What Nerve does and does not do

What Nerve does

Controls a customer experiences, on by default unless a line says otherwise.

• By default, agents cannot execute production deploys.
• Deploys run on the platform’s servers and are unreachable from agent dispatch.
• Agents cannot push to main, master or production branches.
• Every blocked attempt is audited.
• No one approves their own gate, whether agent or human.
• An agent can ask to deploy; it can never approve its own request.
• The real build and full test suite must pass before the approval gate opens; a failing build never merges.
• An agent cannot self-report a merge or approval that did not happen; the platform verifies completion claims before a task can close.
• Closing work can require leadership or an assigned reviewer.
• Agents never hold provider credentials; the platform performs the privileged action on their behalf.
• Stored integration secrets are encrypted at rest.
• Per-agent secret grants are default-deny.
• When a credential appears in an agent’s output, the stream is cut and a rotation gate opens.
• A credential or workspace file is refused before it can be committed.
• A deterministic prompt-injection firewall is always on.
• Tenant isolation is enforced at the database and fails closed: even the database owner role cannot read another tenant’s rows.
• Operational data is tenant-isolated and encrypted at rest, and inference can route to the customer’s own model endpoints.
• Nerve runs real vulnerability scanning, including dependency CVEs, SAST and secret detection, on every tenant, not mock findings.
• Dependency CVE data is sourced from the OSV.dev database.
• Nerve produces CycloneDX software bills of materials, plus AI and cryptographic bills of materials.
• Cloud security posture management evaluates live against Kubernetes.
• An eBPF sensor monitors the production host continuously, feeding runtime detections into the security dashboard.
• Nerve supports OIDC single sign-on and SCIM 2.0 provisioning.
• Nerve keeps an admin and chat audit trail.
• DORA four-key delivery metrics are computed from real deploy records.
• Nerve shows cost per agent and per model, with daily trends.
• Budgets warn and then pause for a human.
• Nerve produces compliance evidence mapped to the control families your auditor uses.
• Model choice is per agent and per project, including local models.
• Nerve ships 30 agent role definitions.
• Nerve has an 80+-capability permission model with a staged shadow → enforce rollout.

What Nerve does not do

Stated plainly, because a buyer is entitled to the limits as well as the strengths.

• If verification capacity is unavailable, the system says so rather than silently bypassing the check.
• Nerve does not offer SAML single sign-on today; OIDC and SCIM 2.0 are supported.
• AWS is the one live production deployment target today; other cloud providers are not yet validated against live infrastructure.
• Nerve is not self-hosted by default, and it does not currently offer a fully air-gapped deployment.
• Host-touching tools are refused outside the platform tenant; off-host isolated execution is in active rollout.
• Runtime detection is continuous; enforcement is operator-armed.
• Mandatory QA gating and automatic conflict resolution are available options, not behaviours that are on by default.
• Nerve does not automatically route work to cheaper models; you choose models per agent and per project.
• There is no automatic budget top-up; a budget warns, then pauses for a human.
• Compliance evidence is not a certification: Nerve does not claim attestation against any named framework.

Where it runs

• Nerve is a managed service by default; on-premises is available for enterprise customers at significant cost.
• Nerve ships via AWS CodeBuild to EC2, with an any-cloud-ready seam.

Sources

• OSV.dev, the open vulnerability database
• CycloneDX bill of materials standard