Guides
Local-first without a production database.
Most tools in this category ask for a production connection before they can show you anything. Chawo was built the other way round, and the boundaries below are the reason it can be.
Projections instead of the live table
The workbench is a local process on one machine. It does not contact a live runtime while you design, test, or read back a conversation, so there is no third party sitting between you and the script you are editing. The data behind a run is a checked-in redacted or synthetic projection, not a live production table, and that is the whole of what the ledger can see.
Chawo has no production database credentials and no code path that would use them. What you replay is a record shaped for reading. That is why a conversation you load stays on your machine: there is no upload step, because there is nowhere for it to be uploaded to.
Nothing is written outward
There is no write path to a CRM, an ad platform, or a messaging channel. A misconfigured test cannot reach a customer, because the current build has nowhere to send anything. Delivery, when it exists later, is performed by the runtime that owns the channel, not by this workbench.
The network boundary is one rule, and it is checkable. The web process answers requests that arrive over loopback and returns 421 to any other host header. You can verify that in a minute instead of taking a policy document on trust.
What this does not cover yet
The current build has no operator authentication of its own, because it has never been reachable by anyone but the operator running it. Hosting changes that, and authentication and tenant isolation are prerequisites for hosting rather than additions to it. A data processing agreement lands with the hosted build, not before, and it is not a document this workbench pretends to carry today.
Local-first here is a position, not a stage on the way to a hosted product that pretends the same facts still hold. The workbench you can run today stays on the machine that started it, reads projections, writes nothing outward, and refuses every host that is not loopback. Multi-tenancy and self-registration are not in this build either: the cabinet has no operator authentication of its own, and the site does not offer an account.