Overview
Updated 2026-08-29
APEX is Abridge's production-grade, HIPAA-compliant internal agent — the
live-first agentic platform. Mention @APEX in Slack and it answers
operational, engineering, data, and product questions by querying live
systems instead of relying on large static documents. It also triages
tickets, creates PRs and docs on request, and is the runtime the
Frankie Software Factory is built on.
What APEX is
- Live-source-first. APEX uses curated repo indexes and internal maps as navigation, then verifies facts with live tools when the answer depends on current state. It separates verified evidence from assumptions and unknowns.
- Event-driven and stateless. Triggered by
@APEXmentions, each interaction is processed in isolation; pods restart every few hours and wipe in-memory state. - Safe by construction. External users are blocked (fail-closed), BigQuery output is aggregate-only, and it never posts raw clinical text, identifiers, patient names, emails, or Firebase UIDs.
The source of truth for agent behavior is agents/DIRECTIVE.md in
abridgeai/apex.
How to use it
- Slack: mention
@APEXin a channel, DM, group DM, or thread. APEX reads the thread context, runs the agent, and replies in-thread. Messages without a real mention are ignored. - Cursor / Claude Code: clone the repo and open it in an agentic IDE — the repo rules point agents to
agents/DIRECTIVE.md. - Console: watch runs and Frankie builds at apex-web.abridge.services.
Evidence tiers
Every answer is classified by how well it's verified, so you know how much to trust it:
| Tier | Meaning | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| A | Verified against a live tool | 0.95 |
| B | Observed / strongly corroborated | 0.85 |
| C | Schema- or config-derived | 0.75 |
| D | Guidance / best-effort | 0.60 |
Answers below the 0.72 triage threshold are flagged for a human.
Sibling agents on the APEX runtime
APEX's dispatcher → queue → worker pattern powers a small family of agents:
- Frankie — the Software Factory coding agent (docs).
- Sentinel — deployment monitoring.
- Ascend — RFP workflows.
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