Projects and conversations

Two words carry the whole app.

A project is a folder you added. A conversation is one thread with one agent, and it runs in that folder.

Running several at once

A conversation runs one prompt at a time. While it works, its send button turns into a stop button and a new prompt has to wait.

Other conversations are not held back. Start a second one, a third, a tenth, and they all work at the same time — in the same project or in different ones. That is what running agents in parallel means here.

So pick one of these:

• One agent at a time per project. Start the second conversation when the first has finished.
• One folder per agent. Add a separate folder as its own project. Separate projects never touch each other, because they are separate directories.

Conversations in different projects are always safe to run together.

While an agent works

The input area shows which agent is working and how long it has been going. In the sidebar and in project lists, the row for that conversation is marked as active.

Anything you type stays in the box. Return does nothing until the agent finishes, and your text is still there when it does.

When a prompt ends while Arbitr is in the background, macOS notifies you. The first time this happens, macOS asks whether to allow notifications. Nothing is sent for a prompt you stopped yourself.

Stopping an agent

Press Esc, or the stop button next to the input box.

The conversation stops being active and you can type again. Stopping does not undo anything — whatever the agent already wrote to disk is still there, and whatever it already said is still in the transcript. To throw away files it changed, use the Git panel; see Reviewing changes.

Continuing later

Arbitr hands back the agent’s session on the next prompt. Type into a conversation from last week and the agent picks up where it left off, including after you quit and reopen Arbitr.

If the agent has since discarded that session, the next prompt starts a fresh one instead.

Archiving

Archiving a conversation hides it from every list. There is no view for archived conversations, so treat it as putting something away for good rather than as a recycle bin.

Where history is kept

Everything is stored locally on your machine. Nothing is uploaded. See Security and privacy.