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Covin Local · Free

Keep coding agents inside the job you gave them.

You asked for a new button color. Covin Local checks each action your agent takes against that task, so cat ~/.aws/credentials or terraform destroy gets flagged, paused or blocked. Your choice.

  • Claude Code
  • Codex
  • Cursor
Download for MacInstall guide: Linux, Homebrew, terminal
  1. 01

    Install

    On a Mac, the Mac installer is the easiest way: a standard installer, signed and notarized by Apple, for Apple silicon and Intel. When it finishes, a Terminal window opens and runs covin setup.

    Or one line in a terminal, on macOS or Linux. It downloads the covin binary (version 0.1.9) and checks its sha256 against the published manifest. Run from your terminal, it then starts covin setup, which shows what will change and asks before touching anything. Coding agents can't run it for you.

    curl -fsSL https://covin.dev/install.sh | sh

    Or with Homebrew, then run covin setup:

    brew install covin-dev/tap/covin
    Manual download, platforms and checksums

    Version 0.1.9. Download the archive for your platform, check it against the sha256 in the manifest (or the .sha256 file next to it), then unpack it.

    shasum -a 256 covin-<os>-<arch>.tar.gz
    Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 covin-windows-x86_64.zip

    Not supported: Linux without glibc (Alpine). The macOS binaries are signed and notarized by Apple.

  2. 02

    Hook up your agents

    covin setup finds the coding agents on your machine, backs up each one's config, adds Covin's hooks, and runs each hook once the way your agent will, so you know it works. It then offers to connect your Covin account for the dashboard and alerts. That part is optional: Covin works locally either way.

    covin setup

    If something looks off later, covin doctor explains each problem and how to fix it. Prefer separate steps? Use covin init and covin login.

    Your devices, activity and alerts are in your account at app.covin.dev.

  3. 03

    Pick a mode

    Start in observe to see what your agents do, then tighten when you're ready.

    covin mode observe

    observe

    Log every action and flag the ones that drift from your task. Nothing is stopped.

    ask

    Pause on a drifting action and ask you before it runs, where the agent can ask (see below). Everything else goes through.

    block

    Stop drifting actions before they run.

    Where ask mode can pause an agent
    AgentIn ask mode
    Claude CodeAsks you, for every tool
    CursorAsks for shell and MCP calls. File reads cannot ask: they follow ask_fallback
    Codex CLICannot ask: every ask follows ask_fallback

    ask_fallback in local.yaml defaults to allow: the action runs and is logged. Set it to deny to block instead.

  4. 04

    See what happened

    covin log shows a timeline of each session: the task you gave, the actions the agent took, and which ones drifted.

    covin log
  5. 05

    Uninstall any time

    covin uninstall removes only Covin's own hook entries from each agent's config, and the background agent. Your other hooks and settings, including changes you made after covin init, stay as they are. It does not restore the backups init took; they stay on your laptop if you want one back.

    covin uninstall

Already installed? Update

The latest Covin Local is 0.1.9. Your dashboard's Laptops page says which of your laptops run an older one, and how each gets the new one. Your settings, rules and logs stay as they are.

Installed with the Mac installer or the install command, Covin Local 0.1.5 or later:

covin update

Installed with Homebrew:

brew upgrade covin

On an older version, install once more, with Download for Mac or the install command above. From then on, updates can be automatic.

Automatic updates: turn on Keep Covin Local up to date automatically in your dashboard's Settings. Each laptop then installs new versions by itself, only ones signed by Covin, and shows a notification when it has. A laptop can opt out with covin settings auto_update off.

Privacy

A guard that reads your agents' work has to stay on your side. This one does.

  • Blocking happens on your laptop, in milliseconds, and works offline.
  • After you sign in, Covin's cloud receives metadata about what your agents did: the session, the action, the resource address (a file path, command name or host), the result and a tool-call id. Anything that looks like a secret is stripped before it leaves your laptop.
  • By default your prompts, file contents, command text and agent output are not sent to Covin. Where Covin needs to match them, it gets keyed hashes (fingerprints), not the text.
  • Optional task titles, off by default: "covin share-titles on" sends the first line of each task's prompt, cut to about 80 characters with anything that looks like a secret masked, so your dashboard can say what a session was for. "covin share-titles off" stops it.
  • One opt-in exception: if you add your own Anthropic API key for the AI review, an unclear action is sent to Anthropic, not to Covin, with the session's task (its prompts, trimmed) and the action, obvious secrets masked. No key, nothing sent.
  • Uploads stop when you run "covin logout" or revoke the device in Settings.

Enterprise

Running agents across a whole team?

Enterprise covers the fleet: a cross-agent causal graph from laptops to GitHub and CI to your cloud, MDM rollout with managed policies users can't disable, hosted or self-hosted in your own cloud, SSO, an audit trail and LLM intent review.

Book a callCompare plans