How you talk with the fleet
Five surfaces over one record - CLI, agent CLI, MCP, dashboard, editor.
A control plane is only as good as its doors. Saphan Studio ships five, all projections of the same record — pick per moment, not per religion:
| Surface | What it is for | Status |
|---|---|---|
saphan CLI | The operator's surface: every verb, every act, paste-ready commands; the only writer of acts | Shipped |
saphan-agent CLI | The runner-side agent binary: dispatched runs on admitted machines, local and remote | Shipped |
| MCP server | Conversation with the fleet — see below | Shipped |
| Web dashboard | The fleet at a glance in a browser: overview, streams, runners, the cost ledger, the owner's gate inbox; served by the engine itself, embedded in the binary | Shipped (loopback and pre-auth today; OAuth fronting is named, planned work) |
| VS Code extension | The fleet inside the editor: the fleet tree, stream detail, and gate acts whose command lines are composed by the engine — beside the agent sessions you run in the same window | Shipped (early) |
The MCP server deserves its own paragraph, because it changes who can operate a fleet. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard by which AI assistants call external tools — and Saphan's engine ships an MCP server that exposes the fleet's projections to any MCP-capable client, behind an OAuth 2.1 front door. In practice this means: you open a chat and talk to your fleet. "What waits on my gate?" "Show me this stream's history." "What did today cost, and where?" — answered from the record, with the same rows the CLI reads, in plain language, from a desktop or a phone. The read surface is deliberately read-only: conversation informs, acts stay acts — the assistant you talk to can compose the exact command for your hand, but only your hand (or a delegation you signed) executes it. This is not a chatbot bolted onto a product; it is the record made conversational — and it is how the fleet's own advisory role reads the very fleet it advises, every day. (the MCP server §2 shows real conversations: today's spend, the insights in it, and the gate commands drafted for the operator's hand.)
The doors compose. A typical day uses all five: the fleet reports into the record; you ask about it in chat on the phone; you decide; you paste one command in a terminal — or click the same act in the dashboard; the editor shows the runs land.