Engines FAQ

What are the Corpus, Foundry, and Relay engines?

They are the three subsystems that power Ironspire's multi-agent coordination:

• Corpus (IS-Corpus): the cross-agent memory system. Agents automatically capture findings as memories and recall relevant context before each message. Stored in a local SQLite database with full-text search.
• Foundry (IS-Foundry): powers Blueprint, the project orchestration system. Lets you define milestones, phases, plans, and tasks, then delegate work across agents with validation gates.
• Relay (IS-Relay): the agent communication layer. Agents can send messages to each other, ask questions, and broadcast to the whole team using MCP tools.

What is Corpus and how does memory work?

Corpus gives agents persistent, shared knowledge across sessions. As an agent works, it captures notable findings as memories (facts, events, or patterns). Before each message, Ironspire recalls relevant memories and injects them as context automatically.

Memories are stored locally in SQLite with full-text search and are scoped to private (only the creating agent), project (shared with agents in the same project), or global (all agents). Old memories decay in relevance over time to keep context fresh.

See the Memory overview for the full details.

What is Foundry and how does Blueprint work?

Foundry powers Blueprint, Ironspire's project orchestration system. You define work as a hierarchy of milestones, phases, plans, and tasks. Agents advance through a 5-step pipeline (research, brief, planning, execution, validation) and use 16 dedicated MCP tools to create and progress work items.

Plans require explicit approval before execution begins, giving you a review checkpoint. The validation step checks success criteria (assertions, artefacts, and wiring) automatically.

See the Blueprint overview for the full details.

What is Relay and how does agent communication work?

Relay is an MCP-based messaging system that lets agents coordinate directly. Agents at the Full Autonomy level have access to four tools: ask_agent (request a response), send_message (one-way), broadcast (all agents), and get_team_status (query fleet status).

Relay messages appear in the chat with a colour-coded border from the sending agent. The system tracks hop depth to prevent agents entering infinite messaging loops.

See the Agent communication guide for details.

Do I need to configure the engines?

No. All three engines start automatically with the Forge tier and require no manual configuration. Memory capture, recall, and reflection run in the background. Blueprint tools are available to agents through the Relay engine's MCP toolset. Relay is enabled by default.

Can Starter-tier users access any engine features?

No. The Corpus, Foundry, and Relay engines are Forge features. Starter users can run up to 3 agents with basic monitoring, but cross-agent memory, Blueprint orchestration, and agent-to-agent messaging are locked to the Forge tier.

See the pricing page or the General FAQ for a comparison of Starter and Forge.