Bromure Agentic Coding — User Manual
Welcome to the official user manual for Bromure Agentic Coding, the macOS app that runs AI coding agents — Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok CLI, and ordinary shell tooling — inside disposable Linux VMs, with a host-side gateway that keeps your real credentials out of the agent's reach.
This manual documents version 4.3.0. It requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later on Apple Silicon. If you are new here, read Introduction and then Quick Start; everything else is reference you can reach for as you need it.
New to the app? The fastest path to a running agent is Installation followed by the Quick Start walkthrough.
Table of contents
Getting started
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1. Introduction | What the app is, the single-boundary security model, the pillar features, and how it compares to other tools. |
| 2. Installation | System requirements, downloading and installing the app, the first-launch setup flow, base-image updates, migration, and uninstalling. |
| 3. Quick Start | From a fresh install to a running agent in about ten minutes: create a workspace, choose an agent, share a folder, run a task, and inspect the trace. |
Foundations
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 4. Concepts & Architecture | Host vs. guest, workspaces vs. sessions vs. VMs, the VM lifecycle, the wire boundary, storage, vsock bridges, and networking. |
| 5. Workspaces | The workspace browser: status pills, resource cards, the configuration summary, and creating, duplicating, resetting, and deleting workspaces. |
| 6. Sessions | The unified session window: starting and closing sessions, tabs and worktrees, the browser and file panes, file transfer, and checkpoints. |
| The Embedded Browser | Using the workspace's built-in Chromium: driving it yourself, letting the agent drive it through the browser tools, staying signed in, and privacy. |
| Automations | Scheduled, unattended agent runs on a kanban board: creating them, triggers and schedules, chained automations, run history, and answering their prompts. |
| Coding Tasks | The coding kanban: briefs, agent-planned phases with dependencies, autonomous runs in worktrees, diff review with line comments, and merging. |
Settings reference
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 7. Settings Reference | How to open the Edit workspace editor and a page-per-pane reference for all sixteen panes. |
The settings reference has one page per pane: General, Agents, Local Models, Fusion, Folders, Credentials, Environment, MCP, Tracing, Guardrails, Supply Chain, Prompt Injection, Appearance, Browser, Resources, and the app-wide Automation pane.
The pillars in depth
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 8. Credentials & the Wire Boundary | How real secrets stay on the host and the agent gets only fakes: the MITM proxy, per-credential lifecycles, approvals, and the compromise detector. |
| 9. Supply-Chain Protection | Vetting, rewriting, and blocking package installs before the agent sees them — the age gate, OSV, socket.dev, Delpi, and script stripping. |
| 10. Prompt-Injection Detection & Guardrails | On-device detectors that scan the agent's AI traffic for injected instructions, plus guardrails that strip destructive infrastructure operations. |
| 11. Tracing & Audit | What a session trace records, the Trace Inspector, encryption at rest, retention, exporting, and privacy. |
| 12. Fusion — the Multi-Model Panel | Answering each prompt with several models at once, judged and synthesized on the wire into a single reply. |
| 13. Local & Hybrid Inference | Running models on your own Apple Silicon with MLX, the model catalog, hybrid cloud/local fallback, and inference metrics. |
Beyond one Mac
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 14. Remote Access & the Rich Client | Reaching your sandbox from anywhere — the rich client mirror, the CLI, SSH, tunnels, PAC, and the remote security model. |
| 15. Enterprise — Enrollment & Fleet | Enrolling with Bromure Enterprise Manager, what telemetry uploads (and what does not), the fleet view, and off-boarding. |
Reference
| Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 16. CLI, Automation & MCP | The bromure-cli command-line interface, the loopback control API, the MCP server, and AppleScript. |
| Advanced | Power-user tools, including the ext4 file browser for reading a stopped workspace's home image without booting it. |
| 17. Troubleshooting | Diagnosing setup, VM, authentication, TLS, supply-chain, disk-space, and remote-access problems, organized by symptom. |
| 18. Glossary | Definitions of every term of art used in this manual. |
| 19. Appendix | Reference tables: on-disk locations, network ports, environment variables and launch arguments, and the guest-VM cheat sheet. |
Conventions used in this manual
- Bold text names an on-screen control exactly as the app labels it — a button, menu item, toggle, or pane (for example, Start this VM at login).
Monospacetext is a command, file path, environment variable, or literal value you type or see (for example,bromure-cli runor~/Library/Application Support/BromureAC).- Screenshots show the English interface. The app is fully localized; your screens will match your macOS language.
- Notes, tips, and warnings appear as callouts:
Note: Background information worth knowing.
Tip: A shortcut or recommended practice.
Warning: Something that can lose data or weaken a protection if you get it wrong.
Where else to look
Product downloads, the technical whitepaper, and the detailed feature matrix live at bromure.io. For questions this manual does not answer, Troubleshooting collects diagnostic procedures, and the Glossary defines the vocabulary.