Status and maturity

Early, and deliberately not promoted. The project describes itself as not yet public: the source code is open to look at, and the audience is the maintainer's own network, invited to run it rather than to read about it. A coding-agent subscription is treated as an audience filter rather than a gap. Expect things to change without notice.

One maintainer. The project has a single maintainer, Ian Bicking. Bug reports are invited. Pull requests and feature contributions are not solicited. Some documentation is agent-written and human-reviewed, and says so.

License. GPLv3 covers Bee Box, the Chrome extension, and the browse wrapper. Two parts of the same source code are MIT-licensed for standalone reuse: the t.check test plugin and the shared lint preset. The engine is internally tracked as version 0.1.0 in source; published container images carry a stamped version (tagged releases, plus a daily image built from main).

How updates work. There is only one continuously updated version of the software; every change is shipped as soon as it's made, with no list of what changed in each update, today. Updating means fetching the latest version of the project and rebuilding the container, or reinstalling from source. The Mac app is the exception: each time the box starts it checks the daily published image, confirms the image and the app can run together, starts the new engine only when the box has no uncommitted edits, and goes back to the previous engine if the new one fails to start. Your box, the directory holding your data, is untouched by a rebuild. When it starts, the container automatically updates your existing cards (the files that hold your data) to match any changes in what a card type expects and refreshes the reference material generated for the agent, recording each of those updates in your box's history, and it stops to ask for your help at any update that needs a decision only you can make. The project's own records name the missing part: nothing tells an operator that an update exists or what changed in it. Release discipline and an update story are recorded as open work rather than shipped behavior.

Backups are new. Encrypted, restic-based backups of a box arrived in late October 2026. Their tests pass, but the Admin setup form has not been walked end to end in a browser as a signed-in owner, and the documentation itself says only a test restore proves an installation can recover. Until you have tried a restore, keep another copy of anything you cannot lose.

Security posture is documented rather than assumed. The security overview is agent-maintained and human-reviewed, with the rubric that generates it kept in the project's source code alongside it, and it leads with how bad the worst case is. The issue queue ships with the project's source code, including known bugs and accepted risks.

Where to look and ask.

See also what it requires and your data and safety.