Sidecar

Overview

Sidecar is an early-stage private API for browser-backed consumer AI products the operator already uses, beginning with NotebookLM and Perplexity. Its product promise is to make those workflows dependable for local agents without moving authentication ownership away from the human.

The project is deliberately not a thin “click the website for me” wrapper. It starts with contracts for lifecycle, audit, throttling, staleness, approval, and recovery because browser-backed automation inherits every awkward state of the product it operates.

The boundary is the product

Sidecar’s initial rules are more important than its happy path:

• local-first and private-network-first;
• credentials and browser profiles remain human-owned;
• request acceptance never counts as task completion;
• authentication, throttling, staleness, timeout, and success are typed states;
• dedicated browser profiles use bounded queues and explicit recovery;
• session material and secrets never enter the repository.

Those rules prevent the common failure where an API returns 200, a browser job is merely queued, and an agent reports that the research or export exists.

What exists now

The active M1 branch contains executable job primitives, a guarded job aggregate, canonical control v1 schemas, and accepted security lifecycle policies. Recent commits landed on August 25.

That is a meaningful foundation, but it is not a public service and this page does not present it as one. The repository remains in the first implementation milestone while the security, licensing, product, and browser-ownership boundaries are made explicit.

Why it belongs in the fleet

Consumer AI subscriptions are useful surfaces, but they do not automatically become safe infrastructure just because a browser can reach them. Sidecar is the attempt to turn those human products into bounded, auditable workflows without pretending they are first-party APIs or exporting the human’s session into an unattended agent runtime.

Status

Experimental, M1 in progress. Contracts and core lifecycle primitives exist. No public endpoint, production deployment, or generalized browser control claim is made.