FAQ & troubleshooting

General

Is Vanta a chatbot? No — it's a local trusted-operator agent. It knows the goal before it picks a tool, gates every action through an enforced kernel, and reports only what it verified. See Introduction.

Does my data leave my machine? Only if you use a cloud model or a network tool (web, comms, browser). Run fully local on Ollama — see Self-host offline. State lives under .vanta/ (per project) and ~/.vanta (global).

Which models can I use? OpenAI, Ollama, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter. Switch with vanta setup or /model. See Providers.

How is this safe? A small Rust kernel classifies every action allow/ask/block and the agent can't bypass it (Rule Zero). See the Safety model and Security features.

Setup

The setup wizard didn't run. It only auto-runs on a TTY when no provider is configured. Run it explicitly: vanta setup. See the Setup wizard.

My API key isn't picked up. Keys live in vanta-ts/.env (or via api_key_helper). Run vanta doctor to check provider reachability + key presence. Keys are validated before the wizard writes them.

Troubleshooting

The kernel won't bind / port 7788 in use. A stale kernel may hold the port. Find and kill it:

lsof -nP -iTCP:7788 -sTCP:LISTEN     # note the PID, then: kill <pid>

Web search returns nothing / 403. Leave VANTA_SEARCH_PROVIDER=auto so Vanta can fall through configured providers, Brave browser, and Bing. DuckDuckGo adapters are legacy explicit options and are not used automatically because their bot gates frequently return 403. For stronger coverage, self-host Searxng or configure a managed provider. web_fetch is unaffected. See Configuration.

Local model errors / "provider unreachable". Make sure ollama serve is running and the model is pulled (ollama pull qwen2.5:14b). Check VANTA_OLLAMA_URL.

It resumed an old session I didn't want. Resume is age-gated (VANTA_RESUME_MAX_AGE_MIN, default 120; 0 = always fresh). A carried goal launches paused until /goal resume. See Sessions & continuity.

A tool keeps asking for approval. That's the kernel escalating an ask action. Choose "Yes, don't ask again" to persist a tool-scoped rule, or configure auto-mode. A kernel block can never be allowed. See Permissions & hooks.

Browser tools fail. Live browser use needs npx playwright install chromium.

/look returns a blank image or says Screen Recording is denied. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording, enable the terminal application running Vanta or enable Vanta Desktop, then quit and relaunch that application. Vision also needs a vision-capable model (VANTA_VISION_MODEL). See Sight & screen context.

I captured the wrong area. Did Vanta send it? No. /look attaches the image to the next turn but does not send a message. Run /attachments clear, or remove the attachment in Desktop. Cancelling the macOS selector attaches nothing.

Commit blocked by the size gate. A file/function exceeded the limits. Split it, or set VANTA_LINT_BLOCK=0 to warn-only. See Modularity.

Changes I made didn't take effect. The agent loads code at launch (no hot reload). Use /restart (with ./run.sh) to reload.

Still stuck?

Run vanta doctor for a health report, /bug to capture a structured bug record, or /handoff for a continuity packet.