Aphelion

For a plain-English map from Aphelion terminology to familiar systems/security concepts, start with Aphelion, in boring words.

Aphelion is a personal AI harness built for distance. It runs as a Linux service on a machine you control and gives you a Telegram operator surface. Every action passes through explicit consent on its way to a typed audit ledger.

The agent inside Aphelion can fork its own work into parallel side threads, promote a thread into a distinct sub-agent, and push that sub-agent to a remote machine over Tailscale — all under the same authority model. The user is the final arbiter; the architecture takes care of the rest.

Why Aphelion

Most personal AI harnesses are built for a developer at a terminal. Aphelion is built for an operator running their agent at a remove — from a phone, across time, across machines they don't sit at, and across the boundary between intention and action where things tend to go wrong.

Two layers, two reference frames

The agent inside Aphelion is two collaborating roles, not one persona. The face (Idolum by default) is who you talk to — present, direct, conversation-oriented. The governor (Idolum (System)) is what holds authority, decides what the face is allowed to commit to, and produces the typed records that survive the conversation. The two argue internally. When they reach an impasse on something material, the conversation pauses and asks you to arbitrate.

This is structural, not theatrical. The face cannot grant itself permissions; the governor does not present itself as the conversational persona. Its work surfaces as approvals, refusals, status, recovery, and typed evidence. You remain the source of authority, but you are not the constant context driving what the protected layer is doing. Think of the restaurant kitchen: you order from a waiter, and you don't usually speak to the cook. That structure exists so the meal arrives faster, hotter, and right. You can always ask to speak to the cook; that path stays open. Aphelion is shaped the same way.

Authority before capability

Permissions in Aphelion are not configuration files. They are typed records that travel through a pipeline: . Each tool, each remote-host child, each external account, each capability that crosses a trust boundary lives on this lane. The runtime cannot invoke something it does not have an active, unexpired grant for.