Pre-alpha. Postgres, HTTP, Stripe and email work today.

Let your agents write in pencil.

Retract sits between your AI agent and your database, files and APIs. Every change is held, shown as one diff, and committed or discarded by you.

Get started Star on GitHub

git clone https://github.com/retracthq/retract

examples/quickstart ● held

$ retract session start | node agent.js
database: added customer 1073741824 (Ann Lee)
stripe: created customer cus_rtxAxjVjA8BaGaGbKkp
stripe: charged $19.00 as pi_rtxL2bOLEMjqF7Z2wnv (status processing)
database: customer 1073741824 is now on the pro plan
mail: 250 2.0.0 Held by Retract as msg_fa835a60f5a4

$ retract diff
public.customers: 1 added
  + id=1073741824  {"email":"[masked]","name":"Ann Lee","plan":"pro"}
  (values masked in: email)

Held calls and email, sent in this order after the commit:
    1  stripe  create customer cus_rtxAxjVjA8BaGaGbKkp (email=[masked], name=Ann Lee)
    2  stripe  create payment_intent pi_rtxL2bOLEMjqF7Z2wnv (amount=1900, currency=usd, …)
    3  mail    email "Welcome to Pro" to [masked]@example.com

$ retract commit
Committed ses_d06ba880058d (14 journal entries).
  rows: 1 inserted, 0 updated, 0 deleted
  new id: public.customers.id 1073741824 -> 1
  outbox: Sent 3 held messages.
  new id: stripe cus_rtxAxjVjA8BaGaGbKkp -> cus_1001
  new id: stripe pi_rtxL2bOLEMjqF7Z2wnv -> pi_1002

$ retract discard
Discarded ses_d06ba880058d (14 journal entries).

Output from the quickstart, lightly trimmed. The agent added a row, charged a card and sent an email. None of it left until the commit.

Holds today: Postgres 16 and laterHTTP APIsStripeEmail over SMTP
Next: FilesMCP serverPython and TypeScript SDKsReview UI

Hold, review, then commit or discard.

Point your agent at Retract instead of production. It is a connection string and a base URL, not a rewrite.

Hold

The agent connects to Retract as if it were the real thing. Reads pass through. Writes land in a private scratch copy, and outgoing calls and email wait in an outbox.
Review

When the session ends, Retract shows one diff: every row added, changed or removed, and every message waiting to be sent, in the order it will go.
Commit or discard

Commit replays the changes in order with conflict checks, then sends the held messages. Discard leaves no trace.

Your agent

Any Postgres client, HTTP SDK or mail library
Holds stand-in credentials only

every call

Retract

Writes land in a scratch copy
Calls and email wait in an outbox
Reads pass straight through
Real keys stay here, encrypted

only on commit

Production

Your Postgres database
Stripe and other HTTP APIs
Your mail server

Built to sit in front of production.

Nothing lands until you commit.

Writes, API calls and email are held. Your database, Stripe and your mail server see nothing until you say so.

One diff for everything.

Every row and outgoing message in one place, as plain values, with sensitive columns masked. Files join the same diff next.

Commit is ordered and checked.

Changes replay in the order they happened. If the data changed underneath, Retract stops and shows the conflict instead of guessing.

The agent never sees your keys.

It logs in with stand-in credentials that only work through Retract, so Retract is its only door to production.

No model inside.

Risk is decided by fixed rules on parsed SQL and a catalog of known destructive API calls. Built for AI agents, not with them.

Read every line in your data path.

The proxy, journal, diff, replay and outbox are written from scratch on Node.js built-ins, with no third-party dependencies.

Try it in ten minutes.

An example agent adds a customer, charges them $19 on Stripe and sends a welcome email. You review one diff, then commit or discard. A fake Stripe and a fake mail server are included, so you need no accounts.

Node.js 24
PostgreSQL 16 or later, with its contrib modules

Read the full quickstart

from the repo root

# after registering your database, a scratch server and the fakes
$ node cli/bin/retract.js up --target app --target stripe \
    --target mail --scratch local
$ node cli/bin/retract.js session start | node examples/quickstart/agent.js
$ node cli/bin/retract.js diff
$ node cli/bin/retract.js commit

Undo should be a property of the connection, not a hope about backups.

In April 2026 a coding agent on a routine staging task hit a credential mismatch, tried to fix it, and deleted a production database and its backups with one API call. It was not malicious. It was helpful, fast and wrong, which is how agents fail, and it could only do that because a real key was within reach.

I spent three years building bioinformatics pipelines where one bad write could quietly corrupt months of research, and I work shifts as an ER tech, where every action is checked before it touches a patient. Retract brings that habit to software: verify, then act.

Ryan, founder

Putting an agent on production data? Build with us.

We are working closely with the first ten teams. You get direct help wiring Retract in, and what your agent touches decides what Retract holds next.