Dashboard

The Dashboard is the first screen you land on. It answers three questions at a glance: is anything running on its own right now?, what happened while I was away?, and where do I go next? Everything here is a jumping-off point — each tile drills into the screen that explains its number.

How to get here

It’s the default view when you open askTheodor. From anywhere, click Dashboard (the 🏠 home entry) in the sidebar.

The autonomy bar (your kill-switch)

A slim bar sits at the top. It’s the single switch that halts — or resumes — all unattended work: Plans, Routines, the Reviewer sweep, the stuck-task watchdog, and channel replies.

• When active, the bar is quiet and reads “Autonomy active — workers run Plans & Routines on their own.”
• When paused, it turns amber and reads “Autonomy paused — unattended workers are halted. Your chats still work.” Press ▶ Resume autonomy to turn it back on.

Your chats are never paused

Pausing autonomy stops only the unattended machinery. You can still open any worker and chat normally — the switch is about work that happens without you watching, not about talking to your team.

”Work done while you were away”

Just below the bar, a digest lists the Routines that finished and the artefacts workers produced since your last visit. Clickable rows open the file (in the Library), the link (in your browser), or the audit log. Use ✓ Mark all seen to reset it, or the ✕ on a single row to dismiss just that one. When there’s nothing new, it collapses to a one-line “All caught up” note.

Metric tiles

A grid of tiles summarizes your whole workspace. Each one is clickable and lands you on the screen behind the number. Many carry a small ? that explains the term in plain language.

• 👥 Workers — your roster size; opens the Workers hub.
• ✅ Open tasks — unfinished tasks (with an ⚠ overdue count); opens a task picker.
• 🎯 Open goals and 📁 Projects — open their pickers.
• 💬 Conversations — opens the conversations manager.
• 📚 Library — opens the knowledge base; see Library.
• 📥 Inbox — unread messages waiting for you (Theodor’s mailbox).
• 💰 Cost this month — opens Settings → Cost.

Further down, a “What your workforce produced this week” row and a per-Company value row answer the “what is this worth this month?” question — tasks shipped, spend, and words produced, broken out per Company.

First-run: “Welcome — start here”

On a brand-new, empty workspace you’ll see a 👋 Welcome card with three good first moves: 🎩 Chat with Theodor, 🌱 Build a team (spawn a Company from a template), and 📚 Upload reference docs. Pick one and ignore the rest.

The journey checklist

Once you’ve done a thing or two, the Welcome card gives way to a 🚀 Getting started checklist that ticks itself off as you go:

1. Connect a provider — pick a model source (local Ollama is free; cloud is smarter).
2. Start your first chat — talk to your starter worker, Aria, or to Theodor.
3. Build a team — use a Wizard to spawn a Company in about five minutes.
4. Upload a reference doc — drop in a PDF, .md, or .docx; workers can then quote it.

It gets out of your way

The checklist auto-hides once all four are done, after a week, or when you click Dismiss. It’s a nudge, not a permanent fixture.

In practice

The autonomy bar is the control you should know how to reach without thinking. If a routine is misbehaving, a worker is looping, or you simply want everything to stop while you look at something — one click and all unattended machinery halts. Your chats keep working, so you can still ask a worker what it was doing. Learn where it is before you need it.

“Work done while you were away” is the point of running an app like this. If that digest is empty every morning, nothing is running unattended, and you’re using a workforce as a chat window. One routine — an inbox digest, a daily source check — turns this into a screen worth opening.

Two things the tiles are genuinely good for:

• Catching cost drift early. 💰 Cost this month on the home screen means an unexpected number is something you notice in passing rather than at the end of the month. Click through to Cost when it looks wrong.
• Spotting stalled work. The ⚠ overdue count on Open tasks is the cheapest signal that something assigned is not moving — a worker blocked, a task nobody picked up.

Treat the checklist as disposable. It exists to get four things done — provider, first chat, a team, a reference doc — and hides itself afterwards. Dismiss it once those are true; don’t work through it for completeness’ sake.

🎓 Learn it hands-on: Autonomy & the kill-switch

Terms in this page

• Autonomy — work your AI workers do without you watching: scheduled Routines, multi-step Plans, and automatic replies. The Dashboard’s top bar pauses or resumes all of it at once.
• Kill-switch — a single control that immediately stops every unattended process. Here, the autonomy bar.
• Plan — a multi-step project a worker (often Theodor) breaks down and executes, step by step.
• Routine — a job that runs on a schedule or trigger (a time, a watched folder, a webhook), usually unattended.
• Reviewer — a built-in background pass that checks finished work; part of what the kill-switch halts.
• Watchdog — a background process that notices tasks stuck too long and nudges them.
• Artefact / work product — a concrete output a worker made: a written file, a screenshot, a saved link.
• Audit log — the running record of who did what (you, a worker, or a trigger) and when.
• Provider — the company or program supplying the AI model (OpenAI, Anthropic, a local Ollama, etc.). You connect at least one.
• Library (RAG) — your curated knowledge base. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) means the app fetches relevant documents and feeds them to a worker so its answers are grounded in your material.
• Inbox — messages addressed to you, including pings when a delegated task finishes.
• Theodor — the built-in “chief-of-staff” worker who sees your whole workspace and coordinates the others.