Surfaces are the different places the operator does its work. Chat is where you talk to it, Computer is where it runs real software, Files and Canvas are where the output lives, and Preview and Deploy are how that output reaches the world. You do not pick one and stay there. A single turn often starts in one surface and finishes in another, with your session and context following you the whole way.
Chat
Chat is the front door, and for most people it is where the day begins. Every message you send is a turn: you describe what you need, watch the operator work in the thread, and review the result in place. It is the fastest way to do quick, back-and-forth work, and it is the surface where you read the blob, approve steps, and steer mid-task.
You do not need to leave Chat to get a lot done. Drafting, research, planning, and review all finish here. Chat is also where work that escalated to the Computer reports back, so even when the real action is happening on a VM, the thread stays your control panel. See Agent Workspace for how to get the most out of a single thread.
Computer
Computer gives the operator a real machine. Every session boots a clean Linux environment that the agent drives the way a person would, with three things a conversation alone cannot offer. There is a real browser, which fills forms, clicks, scrolls, and downloads files. There is a real shell, which runs commands, installs packages, and uses a full toolchain. And there is a real filesystem, which it reads and writes and which you can inspect afterwards.
The Browser inside Computer is worth calling out on its own, because it is how the operator does anything that lives on the web rather than in your files: signing into a service, pulling data out of a dashboard, testing a flow click by click. You can watch it move through pages in real time, which makes web work legible in a way that a text summary never is.
Reach for Computer when the work needs a machine and not just text. Each session is created for you when you need it and torn down when the work is done, so it is a workspace for a task rather than a server you maintain.
Files and Canvas
Files is a real filesystem you can browse and download. Everything the operator writes lands here, and every write is checkpointed, so rolling a change back is a single step rather than a recovery effort. When you want to know exactly what a turn produced, Files is where you go to see the artefacts directly, side by side with the trail that explains them.
Canvas is a visual surface for laying out and editing what is being built. It is the right place when you want to see and arrange the work rather than describe it in words, such as positioning sections of a page or shaping a layout by hand. Where Chat is for instructions and Files is for the raw output, Canvas sits between them: a place to look at the work taking shape and nudge it directly.
The two pair naturally. The operator writes to Files as it builds, and you use Canvas to arrange and review the pieces, with checkpoints underneath both so nothing you try is ever a one-way door.
Preview and Deploy
As the operator works, each branch posts a live preview link the moment it reaches a stable state. That means you click through real, running work instead of reading a description of it, and you catch problems while they are still cheap to fix. Previews show up at the checkpoints inside a turn, so a long build gives you something to look at well before it is finished.
When you are happy with what you see, Deploy ships it. Releases roll out for real, and a rollback takes seconds if something looks wrong once it is live. Because Deploy is one of the irreversible moments, the operator pauses for an approval before it ships, in line with how approvals work across every turn. You preview as often as you like; you deploy on purpose.
Moving between surfaces
The thing that makes surfaces work is that you do not commit to one. Your session, history, and context follow you everywhere. You can start a turn in Chat, drop into Computer to watch it run, open Files to check what changed, and step into Canvas to arrange the result, all within the same piece of work. The operator picks up exactly where you left off, on any device, with no re-explaining and no lost state.
In practice you rarely think about switching at all. You describe an outcome, and the operator brings the right surface to the work: a web task surfaces the Browser, a build surfaces Preview, a file change surfaces Files. Your job is to read the result and steer; the surfaces arrange themselves around the turn.
From here, The Operator explains the turn that moves across these surfaces, from reading the blob to forking a trail. If you are just getting oriented, Getting Started walks through your first run end to end.