About
TOVIO is a next-generation, open-core version control system built for how software is actually made today: with AI agents on the team and secrets in the repo.
Mission
Git was designed in a world without autonomous agents writing code and without per-file secrets. We bolt branch conventions, secret-scanners, and review checklists onto it and hope nothing breaks. TOVIO takes the opposite stance: agent authority, provenance, and encryption are part of the data model, not policies layered on top of it.
Our mission is simple — give developers a version control system where the safe thing to do is also the easy thing to do. You don't have to remember to be careful; the system is careful by construction.
Open core, openly documented
The TOVIO engine, CLI, SDKs, and wire-protocol specification are released under the Apache-2.0 license. The Forge is a commercial product, and the free tier is tovio serve in that same Apache-2.0 CLI. Selling the Forge funds the project without changing the open core's license.
Decisions are made in the open. Significant or hard-to-reverse choices are captured as Architecture Decision Records; specifications carry stable requirement IDs that tests and code cite directly. Anyone can read why a thing is the way it is — and propose changing it. See the contribution and governance guide for how to participate.
What we believe
Snapshots covered by a read policy encrypt content before it enters a tracked tree. Recipient private keys and unwrapped content keys stay out of synced object storage; protected objects still carry wrapped-key metadata for authorized recipients.
The supported offline core records local history and permits core repository work without a server. Collaboration and remote durability still depend on an explicitly configured sync edge.
AI agents are authorized, scoped, and audited like any other actor — with capability tokens and provenance, not a shared human credential.
A change keeps its chg: identity across rebase and history rewrites, so reviews, discussions, and provenance don't get orphaned.
Apache-2.0 core, public specs, and decisions recorded in the open. No lock-in — your repo is yours, and so is the software that reads it.
Implemented object-store reads verify addressed content before returning it, and covered audit records are hash-chained and signed. The documentation states the limits of each check.
Origin
TOVIO began with a recurring, avoidable incident: a secret committed to a repo, caught too late — or not at all. The fix was always the same scramble — rotate the key, rewrite history, hope no clone kept a copy. The tooling treated leaked secrets as a process failure, when really it was a design failure. Files that should have been encrypted were sitting in plaintext because the version control system had no concept of a protected file.
Around the same time, AI agents started landing real commits. Giving an autonomous agent a human's full credentials felt obviously wrong, but there was no better primitive to hand it. So we set out to build one system that solved both problems at the root: per-file encryption baked into the object model, and capability tokens that scope exactly what an agent — or a person — may read and write. That system is TOVIO.
