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Build on Side Space
A shared drive your AI agents and pipelines can work in, next to your team. One API behind the Mac app, the web app, the CLI, MCP, the Linux mount and the SDKs.
Side Space is a shared drive that your AI agents and pipelines can work in, alongside your team. Agents connect over MCP, pipelines run on every upload, render nodes mount the spaces, and scripts use the API, each with a token that allows only what it needs. Every save is a version, so any change can be looked at and undone. Every version can carry sidecars: JSON documents with the AI prompt that made it, a transcript, tags, media facts or your own data.
What you can build
| You want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Ask Claude to find, organize and share files | Use it in Claude |
| Let Cursor or your own agent read, edit and organize files | MCP |
| See a folder as it was before an agent ran, and put it back | History and rewind |
| Transcribe, tag or convert files, by hand or on every upload | AI actions and pipelines |
| Add your own processing (a QC check, an upscaler on your GPU) | Plugins |
| React when a file lands or changes (transcode, notify, sync to another system) | Webhooks and the journal |
| Record how an AI asset was made, attach QC results or scores | Sidecars |
| Let render nodes and servers read and write spaces as a folder | Linux mount |
| Upload renders, pull dailies into an edit, back up a space from code | The API, the SDKs (TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust) or the S3 gateway with aws and rclone |
| Try changes in a sandbox and apply only what you keep | Forks |
| Give teams access, limit who may change a folder, sign in with your company's identity provider | Organizations |
| Read and answer review notes pinned to a moment of a video | Review comments |
The pieces
Spaces hold files, like a shared drive. People join a space as viewer, commenter, editor or manager.
Nodes are the files and folders in a space, addressed by id (nod_…) or by path (Ep01/Shots/A001_C003.mov).
Versions (ver_…) are immutable. Saving again adds a version; any version can be restored or named ("Client cut"). When two people save at once, the last save wins and the other person is told; both saves stay in history.
Sidecars hang off a version, one JSON document per namespace: media, transcript, ai.tags, ai.generation, user, or your own x-… namespace.
The journal is the ordered list of everything that changed in a space. Webhooks, pipelines, sync clients and changes() in the SDKs all read it.
Bytes do not pass through the API server. A block gateway stores content in chunks (deduplicated and encrypted per space) and streams whole files with HTTP Range, so you can read the last minute of a 200 GB file without downloading the rest. The API hands out short-lived tickets for it.
Where things live
- API:
https://<your server>/v1. The OpenAPI file is served at/v1/openapi.yaml, and a short guide for AI agents at/llms.txt. - Block gateway: the address the API gives you in each ticket (
blockgw_url). - MCP server:
https://<your server>/mcp. - S3-compatible gateway: port
8070on the same host.
Side Space can be self-hosted, so these docs use https://side.example.com as the server. Replace it with yours.
Every page as Markdown
Each page here has a Markdown version for AI tools: add .md to its address (for example /docs/quickstart.md), or use Copy page at the top. /docs/llms.txt lists them all.