Notes /
The relay is a dumb pipe. That's the feature.
No account. No email. A QR on the Mac, and then we can't read you.
Most "remote control for your agent" products have a server that can see your code. That's the easy architecture: the Mac talks to us, the phone talks to us, we stitch it together. It also means your transcripts live on somebody's disk in plaintext, including ours if we built it that way.
We didn't.
Pairing prints a QR on the Mac. The QR carries a NaCl key (Curve25519). Your phone or browser scans it off the screen — the key never goes through the relay. After that every prompt, every tool result, every "allow this bash?" is an XSalsa20-Poly1305 box. The thing in the middle forwards opaque frames. We move the bytes. We cannot read them.
There's no account because an account would be a place to hang a key we don't have. There's no email because we'd only use it to send you a password for a vault we refuse to hold.
If you don't want our relay: docker compose up on your own box, point tether start --relay wss://your-host at it. The encryption does not change. The daemon, the relay, and the apps are the same open-source tree.
The product is the control loop. The relay is plumbing. Plumbing shouldn't have opinions about your code.