Walkthrough: AI chat & the approval gate

Action walkthrough · Core Studio 3.0 · Verified 2026-09-01

Concept: the AI assistant answers questions about your real system by consulting the living index — and its tools are structurally divided into read-only and mutating. Every mutating call routes through a human decision with a full preview. Deny-by-default isn’t a setting; it’s the architecture.

Prerequisites

Your own AI provider and credentials (the Studio connects directly from your desktop to your provider, under your agreements — never through our servers).

Steps

Open the AI chat and ask a question about your system — the assistant searches and reads the real codebase to answer.
Ask for a change — the assistant proposes, showing exactly what will happen: the full difference, file by file.
Review the preview — nothing has happened yet. Nothing ever happens first.
Approve or deny — the gate is deny-by-default and provably cannot hang or proceed without your decision; a permanent automated test stands guard over that invariant.

AI CHAT · APPROVAL GATEReal UI capture pending (shares capture with deep-ai-approval-gate)act-ai-gate

Verify it worked

A mutating proposal always stops at the gate — the preview shows the complete change before any of it exists.
Denying leaves your tree untouched; approving applies exactly what the preview showed.

If it goes wrong

Assistant can’t reach your provider — check your own provider credentials/network; the Studio doesn’t proxy or store them.
You want multi-file AI edits — that flow is shipped and certified (verified with byte-exact evidence, 2026-08-22): the assistant proposes across files, you review the complete difference and approve or deny; the approved edit lands byte-exact.