The Assistant

4 min read

The Assistant is a conversation with your whole fleet. Every other screen in DevThrottle is about one session or one list; this one is not tied to any session at all. You ask it questions - how many sessions are open, which ones are stuck, which machines are on, what runs tonight - and it answers from what your Gateway can actually see. It can act, too: message a session, approve one, snooze one, start one, or close one.

Opening it

In the Cockpit - Assistant in the left rail, third down, under the Fleet Map.
On your phone - Assistant in the menu, under New session.

It is the same screen and the same conversation machine on both. What differs is the shape of the window, not what it can do.

Chat or Voice

One toggle decides how the screen behaves, and it sits big in the middle until you have asked something:

Chat - type your question and press Send (Enter sends; Shift+Enter starts a new line). Replies stay quiet on the screen.
Voice - press the microphone, speak, and press Send. Replies are read aloud, and a Stop reading button appears while one is playing.

Speaking uses the same dictation dialog as everywhere else in DevThrottle - level bars, an elapsed timer, a Pause checkpoint, the transcript in a box you can edit, and Cancel or Send. In Chat mode it also offers Insert, which drops the dictated words into the message box so you can edit them before asking. See Voice.

Note

Turn-taking is a button on purpose. You press to speak and press Send when you are done - the Assistant never decides for itself that you have stopped talking, and there is no spoken keyword that ends your turn.

What it can tell you

The Assistant does not guess about your fleet. Ask it something about your sessions, your machines or your schedules and the answer is built from a live read rather than from memory, with the screen listing the steps it took above the reply:

Your sessions - the whole roster, with how many need you, what each one is doing, how long it has been waiting, how old it is, and how long it has been idle.
One session in particular - name it, or say its repository or its session number, and it reads back what that session is doing. Whichever session you asked about becomes the one it assumes you mean next, so "snooze it" needs no second name.
The next one that needs you - it picks the session that has been waiting longest and focuses on that.
What a session's voice would say - the real narration for that session's last completed turn, read aloud rather than a summary of a summary.
Your machines - the computers running Directors right now, how recently the Gateway heard from each, and how many sessions each carries.
What is scheduled - the scheduled jobs: what each one does, whether it is on, when it is next due, and how the last run went.

What it can do

Send a message into a session, the way the Send button does.
Approve a session that is waiting - the equivalent of pressing Enter on the choice it has highlighted.
Snooze a session, with your usual snooze length.
Switch a session to voice mode, so it starts narrating its turns.
Start a session in a repository you name. If no machine in the fleet has a repository by that name, it says so rather than picking something close.
Close a session - and this one always stops and asks first.

Warning

Closing a session is permanent, so the Assistant never does it in the turn you asked. It names the session and the repository out loud, and the screen offers Yes, do it and Cancel. The confirmation always names what it is about to close, even when you did not name it yourself - so you hear the target before anything happens.

What it will not do

Money. The Assistant does not read balances, costs, or spend totals. For what your fleet has been doing, see Your Throttle.
Type into a terminal. It sends prompts and presses Enter; it does not drive a session's terminal. That is the session page.
Reach anything outside your fleet. What it tells you about your fleet comes from your own sessions, machines and schedules and from nothing else.

The conversation is per device

The Assistant remembers the conversation on the Gateway, keyed to the device you are signed in on - so a follow-up question works, and your desk browser and your phone each keep their own thread. One question is answered at a time on a device, so two tabs cannot both act on the same pending confirmation.

Choosing the model it thinks with

Settings has an Assistant tab holding one choice: the model the Assistant thinks with. It is a setting for the account, not for a device, so the desk and your phone use the same one, and it applies from the next question. On the hosted Gateway the model catalog is not browsable, and the tab shows the model that is saved.

Tip

The Assistant has to call tools reliably to be useful - a question about your fleet is answered from a real read, not a guess - so pick for tool-calling and speed rather than for depth of reasoning.

When something goes wrong

Failures are shown, not swallowed. If the fleet cannot be read, the reason appears in the conversation. If an answer arrives but cannot be read aloud, you get the answer on screen and a separate line saying the reading failed - the reply is never lost to a voice problem.

Where to go next

The session rail - the same fleet as a list, when you would rather look than ask.
DevThrottle on mobile - the surface this screen is most useful on.
Voice - dictation, and how speaking works everywhere else in the product.