Relay

An AI operations agent that answers from your own data, cites your own policies, and stops for a human before it spends a cent.

1 orchestrator · 2 specialists · 9 tools · 1 human-gated write

Operations teams live in a gap. The answer to "why hasn't this customer's order arrived, and do we owe them money?" sits in two places at once: the order database, and a policy document nobody has read since onboarding. Closing that gap by hand is most of what a support agent does all day.

Relay closes it — and shows its work while it does.

What makes this different from a chatbot

It reads your systems, not the internet. Nine tools query a live PostgreSQL database. The model is forbidden from stating any fact that did not come from a tool result, and every call is visible on screen with its real latency.

It renders product, not prose. Ask what is running late and you get a table with status badges and days late. Ask for an overview and you get a dashboard. The model chooses the tool; the frontend owns how the result looks, so the output is always well-formed no matter what the model does.

It cites your policies. Upload a PDF and it is chunked, embedded and searchable in seconds. Retrieval is hybrid — vector similarity for meaning, Postgres full-text for exact terms like an SKU — fused with reciprocal rank. Embeddings are computed in-process, so document contents never leave your server.

It cannot spend your money. Exactly one tool writes. It sits on the orchestrator, behind a human approval gate, capped at the order total and idempotent. No specialist can move money, and no amount of delegation can route around the gate. That is a property of the topology, not a setting.

It plugs into what you already use. Relay is also an MCP server. Point Claude Desktop, Cursor or another agent at /api/mcp and its read tools become available there — the same tools, against the same data. The write tool is deliberately not exposed: the approval gate lives in Relay's interface, so federating the write would hand an external client a way around it.

You can see how it is wired, live. The architecture view is not a diagram — nodes light up along the path a request actually took, with each specialist listing the tools it called and how long they took.

Related MCP server: postgres-mcp-query-tool

The agents

Delegation is not for speed — it costs latency. It buys reliable tool selection (six related tools beat fourteen unrelated ones), clean per-specialist context, and a structurally isolated write path.

The tools

How retrieval works

Ingestion, once per document: upload → extract → chunk (~1000 chars, 150 overlap) → embed (multilingual MiniLM, 384d) → store in pgvector.

Query, every question: embed → vector search and full-text search in parallel → fuse by reciprocal rank → top 5 passages with their source.

Both searches, because neither is enough alone. Vector similarity finds a passage that means the same thing in different words and misses an exact SKU. Full-text finds the exact token and misses the paraphrase. RRF merges the two rankings without calibrating scores between incomparable systems.

The embedder is multilingual on purpose: an English-only model scores a Spanish question against an English policy at 0.18, barely above the 0.02 it gives unrelated text. Cross-language retrieval would silently return noise. The multilingual model scores the same pair at 0.43.

Running it

Requirements: Node 22+, Docker, and an API key from DeepSeek, Anthropic or OpenAI.

npm install                  # also generates the Prisma client
cp .env.example .env         # set RELAY_PROVIDER and the matching key
npm run db:up                # PostgreSQL + pgvector on port 5440
npm run db:push              # create the schema
npm run db:seed              # demo dataset + policy documents
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Bring your own key. The Settings tab in the console accepts an API key that is stored in your browser only, sent as a request header, forwarded to that provider and discarded. It is never written to the database, never logged, and never appears in the audit trail.

The seed is deterministic — the same orders, delays and tickets on every run — and dates are generated relative to now, so the data never looks stale.

Try it

Sample documents to upload live in docs/sample-uploads/, with the questions to ask after each one and the correct answers. One of them deliberately contradicts a seeded policy, which is what happens at a real client.

Project layout

prisma/
  schema.prisma          Data model — one datastore
  seed.ts                Deterministic business dataset
  seed-documents.ts      Policy documents into the knowledge base
src/
  app/api/chat/route.ts  The agent endpoint
  lib/
    agents.ts            Orchestrator + specialists, delegation tools
    tools.ts             The 9 tools
    rag/                 Chunking, ingestion, hybrid search
    embeddings.ts        Local multilingual embedder
    audit.ts             Tool call recording
    model.ts             Provider resolution, bring-your-own-key
  components/
    console.tsx          The one-panel console
    architecture.tsx     Live architecture canvas
    renders/             Generative UI: tables, records, charts

Connecting over MCP

// claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "relay": { "url": "http://localhost:3000/api/mcp" }
  }
}

Eight read tools become available: orders, shipments, customers, tickets, the operational summary and hybrid document search. issue_refund is absent by design — reads are safe to federate, writes stay behind the human gate.

Deployment

Self-hosted. A standalone Next.js build and a PostgreSQL container behind a reverse proxy. No managed platform required and no vendor lock-in introduced.

Security

.env and every .env.* except .env.example are gitignored. This repository is public — no key, token or connection string belongs in a tracked file.

The demo dataset is entirely generated. Harbor & Pine is fictional; no customer, order, address or refund in it refers to a real person.

Documentation

Built by

IKOM — Haziel Zul and Jorge Bustos.

Relay is a showcase build. Harbor & Pine is a fictional brand and its data is generated; the architecture, the code and the numbers are real and reproducible in the demo.