Frequently asked questions

Because a single-vendor chat app can only show you what that vendor would have said. Polycode’s whole shape is the comparison — fan-out, dissent, synthesis — so you see four perspectives on a question instead of one.

If you’ve already settled on a primary provider for every task, the vendor apps are excellent at what they do. Polycode is for the cases where you haven’t, or where the answer matters enough that you’d want to know whether the other peers agreed.

No. Configure as many or as few as you want. With zero keys, Polycode still runs Apple Intelligence on-device and any local OpenAI-compatible endpoint (Ollama, LM Studio) for free. Most people start with one paid provider plus on-device, then add others when they have a reason.

The full configuration walkthrough lives in setting up providers.

Yes, and for most people that is the fastest way to a working fan-out. One OpenRouter key covers Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI, Mistral, Meta, DeepSeek, and dozens more — single signup, single invoice, single key rotation.

Two trade-offs worth naming. First, OpenRouter sits in the network path between you and the upstream model; per-provider keys are more direct. Second, most OpenRouter routes carry a small markup over the underlying API price. Apple Intelligence and any local provider you configure (Ollama, LM Studio, an internal gateway) are not routed through OpenRouter — they keep running on-device for free.

No. Polycode talks directly to the providers you authorize. There is no Polycode-operated server in the conversation path — no proxy, no relay, no logging endpoint that sees your prompts. We could not read your conversations even if we wanted to; the architecture does not give us a way in. The full data path is documented in data lifecycle.

It costs roughly N× one model, where N is the number of paid peers dispatched in the fan-out, plus one synthesis pass billed at your primary model’s rate. Apple Intelligence and local endpoints carry no per-token cost, so a four-peer fan-out with two paid and two free peers runs at roughly 2× one model plus the synthesis pass — and the synthesis pass is free too when your primary is Apple Intelligence or a local endpoint.

The exact figure is visible per turn in the inspector — each trace card shows tokens in / out and dollars at exchange-time pricing — and Settings → Usage rolls spend up by provider, by project, and by session over a date range. Costs are snapshotted at the moment of the call, so historical totals reflect what you actually paid, not what current pricing would imply.

Polycode is a first-class MCP host. Connect an HTTP MCP server and its tools join the catalog alongside the built-in file tools. Each tool has a global default — Always, Ask, or Deny — set in Settings → Tools; when a tool is set to Ask, Polycode shows an inline approval card (Deny, Approve, or Approve + Remember for this session) before it runs. Read-only tools are offered to every peer in a fan-out; write-capable tools run on the primary only. Every call is recorded per-peer in the inspector. The full model is documented in tools and approvals.

Not yet on the public roadmap. The current app leans hard on macOS-specific affordances — the three-column inspector, Spotlight indexing, a global quick-prompt hotkey, a window-resident keyboard-shortcut surface — and shipping one Mac app that does the shape well is the current priority. If and when an iOS app makes sense, it’ll get its own announcement.

Polycode has no cloud sync; migration is a folder copy plus a key re-entry. The full step-by-step lives in backup, restore, migrate, but the short version: copy ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.izzo.polycode/ to the new Mac after launching Polycode once there to create the empty container, then re-enter your provider keys in Settings. Conversations, project bindings, and preferences come along; Keychain credentials stay on the old Mac.

Email [email protected]. Include your Polycode version (Settings → About shows it), a short description of what went wrong, and — if applicable — what the affected peers showed in the inspector. To attach a full conversation, export it from the sidebar (right-click a session → Export to Markdown…).