The workbench
The desktop app's eight destinations — Work, Files, Changes, Genome, My tools, Costs & usage, Settings, Help — what lives in each, and how to navigate them.
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The desktop app is one window with eight destinations. Chat is one of them. Everything that used to be a drawer — keys, MCP, skills, routines, the advice ledger — is a page inside a destination, with a breadcrumb, a back button, and a URL-like location that survives a reload.
/workbench (alias /cockpit) opens it. Cmd/Ctrl+K reaches any page by name.
The eight destinations
| Destination | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Work | The conversation. Tabs, composer, tool rail, the Primordial Deep docked or fullscreen |
| Files | The file browser and tree, with diff preview and Monaco editing |
| Changes | What this session wrote, the working tree, and checkpoints |
| Genome | The code graph — symbols, blast radius, co-changes |
| My tools | Cells, skills, agents, MCP, permissions, and the five engine surfaces |
| Costs & usage | The cost ledger, model calls, and metrics |
| Settings | Appearance, models and accounts, code and context, system |
| Help | Guides, diagnostics, session status, feedback |
A Cell can claim a ninth: workspace.tab opens a cell extension as a real peer of Work and My tools, with the same navigation and history. See Cells & Morphs.
My tools
| Section | What it is |
|---|---|
| Morphs | Installed cells, their surfaces, and per-cell agent access |
| Skills | Search, install, load, and remove skills |
| Agents | Custom agent definitions — project and global |
| Agent runs | Every dispatch and background agent, live |
| MCP connections | Project and global MCP servers with live status |
| Permissions & reach | Hooks, the tool catalog, privacy globs |
The Engine group underneath is the cockpit for everything that keeps running when a turn ends:
| Section | What it is |
|---|---|
| Orchestration | Graph runs — nodes, gates, tokens |
| Routines | Scheduled runs and their history |
| Background jobs | Shell jobs started with background: true — logs, status, stop |
| Rooms | The agent link — who is talking to whom |
| Advice | The per-tab advisor ledger |
Settings
Four groups, in order:
| Group | Sections |
|---|---|
| Appearance | Theme, Window & layout, Preferences, Language |
| Models & accounts | Models & routing, Accounts & keys, Subscriptions, Provider options, Proxy |
| Code & context | Code intelligence, Context & compaction, Web search, Language servers, Syntax highlighting |
| System | Addons, Storage, Remote access (Hearth) |
Every field maps to a key in the configuration reference. The desktop writes the same config.json the CLI reads, so a setting changed here is a setting changed for the terminal.
Changes, usage, help
- Changes — *Session changes* is what the agent wrote in this session, per tab.
*Working tree & Git* stages, unstages, and commits with click-to-preview diffs. *Checkpoints* restores a checkpoint.
- Costs & usage — the running ledger, then *Model calls* (every request, its latency,
and its finish reason) and *Metrics*.
- Help — guides, *Diagnostics* (the same checks as
doctor), *Session status*, and
*Send feedback*.
Navigation
Destinations keep their own history. Back returns to where you were inside that destination, not to the last thing you clicked anywhere. Switching workspace clears the previous root, so back never lands you in a repo you closed.
Breadcrumb, page title, and search result all read one identity table (workbench-sections.ts) — a page cannot show one icon in the crumb and another in its own heading.