Sessions

A session in Cockpit is one continuous conversation with one engine — tied to one Agent tab. Every tab is its own session; the whole UI is built around running many of them at once without losing track.

Tabs are sessions

Open the Agent panel (Cmd+1) and look at the tab strip across the top. Each tab:

• Has its own engine pick (Claude / Codex / DeepSeek / Kimi / Ollama)
• Has its own working directory (defaults to the current project)
• Has its own conversation history
• Has its own token / cost counter
• Runs in parallel with every other tab — sending a message in one doesn't pause the others

Click the + button next to the tabs to open a new one (with a dropdown to pick the engine). Hover a tab and a × appears on the right to close it. Drag a tab to reorder.

Pinning a session

Hover over a tab and a star icon appears in its top-right corner — click it to toggle pinned (filled star = pinned, empty star = unpinned). Not a right-click menu — just a hover-icon click.

Pinned sessions:

• Persist across Cockpit restarts (saved into the pinned-sessions file in Cockpit's data folder).
• Show as a star button with a badge counter at the bottom of the left sidebar (badge shows how many you've pinned).
• Click the star button to open the Pinned Sessions popover, which floats to the right of the sidebar. One row per pinned session, showing project name + a custom title (or the first 8 chars of the session ID), with:
  • A drag handle (6-dot icon) to reorder
  • Pencil icon to set a custom title
  • × icon to unpin
• Single click to jump back to the tab.

Use this for long-running sessions you keep coming back to — your "main thread of work" across days.

Session Browser

Click the grid icon at the top of the left sidebar to open the Session Browser — a full-screen modal that lists your sessions grouped by project:

• Search bar at the top filters projects by path keyword.
• Each project expands to reveal the sessions inside it (timestamp + a preview of the first message).
• You can also add new project folders from here.

Note: the browser is hierarchical (project → session), not a flat fuzzy search across every session. If you don't remember which project a conversation lived in, filter by project first, then expand.

Enter / clicking a session jumps to its tab (creating one if needed).

Forking a session

Right-click any message → Fork from here. Cockpit creates a new tab pre-loaded with the conversation history up to that message — the server reads the original session file, truncates at the chosen message, and copies the prefix into a new file. The original tab is completely untouched.

Use cases:

• Exploring alternatives. "What if we used Postgres instead of Redis?" — fork and explore without losing the original thread.
• Splitting a long session. Once a thread has grown to many thousands of tokens, fork at a natural break point and keep going. Old context stays accessible in the original tab.
• A/B comparison across engines. Fork the same conversation into a DeepSeek tab and a Claude tab; ask both the next question.

Session completion toasts

When you're not currently focused on that project's tab, if a session finishes generating (the AI stopped, no more tokens streaming), Cockpit shows a small toast in the lower-left:

my-service finished — "Added Redis cache with 60s TTL."

The toast shows project name + a preview of the AI's last message. Click it to jump to that tab. Auto-dismisses after 5 seconds; hover to pause the countdown, leave and it resumes after 2 seconds.

No toast fires for the project tab you're already looking at — you can already see it, no need to interrupt.

This is the single feature that makes 5+ parallel sessions tractable. Set them off, switch panels, do something else; they tap you on the shoulder when ready.

Token & cost

Every tab tracks input / output tokens for every message and converts them to USD using the engine's price table. Click the token button in the top bar to open the Token Stats modal:

• Current session totals
• Broken down by model (per engine, per model variant)
• Daily token usage chart

Costs are estimates — final billing is whatever your provider reports. Ollama always shows $0.00 (it's not in the price table).

Practical layout

A common pattern after a few days:

• 3–5 pinned sessions for major workstreams — one click via the star button at the sidebar bottom.
• 2–3 transient tabs for one-off questions — close them when done.
• 1 "scratch" tab on the side for /qa clarification, /cg exploration, etc.

The Session Browser is the glue: any time you can't remember where something was, click the grid icon at the top of the sidebar.

Next

• Skills — /qa /fx /ex /go /cg change how the AI works within a session
• Engines Overview — pick an engine per tab