Rhēma

A writing workspace for developing, reviewing, and revising long-form prose.

Rhema brings the manuscript, editorial feedback, and supporting research into one place. A Review produces a dossier with an editorial letter, a claims ledger, and findings attached to the draft. Writers can inspect the evidence, decide how to address each finding, and carry those decisions into the next revision.

The repository contains the web application, collaborative editor, run orchestration, and deployment infrastructure behind rhema.tools. The project builds on the earlier agent-discourse experiment, which explored structured agent review of prose; this repository carries that work into a full product.

What is here

• Writing and revision: a ProseMirror editor with Yjs collaboration, Markdown source mode, versioned drafts, outlines, and import/export workflows.
• Editorial review: dossiers, source-linked claims, finding dispositions, and revision obligations that keep feedback connected to the text.
• Controlled agent runs: explicit approval gates, live run events, budget caps, and a separate execution environment for model-driven work.
• A public demo: /demo serves four essays and their complete editorial record — drafts, reviews, dossiers and what-changed diffs — as read-only static snapshots, with a guided tour on The Structure of Political Difference. No account and no database reads are involved; the corpus is separately licensed (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; see LICENSES).
• A TypeScript application stack: React, Hono, TanStack Router/Query, PostgreSQL, and a pnpm workspace built with Turborepo. Infrastructure is defined in TypeScript with Pulumi for GCP.

These describe the application source. Hosted availability and configured entitlements can differ; the hosted service presents its current terms. The mobile app is a skeleton. Review output still requires editorial judgment; the repository does not establish a benchmarked quality advantage.

Release status

Public source release (MIT), 2026-11-03. The tree publishes as-is — including the editorial protocols in packages/protocols — after a full-history secrets and personal-data audit (disposition table + procedure: docs/ops/open-source-readiness.md). Private evaluation content stays outside the repository (RHEMA_EVALS_PATH; evals-stub supplies the fallback), and is not required for the checkout below.

The hosted service publicly launched 2026-10-28 and runs at rhema.tools, with its public demo at rhema.tools/demo. Deployed provenance, launch state, and the live verification record live in docs/build; GitHub Actions runs CI and the scheduled browser-journey suite against production.

Architecture

flowchart LR
  Browser --> Web[Web: SSR, SPA and BFF]
  Web --> API[API: sessions, reads and commands]
  Browser <-->|WebSocket| Collab[Collaboration]
  API --> DB[(Postgres and pg-boss)]
  Worker[Worker] --> DB
  Worker -->|launch| Task[Isolated run task]
  Task --> Proxy[Egress proxy]
  Proxy --> Provider[Model provider]
  Collab --> DB
  Collab --> Objects[(GCS content)]
  API --> Objects

• Web serves HTML and keeps session cookies on the app origin, proxying auth and exposing a backend-for-frontend under /bff/*.
• API authenticates and persists; run creation enters the orchestration state machine on Postgres + pg-boss.
• Worker advances the lifecycle — consumes jobs, launches an isolated Kubernetes task, and performs background maintenance.
• Run task executes model work under a privileged-harness / unprivileged-agent split; all provider traffic passes through the egress proxy, which authorizes, meters, and enforces caps.
• Tenant data is isolated by row-level security; budgets are enforced server-side.

The architecture guide walks each boundary in depth, and the package table below maps it to code.

Start developing

Use Node.js 22.12 or later in the 22.x line and pnpm 10.32.1, matching the repository's CI major version and pinned package manager. From the repository root:

pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm turbo build lint typecheck
pnpm exec vitest run packages/contracts/src/notes.test.ts

This installs the workspace, checks the build, and runs a small contract test. For the full test suite, browser prerequisites, focused development, and a local web-server preview, follow the development guide. Running the complete service requires additional configuration and infrastructure.

Find your way around

Area	Start here
Browser application, SSR host, and same-origin API layer	apps/web
HTTP API, background jobs, and collaboration service	apps/api, apps/worker, apps/collab
Editor and reusable interface components	packages/editor, packages/ui, packages/ide
Contracts, database, and run lifecycle	packages/contracts, packages/db, packages/orchestrator
Run isolation and provider traffic	apps/run-task, apps/egress-proxy
Integration tests and browser journeys	integration, packages/journeys
Deployment infrastructure	infra

The documentation index separates maintained guidance from the project's design and build history.

Contribute

Start with CONTRIBUTING for the development and review workflow. Reproducible bug reports, documentation corrections, and focused improvements are useful contributions. Agents should read AGENTS.md and the instructions for the area they change.

For questions, see SUPPORT. Report vulnerabilities privately through the security policy.

License

The repository's license is MIT. Third-party components have their own terms; see LICENSES, including the separately licensed runtime dependencies and public-export boundary.