Your first session

This walks through composing and running a prompt in the desktop app.

1. Pick a provider and working directory

Use the individual chips along the bottom of the composer to choose the provider, access mode, plan mode, and worktree baseline. A green dot next to a provider means its CLI is on your PATH.

The worktree chip is an explicit three-way choice:

• No worktree runs in the selected project checkout.
• Current checkout creates an isolated branch from the local commit at HEAD.
• Local origin default creates it from the commit targeted by the local symbolic refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.

Each available baseline shows the ref and short SHA that will be used. C2 never fetches, guesses main / master, or silently falls back to another choice; a missing, dangling, or locally stale origin ref is shown as that local fact. The created session remembers the actual ref and full SHA. When you press Run, C2 pins creation to the full SHA from the settled preview and fails closed if that local ref moved meanwhile. A newly opened draft therefore does not create a branch or checkout until its first Run succeeds. See Git.

2. Compose your prompt as a document

A new session opens as a full page with the caret in it — it is a document editor, not a text field. Write your request in plain prose. Then type / to open the skill picker and insert skills:

• Skill: Code Reviewer — a reviewer persona (a fragment).
• Skill: Test Writer, Security Audit, and anything you've installed from the market.

Inserted skills appear as inline chips. You can combine several and interleave them with your own text — the whole document is compiled into one prompt when you run it. Details: Document editor & skills.

Because this is a document, Enter starts a new paragraph — send with Mod+Enter (the composer says so while the document is empty). Sending collapses the page into a composer docked under the transcript; Mod+Shift+E (the ⤢ button) takes you back to the full page whenever a brief needs the room, and the draft survives either way.

Once the session exists, a model chip appears beside the provider if the agent reports models. See Models.

Use Mod+Shift+F at any point to search text across the current workspace. The search supports case-sensitive, whole-word, and regular-expression modes. Results show the workspace-relative path and exact line/column; choosing one opens that file in the side dock's Monaco editor and puts the caret on the match. Searches are time/output/result bounded, skip generated and oversized content, and say when the returned set is incomplete. Starting a newer query or closing the dialog cancels and reaps the previous rg process.

3. Run

Press the send button (or Mod+Enter). C2:

1. Auto-checkpoints your workspace (a hidden git ref) so you can revert later.
2. Compiles the document — text + skill fragments + macro substitutions — into the prompt, and attaches any MCP servers from MCP skills.
3. Starts (or reuses) the session and streams the agent's work into the transcript above the composer.

Each prompt becomes one turn in the transcript: your prompt, the agent's answer, and — collapsed underneath — its tools, thinking, and plan. When the provider exposes structured delegation tool calls, an Agents disclosure separates spawned agents and workflows into a compact status roster with their role and task. This is capability-detected: providers that do not emit that ACP metadata keep the ordinary tool view. A badge shows running, the stop reason, and how long the turn took.

The first transcript load contains at most the latest 20 complete user turns. Use Load earlier to page backward without splitting a turn; one request can never exceed 50 user turns. Referencing another conversation with @chat uses the same latest-20-turn window and an additional hard limit of 16,000 Unicode scalar values, with an omission marker when older context was left out.

In the session rail, pin an active chat to keep it above the recency-sorted list. Archiving a chat also removes its pin; restoring it returns it to the ordinary active list until you pin it again. The rail also reflects the core-owned Running, Awaiting Input, and Failed states. Their revisioned snapshot survives a renderer reload and stays consistent across Desktop, TUI, and remote clients. If C2 itself restarts during a running or waiting turn, the unrecoverable task becomes Failed (interrupted) instead of leaving a stale permission control behind.

4. Answer permission prompts

By default C2 is in Ask mode: when the agent wants to run a command or edit files, a permission dialog appears. Allow or reject it. Switch to Accept edits or YOLO in the config popover to reduce prompts — see Permissions & YOLO.

An unanswered request remains visible as Awaiting Input after a renderer reload. Answering it from any connected client updates the others; duplicate, wrong-session, and invalid-option answers are ignored by the core.

5. Review and ship

Open the side dock's Git tab (or Mod+Shift+G for the full Source Control dialog) to:

• see changed files and a colored diff,
• diff/revert against any checkpoint,
• write a message and Commit / Push.

That's a full loop. Explore Git & checkpoints, the command palette, and remote control next.