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- Agents and consoles
- Agent consoles
Agent consoles
A console is a real terminal on the board running an agent CLI, or a plain shell, in your repo's folder. It behaves like the terminal you already use, because it is one.
On this page
What a console is#
- A real pseudo-terminal running the unmodified CLI from your PATH. Control-C, job control and full-screen interfaces work as they do in Terminal.
- It starts in the repo's folder and runs under your own sign-in of that CLI. Symvibe adds no API key and no wrapper, and starting a console never types anything into the agent.
- It gets a short name: Otto, Dax, Maya, Rafa, Nova, Iris, Kai, Zoe, Leo, Mila, Ren, Juno, Ada, Bex, Cy or Pip, numbered when a name repeats. The name is how you address it:
@Otto. - New consoles take a free spot beside what is already on the board, never on top of it.
Start a console#
| Where | How |
|---|---|
| Spawn agent tool | T, then click the board. It runs the agent armed in the left rail's console flyout, which lists the armed agent, up to three of your agents and the installed built-ins (five rows at most), then Shell and All agents. With nothing armed, the click opens that flyout so you can choose. |
| Command bar | New console picks Claude, Codex, Gemini, Grok, OpenCode or an empty shell. Spawn 4 and Group open the composer. |
| Right-click ring | Spawn agent: the five built-ins and Shell, plus Other once you have added agents of your own. |
| Empty board | This board is empty offers your recent agents, Spawn an agent, Spawn 2, 4 or 8, and Start from a preset. |
| Orders | spawn 3 codex, spawn two reviewers, by voice or typed. Up to 12 at once. |
| Presets | A whole layout at once. See Presets. |
If the CLI is not on your PATH, the console opens your login shell instead and says so: not found on PATH. Opening a shell in this lane. Install the agent or set its path in SettingsAgents, then press Restart.
The console header#
- Agent badge
- The agent's logo. Click it to switch the console to another agent, or for Claude Code and Codex to another account. Switching relaunches the console, and asks first if it is running.
- Name
- Double-click to rename it, up to 23 characters. Names stay unique on the board.
- YOLO badge
- Shown when the console runs with its agent's skip-permission flag. See Yolo.
- See output
- Appears once a finished reply reaches about 80 characters or three paragraphs, and hides while the agent works. Opens the output viewer described below.
- Status pill
- What the console is doing; see the table. Hover it to read what the agent says it is doing, such as the command it runs or the permission it asks for.
- Restart, Duplicate, Close
- Restart relaunches the CLI in place. Close ends it and removes the console. Both ask first when the agent is running. Duplicate starts a new console of the same agent, account and text size; the conversation is not copied.
| Pill | Meaning |
|---|---|
| STARTING | The CLI is launching. |
| WORKING | With live agent status, the agent is in a turn. Without it, output arrived in the last moments, which also happens while a prompt waits for you with a spinner. |
| RUNNING | The process is alive but quiet. |
| NEEDS YOU | The agent asked for a permission or asked you a question. Needs live agent status. |
| READY | The agent is at its prompt: it finished a turn or just started. Needs live agent status. |
| PAUSED | Paused from the command bar (Pause all or an order), the Mission Map or an orchestrator card. Nothing runs until you resume it. |
| DONE | The console's process has ended: its shell exited, or the session was killed from the Mission Map or an orchestrator card. Restart relaunches it. |
| ERROR | The console could not start, or, with live agent status, a Claude Code turn ended on an error such as a rate limit. |
| IDLE | Nothing has run in this console yet. |
When an agent exits#
- When the agent quits, for example with
/exit, the console drops to your shell in place. Restart brings the agent back. - When a plain shell exits, the console shows the exit code and waits for Restart.
- After the Mac sleeps for more than 90 seconds, each running console on the workspace you have open prints a dim note, except one showing a full-screen program: network sessions may have dropped, so an agent that lost its connection may need a nudge.
Closing a console stops its process: it gets a quit signal and, if still running a moment later, is stopped. Resume and quitting covers quitting the app and coming back.
The output viewer#
Once a finished reply reaches about 80 characters or three paragraphs, a See output icon appears in the console's header. The viewer shows the whole reply as a document: for Claude Code and Codex it is read from their own transcript files, for other agents from the screen.
- Copy copies the reply.
- Save .md writes it to
outputs/in your repo, with a dated line on top. - Reply to and the console's name lets you answer; your reply is typed into that console and submitted.
Keep going#
Something on this page does not match what you see in the app? Write to hello@symvibe.com or tell us in the Discord, and we will fix it.