Explore the console for the first time
Prerequisites
- A paired device (see Pair a new device)
- The
os-consolebinary available in your PATH, or built locally fromos-console/ - A terminal emulator — 24-bit color and the Kitty or Sixel graphics protocol are used when available and improve the display, but the console degrades gracefully to named colors and text-only rendering without them
Purpose
Get oriented to os-console for the first time: the status bar's live situational picture, the F9 inference-gateway health dashboard, and the F12 input checkpoint every platform-state change passes through — before you start a real task.
Procedure
-
Launch the console from the command line:
os-console -
Read the status bar at the bottom of the screen. It shows, left to right: your identity as
username@tenant; the Machine-Based Authorization link state (MBA LINK ACTIVE,MBA LINK INACTIVE: <reason>, orMBA LINK PENDING); the active slot, shown as its full label (e.g.F9: SLM, not a bare F-key number); and elapsed session time. A[N pending]badge appears only when you have pending pairing requests to review. -
Press F9 to open the SLM Infrastructure dashboard. It polls the inference gateway every 10 seconds and shows five sections: Gateway (Tier A throughput, Tier B circuit state, node class), YoYo Fleet (per-node state for cloud GPU burst capacity), DataGraph (entity count and its own circuit state — DataGraph is a separate field, not a fourth tier), Queue (pending, in-flight, paused, done, quarantine, and poison counts), and Cost Today.
Note: the three inference tiers are Tier A (local model, on this machine), Tier B (Yo-Yo — burst to cloud GPU capacity), and Tier C (external API, narrow-precision tasks against an explicit allowlist). This is not the same three-way split as DataGraph availability, which the dashboard tracks separately.
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Press R to force an immediate refresh of the F9 dashboard rather than waiting for the next 10-second poll. The on-screen hint line confirms the shortcut is live.
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Press F12 to open the Input Machine — the platform's mandatory ingestion checkpoint. Every operator input that modifies platform state passes through this slot; it cannot be bypassed by a menu or mouse path.
Warning: F12 is not a sandbox. A submission here is a real write. If it succeeds, it's appended to the platform's immutable WORM ledger and cannot be retracted — don't submit throwaway content to "just see what happens."
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Submit a short, genuinely disposable test note if you want to see the flow complete. You'll see one of two outcomes: a confirmation showing a Payload ID and the ledger height/root it was written at (with a warning variant if the submission carried a non-fatal issue), or a plain error panel if the submission failed. There is no separate "quarantine" outcome in this flow — that concept belongs to a different subsystem (the inference queue shown on F9), not to F12.
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Move between F3, F9, and F12 and confirm the status bar's active-slot label updates to match each time.
Expected outcome
You can read the status bar's identity, link state, and active-slot fields at a glance; the F9 dashboard shows live Gateway/YoYo Fleet/DataGraph/Queue/Cost data and responds to a manual refresh; and F12 has accepted or rejected a real submission, with the outcome visible on screen.
Verification
- The status bar's active-slot label changes correctly as you switch between F3, F9, and F12.
- F9's on-screen "updated" timestamp changes when you press R.
- A successful F12 submission shows a Payload ID and ledger position; the platform's WORM ledger records it as a genuine, permanent entry.
Rollback
Exploring the status bar and F9 dashboard changes nothing — exit the console at any time with no cleanup needed. A real F12 submission is the one exception: it cannot be rolled back once confirmed, which is why step 6 above is optional and only worth doing with content you're comfortable being permanent.
If the console doesn't respond as expected, exit and restart it. Watch your own terminal's output for errors rather than checking system logs — a plain os-console launched from your own shell isn't running under any system service, so a system log has nothing to have captured.
Next steps
- Navigate the console TUI — the full TUI reference: every key binding and status bar field
- Use the F-key cartridge model — the F-key slot architecture and every Cartridge's default assignment
- Run your first SLM query — submit a real inference query once F9 shows Tier B live
See also
- Pair a new device — how to acquire the device pairing this console session depends on
- Read the command ledger — reading the WORM ledger entries F12 writes
- os-console — the Command Ledger — the full architecture behind the console you just explored
Cite this record: /wiki/explore-the-console — revision 9b9339a2, last updated 6 August 2026.