The most useful idea in Operator is a split: workers are disposable, sessions are durable.

A worker

One agent, one job, one sandbox. It starts, it works, it stops. When it stops it is gone, and so is its chat history and whatever it was holding in its head.

That is deliberate. A worker is cheap. If one gets confused, stop it and start another. You are not supposed to feel careful about them.

A session

The case the worker was working on. It holds:

• The workspace. Every file, exactly as the worker left it.
• The run history. What was attempted, in order, with results.
• The git history. Every change, committed as it happened.
• The documents produced, ready to open or share.
• The audit log of every approval decision.

Sessions outlive every worker that touches them. Three different agents can work the same session on three different days.

Finding your way around

Sessions on the phone has two halves.

Work is the sessions themselves: running, waiting on you, and finished. Open one and you get its files, its history, a terminal into the box, and the conversation with whatever is running.

Bots is the other half, and it is a different kind of thing. See the bots guide.

Picking a case back up

Open a finished session and start another job on it. The new worker gets the same workspace, with everything the last one left. You do not re-explain the context, because the context is on disk.

If a worker made a mess, the git history is real git. Restore any point of it as a branch and carry on from there.

Crews

Some jobs run as a crew: a lead that plans and several members that each take a piece. You see them nested under their lead rather than as a flat list of strangers, and the lead is the one that writes the answer you read.

Members work in a read-only copy of the workspace and hand their results back through the lead. That is why a crew does not produce four conflicting edits to the same file.

Stopping things

Stop a worker from its session at any time. The session keeps everything up to that moment. There is no state you lose by stopping early, which is the point of putting the durable things on the session.

If you quit the Mac app with jobs running, they stop. The sessions are all still there when you come back.