No. Aura is a meta-layer that sits directly on top of your existing local Git repository. You keep git commit, git push and branch management exactly as they are. Aura grafts onto Git hooks and git notes to track the mathematical logic (AST) inside your files. You can walk away with plain git at any time.

Aura runs as an MCP server that Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Kimi, Open Code, Pi and Copilot connect to natively, and auto-captures transcripts and intent for Cursor and Aider via hooks. Three-layer enforcement makes every AI edit explain itself: mandatory MCP intent logging, automatic transcript capture, and a pre-commit hook that blocks unexplained changes.

Only if you want to. Every engine gets a real conversation view in Aura, read from the record the engine itself keeps: Codex from its rollout file, Open Code from its own store, Kimi and Pi from their session files. That means a transcript you can scroll, search and resume, rather than a screen-scrape of whatever the CLI happened to redraw. The terminal is still there, one keystroke away, when you want to watch it run.

Yes, per message. Hover the time a reply took and Aura shows what that one message cost, what the conversation has cost, and what every API key you have added has spent since you added it, with the model and token counts behind the figure. When a turn genuinely has no price on it (a subscription plan that is not billed per token, a model with no published rate) it says which, in words. It never prints $0.00 over a message you paid for.

No. Aura stores checkpoint data on a dedicated orphan shadow branch with sharded storage. When commit hashes change during a rebase, stash or pull, Aura detects the HEAD migration and preserves all semantic history. Your git notes and shadow-branch checkpoints survive any standard Git operation.

Yes. git blame identifies the commit, the commit links to a checkpoint, the checkpoint links to an agent session, and the session holds the full conversation transcript. You see the exact AI reasoning that produced the code: which human, which agent, signed.

Yes, and Aura is fully open source. The whole project (the semantic engine, the CLI, the desktop app, and the VS Code extension) lives in one Apache-2.0 repository on GitHub. The desktop app itself is free and in public beta for macOS and Linux. Install it, point it at a repo, and drive every agent you already use at no cost.