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High Level Architecture

Preloop is built on a modular architecture designed for scalability, security, and extensibility. It consists of three main interfaces that connect you to the core platform.

1. Console (The Command Center)

The Console is the web-based interface where you manage your organization, configure tools, monitor agent activity, and inspect model traffic. It provides a unified view of your issue trackers, automation flows, managed agents, runtime sessions, and governance state.

  • Dashboard: View high-level metrics including active runtime sessions, recent tool-call volume, daily model spend, and system status.
  • Cost: Spend trends, attribution by model/agent/session, and budget-health signals (Enterprise adds policy configuration and optimization panels behind feature flags).
  • Issue Management: Browse and manage issues from connected trackers (Jira, GitHub, GitLab) in a unified view.
  • Flow Builder: Create and configure event-driven agentic workflows.
  • Managed Agents, Runtime Sessions & Agent Control: Inspect enrolled agents, recent sessions, captured gateway interactions, operator-driven session lifecycle actions, and live Agent Control presence/commands where the runtime adapter is connected.
  • AI Models: Configure reusable models, secret-backed credentials, gateway routing, and per-model usage visibility.
  • Settings: Manage users, teams, API keys, and subject-scoped security policies.

2. API (The Engine)

The API serves as the gateway for all interactions. It implements the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool use and the model-gateway endpoints for managed model traffic.

  • MCP Server: Securely exposes tools to AI agents.
  • Model Gateway: Provides OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible ingress so managed runtimes can send model traffic through Preloop instead of using direct provider credentials.
  • Approval Engine: Intercepts sensitive tool calls and routes them for human approval based on defined policies.
  • Subject-Scoped Governance: Evaluates account defaults together with managed-agent and API-key scope for tool visibility, tool rules, and allowed models.
  • Authentication: Handles user sessions, API tokens, and short-lived runtime credentials with runtime-principal attribution.
  • Observability: Records gateway usage, execution-scoped gateway events, runtime-session activity, and audit trails for operator review.
  • Agent Control: Provides the managed-agent WebSocket and operator command endpoint. The CLI provisions credentials/config and installs or verifies native runtime plugins via preloop agents install-plugin. Live agent behavior requires OpenClaw, Hermes, or another runtime to load the plugin that owns reconnect/backoff, heartbeat/status events, capability advertisement, command receipt, and message execution/injection into the active session.

3. Mobile & Watch Apps

Stay connected and manage approvals on the go with the Preloop native applications.

These apps are not open source, but they can be used with self-hosted/open-source Preloop deployments.

  • iPhone App: Full access to your dashboard, issues, approval requests, and scaffolded Agent Control voice turns. Push notifications ensure you never miss a critical decision.
  • Apple Watch App: Quick approvals, status checks, and scaffolded dictation for short Agent Control messages right from your wrist.
  • Android App: Approval review, push notifications, and scaffolded Agent Control voice turns. Google Assistant/App Actions are invocation or deep-link handoff surfaces, not arbitrary background voice transports.