Studio: the human operator surface

Cortex Studio is a live, read-only terminal board for people supervising agent work. It reads the same case files as the CLI and MCP server, so the view does not create a second source of truth or change a case.

cortex studio

Studio is interactive and rejects --json; use cortex sessions --json for the board index or cortex show <taskId> --json for one machine-readable session.

The left pane lists sessions. The right pane uses the canonical session projection: goal and loop position, verified | partial | failed | unverified assessment and gaps, a pending human decision with option consequences, the first structured next action, hypotheses, bounded recent receipts, and bounded recent evidence. Its composite read retains at most the 200 newest evidence, command, and phase records while reporting exact totals; this keeps two-second refreshes cheap on long-lived cases. Studio refreshes the central session store every two seconds.

Filter the board

cortex studio --active       # start with in-flight sessions only
cortex studio --repo billing # match a repository name or slug

Inside Studio:

Key	Action
↑ / k, ↓ / j	select the previous or next session
g, G	jump to the first or last session
a	toggle active-only sessions
r	refresh immediately
q, Esc, Ctrl-C	quit

Studio flags an in-flight session after 24 hours without an update. Use the CLI when you need more detail:

cortex show <taskId>          # bounded one-screen session view with exact totals
cortex timeline <taskId>      # time-sorted phases, evidence, calls, and receipts
cortex status <taskId>        # current blockers and missing verification in its workspace
cortex sessions --stale       # only stale in-flight sessions

Which sessions appear?

Studio reads the central XDG store at $XDG_STATE_HOME/cortex/sessions/, the default case-file location. A project configured with a repo-local cases_dir is intentionally outside this global walk; use cortex list from that workspace instead. Run cortex config to see the resolved paths.

The three surfaces

• CLI — direct operation, inspection, and shell automation.
• MCP server — the compact tool interface an agent calls.
• Studio — the read-only operator view for humans.

All three call the same kernel and read the same evidence model.

The MCP server's exposure profile does not change Studio. cortex serve defaults to the compact 17-tool agent profile, while Studio and the CLI retain the operator views locally. Use cortex serve --profile all only when an MCP client also needs the 24-tool surface, including the seven cross-repository monitoring and session-administration tools.