> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.hq.zone/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How HQ works

> The architecture behind HQ: a roster of specialists, a real isolated machine per conversation, and qOS — the agentic OS we built in Rust.

Most AI tools stop at the conversation — they answer and hand the work back to you. HQ starts where they stop: you `@mention` a specialist and it **researches, decides, and does the work**, then reports back. This page explains the machinery behind that, and where each piece surfaces in the API.

## A roster of specialists

You don't get one generic assistant — you assemble specialists, each with its own model, skills, integrations, and tone, reachable by an `@handle`. The right specialist picks up a thread and stays with it from request to done.

→ Configure them with the [Agents API](/api-reference/agents/list-agents) (`agents:read` / `agents:write`).

## A real machine behind every conversation

The difference between *chatting* and *doing* is a computer. Every conversation runs on its own **private, hardware-isolated machine** — the same class of isolation behind modern serverless platforms. It boots in a fraction of a second and resumes exactly where it left off, even days later. Because it's a real machine, a specialist can run a script, crunch a file, drive a browser, build a small tool, and install what it needs — instead of only telling you how.

→ Drive that machine through [conversations and turns](/guides/streaming-chat); deliverables come back as [artifacts](/guides/artifacts) and live [surfaces](/api-reference/conversations/list-surfaces).

## qOS — the agentic operating system

That machine runs **qOS**, the operating system we built for agents — in Rust, top to bottom. We didn't staple it together from other people's APIs; we built the data layer ourselves:

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Search · Cache · Storage · Graph">Hybrid search across everything, microsecond shared memory, object storage for every artifact, and a queryable graph of connected data.</Card>
  <Card title="Email · Browser · Documents · Extraction">A real inbox that sends and receives, a real web browser, PDF parsing, and structured extraction from any file.</Card>
  <Card title="Inference · Memory">Frontier-model routing, plus memory that remembers and learns from work.</Card>
  <Card title="Skills · Integrations">Composable, per-agent skills and connectors to the tools you already use.</Card>
</CardGroup>

## The right model for each job

Decision intelligence needs more than one model. HQ routes every call across the frontier — Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Cerebras — and sends each task to the model that wins on quality, latency, or cost. The high-volume, data-sensitive work — the embeddings and reranking behind memory and search — runs on open models on **our own GPUs**, so your most sensitive text never leaves our infrastructure to be turned into numbers.

→ See what's available via [List models](/api-reference/agents/list-models), and select one per agent.

## Research you can act on

HQ specialists browse the **live public web** the way a person does — from the region you choose, reaching sources and logged-in tools an ordinary assistant can't — and hand back answers with their sources, not a confident guess. Agents can also drive the user's own browser.

→ [Browser control API](/api-reference/integrations/browser-connect).

## Memory that compounds

Specialists remember and consolidate between sessions, and arrive knowing your workspace's channels and people. You can always see what a specialist knows, and correct, delete, or freeze it.

→ [Memory API](/api-reference/memory/list-facts) (`memory:read` / `memory:write`).

## Trust is the foundation, not a setting

Anything that can act needs a trust model that holds. Every action a specialist takes is **bound to the person who asked and the permission they were granted**, checked at each step, and written to a log that **cannot be edited after the fact**. You choose whether your data lives in the **EU or the US**, and HQ is built under GDPR and the EU AI Act from the first line.

→ Permissions are [scopes](/api/scopes); the record is the [Audit API](/api-reference/admin/list-audit).

<Note>HQ is invite-only while we onboard teams. Slack and the browser extension are live today, with Microsoft Teams on the way.</Note>