Paraphe

The owner-decision inbox for agents. An agent raises one decision, you answer it on your phone or on the machine running it, and that same agent picks the answer up and carries on.

It is for people who run agents that should ask before they act. Paraphe is the small, self-hosted thing that holds the question until the human answers it — not a task tracker, not a chat client, and not a workflow engine.

Install and run

Python 3.11 or newer, and nothing else.

pip install paraphe

In a checkout, the same install inside a virtual environment, with a configuration file to start from:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install .

cp config.example.toml paraphe.toml     # then fill in two values you make up
.venv/bin/paraphe --config paraphe.toml

Those two values are yours:

With pip install paraphe and no checkout, create paraphe.toml with those two lines; Paraphe reads it from the directory it runs in.

Paraphe ready: mcp http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp answer-path on

Add a Telegram bot token and your Telegram user id to paraphe.toml and decisions arrive as a message with buttons instead of on the console. Without them the card is printed where you are looking, which is what the run above does.

Or run the container, with the data location mounted:

mkdir -p paraphe-data && chmod 0777 paraphe-data
docker build -t paraphe .
docker run --rm -v "$PWD/paraphe-data:/data" \
  -e PARAPHE_MCP_CREATE_BEARER=... -e PARAPHE_OWNER_ANSWER_TOKEN=... paraphe

It binds loopback inside the container, because the answer path refuses a non-loopback bind. To reach it from outside, configure the phone destination (a bot token and your Telegram id) and set PARAPHE_MCP_HOST=0.0.0.0; the answer path is then off, and taps arrive on the phone.

Related MCP server: call-a-human-mcp

The loop

ask → you see the card → you answer → the asking agent resumes

The answer returns through the ask itself: the call may wait (wait_seconds), paraphe wait can hold the card's lifetime, and any run that missed both drains the answer from the store at its next boundary. Nothing has to be said in chat.

On the phone the card is ordered rich text, not a wall of prose: it names who is asking and from where (agent, runtime, repository, worktree, ticket), bolds its title, numbers the choices with their one-line notes and marks what is recommended, and lists the limits, links and expiry. A long-press reply answers it in your own words — or asks a question — and that text returns to the exact session that asked.

docs/demo/console-loop.md is a recorded run of exactly that, on a clean checkout, with no third-party credential and no external service: the agent asks, the card is printed, the agent's own credential is refused when it tries to answer, the owner answers, and the agent picks the answer up.

The line this product draws

The credential an agent holds cannot answer a decision. It creates and it reads. Answering needs the owner's credential, on a path the agent's cannot reach. An inbox an agent can approve on its behalf is not an owner-decision inbox, so this is not configurable.

Documentation

Dependencies

The runtime imports nothing outside the Python standard library, so using Paraphe pulls no dependency tree. Installing it fetches the build backend once, at install time, and nothing after that.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later (LICENSE). Modify it and serve it to other people over a network and you must offer them your modified source; nothing here obliges a company to publish the application it builds on top.

Where your data lives

Cards are a SQLite file in your per-user data directory ($XDG_DATA_HOME/paraphe, else ~/.local/share/paraphe) unless you set store_path. The directory is created 0700 and the file 0600, and Paraphe never reads or writes outside that location.

Upgrading from a release that used /var/lib/paraphe: set store_path to /var/lib/paraphe/inbox.sqlite explicitly. Paraphe refuses to start with the default when a store exists at that location, rather than quietly beginning a second, empty inbox.