The formats are open
Everything DecimalAI produces on your side of the fence is a documented, openly specified artifact you can read, generate, and verify without us:
Two consequences worth spelling out:
- Any skill you take from the registry can be yours as a file.
decimalai skills export <slug>writes plainSKILL.mdto your disk, and it keeps working if DecimalAI disappears tomorrow. Install is deliberately the other thing — a live link that tracks the author’s updates, the way an extension marketplace works — so the promise here is about Export, which is where it has always actually been true. - Verified numbers are reproducible wherever the suite is published. A verified lift figure comes from an
eval.yamlrun under the skillevaluation spec; where the author published the suite,decimalai skills pull <slug>fetches it and you can re-run the benchmark on your own machine with the open runner. You don’t have to trust our leaderboard — you can check it.
agentversion and skillevaluation are open specs — published formats with reference implementations anyone can build against. We deliberately don’t call them standards; a standard is earned by adoption, not declared by a vendor.
No DecimalAI code in your LLM critical path
The SDK is an observer, not a proxy. Your agent calls your LLM provider directly, with your keys, exactly as it did before:- Tracing is fire-and-forget. Traces are queued to a background sender; your agent never waits on our API to answer your users.
- Regression checks need no LLM key at all. They are pure trace-store queries — we don’t run your agent. The one place a key is used (Playground runs) is bring-your-own-key: the key is stored encrypted at rest, scoped to your organization, and never logged — and any member of that organization can spend against it.
- Skill delivery degrades gracefully. Skills exported to disk load without any network call — that’s your runtime reading a local file. If you use hosted routing and the platform is unreachable, the SDK falls back to local-only mode: your agent runs, skills still load from disk, and you lose telemetry for the gap — not uptime.
Everything is exportable
Deleting is a first-class exit too: workspace deletion purges traces, manifests, datasets, and skills — see “How do I delete my data?” in the FAQ.
The client tooling is open source
Every piece of DecimalAI code that runs on your machines is permissively licensed:
Permissive licensing is the point: if we vanish, the tooling you depend on is forkable, and the file formats it reads and writes are specified above.
What is not open — and why
Honesty cuts both ways. The hosted platform — the trace store, the registry, the dashboard, and the verified-benchmark runner — is a cloud service, not an open-source deployment, and self-hosting isn’t offered today. The centralization is deliberate in exactly one place: verified runs execute on our infrastructure, which is what makes a “verified” lift number mean something — a self-reported benchmark can’t poison the leaderboard. You can reproduce any published suite locally with the open runner; you can’t mint a verified badge locally. That’s the trade, stated plainly. Everything on your side of that line — your files, your data, your tooling — exits cleanly.Related
- Use skills without the SDK — every consume-only route, no account required
- Security — data handling, retention, encryption
- Why DecimalAI? — what manifest-aware change management does, and what we don’t offer (self-hosting, for one)
- skillevaluation and Versioning & Compatibility — the two open specs in detail