Common questions.

No. cot is fully self-hosted. Install locally, open the dashboard, and start tracing.

Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. Hooks wire automatically during install.

No SDK required. cot uses agent lifecycle hooks: your agents pipe events to a local bridge script.

Locally in ~/.cot/cot.db (SQLite on your machine). The collector runs in Docker with your home directory mounted.

Trace data stays local. Separately, cot can send optional aggregate usage metrics to cot.run: session counts, event counts, installation timestamp, runtime info. No prompts, responses, file paths, or commands are included. This is on by default; turn it off in Settings → Usage metrics, or set COT_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1.

Yes, for tracing. The collector and dashboard run locally. Install requires network access (Docker image pull, bridge download). Update checks and telemetry are optional and degrade silently when offline.

For the one-line install, yes. If you already run the collector elsewhere, install only the bridge: curl -fsSL http://127.0.0.1:31337/install.sh | sh

The installer finds the next free port automatically. Override with COT_PORT=32337.

Run /hooks in Codex to review and trust the new hooks after install.

Check Settings → Hook health, or open Reconfigure cot and use the Connect step.

Yes. cot is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Source is in the repo at github.com/cot-intelligence/cot.

Use the bridge commands: cot down stops the collector (keeps your hooks and data), cot up resumes it. To remove everything, run cot purge: it stops the container, unwires agent hooks, and deletes ~/.cot after confirmation.