Gateway-Centered Design
All important work happens in the gateway: workspaces, threads, turns, tools, MCP, skills, tasks, provider settings, auth, and durable storage.Local Or Remote Deployment
Run a gateway on your personal computer for a local assistant, or host gateways on separate servers for work, study, home, or other isolated environments.One Desktop, Many Gateways
Connect the desktop app to any number of gateways and switch between them from one native client.Workspace Management
Create, switch, and rename workspaces inside a gateway. Each workspace keeps its own threads, provider keys, MCP servers, skills, tasks, and artifacts.Thread Modes
Use Chat mode for direct conversations and Agent mode when the thread should plan, use tools, and work through multi-step tasks.Thread Tree AGENTS.md
CreateAGENTS.md at the thread tree root or inside any thread folder to keep persistent agent instructions close to the work they affect. Threads inherit the nearest active file from their folder ancestry.
Multi-Agent Workflows
The gateway can automatically fan work out to subagents with their own prompts, roles, models, context policies, tool policies, result contracts, and child threads. The parent agent can review each subagent result, accept it, or request a revision with concrete feedback.Agent Memory
In agent mode, Pioneer can recall durable facts, preferences, project decisions, and recurring instructions across turns when memory is enabled. Memory combines prompt policy, model-visible memory tools, proactive post-turn extraction, service-owned dedupe, and memvid-backed search capsules. It is not full transcript recall, and it does not guarantee every useful fact will be saved.Bring Your Own Model
Pioneer includes providers for OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, Ollama, Copilot, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Kilo CLI, and many OpenAI-compatible endpoints.Keystore-Backed Secrets
Workspace-scoped provider API keys, MCP env/header secrets, superuser JWT signing material, and desktop gateway bearer tokens are stored inkeystore.db, not in ordinary config tables.
Real Tools
Agents can use shell sessions, file reads and edits, patch application, grep, web search and fetch, URL downloads, computer use, MCP tool proxying, and dynamic skill tools.MCP Servers
Install and manage servers compatible with Model Context Protocol per gateway and current workspace, track their health and catalog, and expose their tools to agents through the gateway. New servers are explicit-only by default and can be attached to a turn from the composer.Skills
Pioneer supports skills compatible with the Agent Skills specification, including installation, validation, trust gates, dependency preflight, gateway and current workspace availability, upload flow, and health diagnostics. New skills are explicit-only by default and can be attached to a turn from the composer.Tasks
Run scheduled and on-demand tasks with dependencies, retries, delivery state, progress events, write locks, task trees, and reviewable subagent result candidates.Protocol-First Architecture
pioneer-protocol defines the public JSON-RPC surface and generated schemas under schemas/.