Local-first & privacy
CoSci is local-first by design. This is the wedge cloud AI-for-science structurally can’t copy: a PI’s unpublished data, grant ideas and competitive hypotheses are exactly what they will not paste into someone else’s cloud.
Where your data lives
- Everything runs on your machine. The backend stores state in a local SQLite
database under
backend/data/(disposable — deletecockpit.dbto reset). - There is no CoSci account and no managed inference. You bring your own key, or run fully offline.
- In online mode, data leaves your machine only when you act — and only to the AI provider or scientific tool you configured, for that call.
Versioned and audited
Every action is versioned, and every model/tool call is recorded in the Agents / Runs log. Combined with human-in-the-loop approval gates, that means:
- You can see exactly what ran, with which provider, and whether it was cached or hit the network.
- Sensitive actions wait for your approval — nothing consequential happens silently.
Why it’s a feature and a cost model
Local-first isn’t only a privacy story. Free users run on their own hardware and their own API keys, so the open-source core costs almost nothing to run at any scale — and the same “data never leaves” property is what privacy- and IP-sensitive settings (industry R&D, clinical, pre-publication work) need most.