🤔 Why embercore

You shipped a product. You have no idea how to market it. Every AI tool either:

• Asks you to describe your audience and spits out 50 LinkedIn posts (not what you need)
• Demands a $99/mo subscription to an opaque SaaS with your data inside it
• Assumes you already know what an "ICP" or "positioning statement" is

embercore does something different. It makes the plan before it makes the content, and it asks you what you think before moving on.

	Feature	What it means
📋	Plan-first, not draft-first	Five stages: Research → Brand → UX → GTM → Assemble. Structured artifacts on disk, not a wall of copy.
🛑	Human checkpoints (H1–H4)	The pipeline pauses between every stage. You approve, edit, or redirect.
🔑	Bring Your Own Key	Your Anthropic key stays in your environment. Zero telemetry.
🔓	Fully open source (MIT)	Read every prompt. Fork it. Run it forever. No paid tier, no upsell.
🏠	Local-first	Runs in Claude Desktop, Cursor, Copilot CLI, Windsurf — any MCP client.
🚫	No jargon	Every decision explained in plain language. Marketing terms get defined.

⚡ Quick Start

Two ways to use embercore. Pick one. Both take ~3 minutes.

Option A — Web App

git clone https://github.com/embercore-labs/embercore.git
cd embercore
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Open localhost:3000, paste your Anthropic key, drop in your product brief, watch the agents work.

Option B — MCP Server

# Build the engine (Go 1.23+ required)
cd packages/engine
make build

# Move it onto your PATH
mv embercore-engine /usr/local/bin/          # macOS / Linux
# Move-Item embercore-engine.exe "$env:USERPROFILE\bin\"   # Windows

Add to your MCP client config (Claude Desktop example):

// ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "embercore": {
      "command": "embercore-engine",
      "env": { "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "sk-ant-..." },
    },
  },
}

Restart your client, drop a product_brief.md in your working directory, and ask the assistant to "run the embercore workflow."

📖 See docs/quickstart.md for Cursor and Copilot CLI configs.

🔄 How It Works

                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │   product_brief.md  │
                    │  (your 1-page input) │
                    └─────────┬───────────┘
                              │
                              ▼
    ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
    │                                                     │
    │   🦉  Athena       → 01_research.md        ── H1   │
    │                                        ▲            │
    │                               approve / edit        │
    │                                        ▼            │
    │   🎵  Apollo       → 02_brand_messaging.md ── H2   │
    │                                        ▲            │
    │                               approve / edit        │
    │                                        ▼            │
    │   🏠  Hestia       → 03_ux.md              ── H3   │
    │                                        ▲            │
    │                               approve / edit        │
    │                                        ▼            │
    │   ⚡  Hermes       → 04_go_to_market.md    ── H4   │
    │                                        ▲            │
    │                               approve / edit        │
    │                                        ▼            │
    │   🔨  Hephaestus   → final_product_plan.md         │
    │                                                     │
    └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                              │
                              ▼
                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │      output/        │
                    │  (all artifacts on  │
                    │     your disk)      │
                    └─────────────────────┘

Each H# is a checkpoint — the pipeline blocks until you approve, edit, or send it back. The final plan is assembled only after all four checkpoints are green.

State lives at .embercore-state/ so a crashed run resumes from the last completed stage.

🏛 The Agents

Why named agents? Because "Stage 3" is forgettable — "Hestia just finished your onboarding flow" is not.

📖 Agent mapping in docs/agents.md  ·  Prompts in packages/engine/prompts/  ·  Implementation in packages/engine/tools/

🔑 BYOK + Privacy

• Your Anthropic key is set in your shell environment (or MCP client config). It never touches an embercore server because there is no embercore server — just code on your machine.
• The web app stores nothing server-side. Briefs and plans live in localStorage and on disk under output/.
• Zero telemetry. Zero analytics. We can't see you using embercore — and that's the point.
• Engine logs are local-only and elide secrets by default. See packages/engine/internal/logger.

🏠 Self-Host

Everything is self-host by default — there is no hosted version to switch from.

Deployment	How
Web app	Deploy apps/web to Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or any Node host. Users paste their own key.
MCP engine	Ship the embercore-engine binary alongside any MCP client. No daemon, no server.
Air-gapped	Set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point at an internal proxy. The engine doesn't care.

📖 See docs/architecture.md for the full picture.

🤝 Contributing

We mean it when we say PRs welcome. The repo is fresh, the surface is small, and there are plenty of good first issues that don't require touching the LLM code.

Resource	Description
CONTRIBUTING.md	Dev setup, PR flow, commit style
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md	Contributor Covenant 2.1
SECURITY.md	How to report vulnerabilities privately
Discussions	Roadmap conversations & design questions

🗺 Roadmap

Full detail in ROADMAP.md. The short version:

Phase	Focus	Status
Phase 0 — Foundations	Repo scaffold, OSS docs, BYOK architecture	✅ Complete
Phase 1 — Core Loop	End-to-end plan → checkpoint → execute pipeline	✅ Complete
Phase 2 — Marketing Workflows	Apollo, Hephaestus, workflow templates, review queue	🧭 In progress
Phase 3 — MCP & Integrations	MCP server tools, plugin API, local providers	💭 Exploring

The default forever-future for embercore is "OSS, BYOK, runs on your machine."

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE. Use it for anything. Sell things you build with it. Just don't sue us.

🙏 Acknowledgements

• Built on the Model Context Protocol by Anthropic
• Engine uses mark3labs/mcp-go and anthropics/anthropic-sdk-go
• Web app is Next.js + Tailwind CSS v4
• Inspired by: Cal.com, Supabase, PostHog, Plausible, Documenso, Inbox Zero, Trigger.dev
• Names: the Hellenes, ~3000 years ago