Features
Feature overview
The Operon feature landscape at a glance — terminal, watching work, control, context, orchestration, memory — and how the pieces fit together.
Operon turns a bare AI coding session into an instrument panel. This page maps every capability to the tab or view where you use it, so you always know where to look. Most of what Operon does lives on the session tab bar — the row of tabs across the top of an open session — with a few global views in the sidebar for working across all your sessions at once.
Tip
Every session tab has a keyboard shortcut. Press the Command palette shortcut, Cmd+K, from anywhere to search and jump. The core tabs are bound to Cmd+1 through Cmd+9 and Cmd+0.
The feature map
Each area below is a group of related features. The "Where" column tells you which session tab or global view to open, and the shortcut column lists the keyboard binding where one exists.
| Area | What it does | Where | Shortcut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watching work — Activity | Every prompt becomes a Trace grouping all the AI activity that followed it: tool calls, file diffs, sub-agents, errors, cost, and the response. | Activity tab | Cmd+3 |
| Watching work — Timeline | A searchable, filterable stream of every event, grouped by trace, with category filter pills and a sort toggle. | Timeline tab | Cmd+4 |
| Watching work — Tasks | A four-column kanban (To Do, In Progress, Blocked, Done) auto-built from the conversation and synced from the agent’s own todo list. | Tasks tab | Cmd+5 |
| Terminal | A real shell running your AI tool, backed by a persistent daemon that survives restarts. Split panes, clickable file paths, and clickable dev-server URLs. | Terminal tab | Cmd+2 |
| Git & shipping | Stage, commit, push, open a pull request, and sync with your base branch without leaving Operon. Diff-stat and PR status live in the header. | Changes tab | — |
| Control & safety | Scope boundaries that revert out-of-bounds edits, checkpoint gates between plan steps, and goal-drift alerts. | Scope, Checkpoints, Intent tabs | Cmd+0, Cmd+9 |
| Context & monitoring | A live token-window monitor with a context health score, plus a preview pane for running dev servers. | Overview and Preview tabs | Cmd+1 |
| Orchestration & Arena | Decompose a goal into a plan across tools, and run the same goal across multiple agents side by side to compare them. | Orchestration and Arena global views | — |
| Memory & intelligence | Decisions, plans, and project memory that persist across sessions, plus cross-session analytics and per-session DNA. | Memory tab and global intelligence views | Cmd+7 |
| Collaboration & replay | Optional cloud sync of metadata, a web viewer, teams, and a scrubable replay of any past session. | Web viewer and Share | — |
The three you will use most
Most of your day-to-day time in Operon is spent in three tabs. Activity is where you read what the agent did. Terminal is where you drive it. Changes is where you ship the result. The rest layer on top of those.
Cmd+3
Activity
The trace stream. Expand any prompt to see the tool timeline, diffs, sub-agents, cost, and response, then inspect it in the properties panel.
Cmd+2
Terminal
The embedded shell where your AI tool actually runs. Persistent, split-pane capable, with clickable file paths and dev-server links.
Changes
Git & shipping
Stage, commit, push, and open a pull request in-app. Review each file diff and stage individual hunks before you commit.
Explore each feature
Every area above has its own page with the full detail — what it captures, how to read it, and the shortcuts. Start with the two most-used surfaces below, then branch out.
The terminal
The persistent embedded shell: split panes, clickable file paths, dev-server URLs, and shell-history replay for past sessions.
Watching your agent work
The observability trio — Activity traces, the Timeline event stream, and the auto-built Tasks kanban.
Git and shipping
Stage, commit, push, and open a pull request from the Changes tab without touching the command line.
Memory and intelligence
Decisions, project memory, and cross-session analytics that make each run smarter than the last.