Workspace tour
Use this tour to name what you are looking at before you start handing work to agents.
Coldtea is built around visible work. A coding agent gets a terminal pane. You get the surrounding context: files, tasks, plans, logs, branches, and review surfaces.
Projects
A project is a local Git repository opened in Coldtea. The project decides the working directory for terminal panes, editor views, worktrees, and most agent sessions.
If the wrong project is open, stop before launching an agent. Most mistakes are boring: the agent edits the right file name in the wrong checkout.
Brews
A brew is an agent session in Coldtea. It might be a quick terminal run, a task-linked implementation session, or a worktree session running beside other agents.
Each brew should answer one question: what is this agent trying to do?
For a small experiment, the answer can live in your prompt. For team work, put it in a task so the plan, log, and review context have somewhere to land.
Panes
Panes are the visible surfaces inside a workspace. Common panes include:
- Terminal panes for agent CLIs and shell commands.
- Editor panes for reading and changing files.
- Task panes for issue context, plans, and session logs.
- Browser or QA panes where enabled by your build and workflow.
The important bit: terminal panes are real terminals. Coldtea is not rendering a fake transcript of an agent conversation.
Tabs
Tabs keep different streams of work apart. A tab might be the base project, a task-specific session, or a worktree with its own branch.
When you switch tabs, check the branch and path before giving an agent more instructions. Coldtea tries to make the active context visible, but it cannot make a vague prompt precise.
Tasks
Tasks are the team-facing unit of work. A task can hold the description, implementation plan, session logs, labels, assignee, and workflow state.
Start from a task when:
- The work came from a teammate or issue tracker.
- The change needs review.
- You expect more than one agent session.
- You want the final context to be readable later.
For a one-off local question, a plain brew may be enough.
Editor and diff review
Use the editor to inspect what changed while the agent worked. The terminal tells you what the agent said. The diff tells you what actually happened.
Do not treat a green agent message as the end of review. Open the changed files, run the smallest useful checks, and make sure the change matches the task.
Worktrees
A worktree is a separate checkout tied to the same Git repository. Coldtea uses worktrees so agents can work on separate branches without stepping on the same files.
A worktree is not a machine sandbox. It separates Git working directories. The commands inside those directories still run on your machine with your permissions.
Next: start a first brew or read the mental model.