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Agent Workspaces

General Bots supports an advanced “Agent Mode” UI where the interaction with an AI agent shifts from a simple chat interface to a fully realized multi-panel workspace. This design empowers users to monitor complex autonomous tasks in real-time, providing deep visibility into what the AI is doing.

Architectural Overview

When an application logic branch triggers a computationally heavy or open-ended action (like APP_CREATE or deep research), the backend kicks off an Agent Executor process. This executor brings up a dedicated, highly isolated LXC container for that specific session.

The Agent Executor communicates back to the frontend in real-time. This provides a transparent view of:

  1. Thought Processes: High-level textual reasoning of the agent.
  2. Terminal Output: Verbatim standard output and standard error from the LXC container.
  3. Browser Output: Visual previews of web applications being built or research being conducted, served via localhost proxies from within the container.

The Agent UI

The main interface pivots from a standard 1-panel conversation to a complex multi-panel grid when “Agent Mode” is toggled from the Chat interface.

This layout includes:

  • Left Sidebar: A collapsible “Agents & Workspaces” sidebar that summarizes the current state of active agents, their resource usage (quota), and provides drag-and-drop workspace organization.
  • Center Chat: A persistent interactive chat with the specific agent, allowing for ongoing refinement of the task.
  • Right Hand Split Screens:
    • Top Right: An active Browser Window. The agent can stream HTML rendering updates or host internal applications (localhost) from its LXC sandbox, exposing them visually to the user.
    • Bottom Right: A live Terminal feed streaming stdout and stderr directly from the bash environment of the underlying LXC container.

LXC Sandbox execution

To prevent dependency collisions, protect the host operating system, and offer clean slate environments for arbitrary execution, every agent session spins up a temporary Ubuntu 22.04 LXC container.

  1. When the agent intent classifier matches a heavy task (e.g. APP_CREATE), the backend initiates the ContainerSession struct.
  2. An lxc launch command instantiates a fast, lightweight container instance.
  3. A bash shell is opened inside this container, and its I/O streams are piped back to the TaskProgressEvent broadcast channel using Tokio.
  4. The user sees the bash output instantly in the bottom-right terminal panel.
  5. On completion or failure, the container is forcibly stopped and deleted (lxc delete --force).

This isolated environment gives agents the absolute freedom to execute package installations (like npm install), launch development servers, and write arbitrary code, entirely segregated from the primary BotServer.