All help topics

Reference · Sessions and engines

Modes

What each of Turret's seven modes gives a session — its tools, its panes and its prompt.

A mode contributes three things to a session: its tools, its panes, and the fragment it adds to the system prompt. The new-session screen offers six, in this order: Coding, Coding v2, Assistant, Productivity, CAD, Game. A session keeps its mode for its whole life; nothing switches it afterward.

A seventh mode, Chat, is not among the six the new-session screen offers. The New Chat screen reaches it instead.

Every session, whatever mode it runs under, can also spawn another session, send it a message and read what it did. Turret gives every session that capability itself. No mode adds it.

Every session can also show its working directory's files beside the transcript. The Files button in the sidebar opens a region with the folder's tree and the open file's viewer. Opening a file tucks the tree away, and the pin at the top of the tree keeps it out. Pressing the Files button brings the tree back or tucks it again.

Above the open file a path shows where it sits in the folder, and each part of it lists what is beside it. Press Ctrl+P (⌘P on a Mac) to find a file by name and open it.

Productivity sessions start with the region open. Coding, Coding v2, Assistant and Chat sessions start with it closed, and Close files at the end of the viewer's strip hides it again. In a session's own window the Files button is in the session header. A session on a paired machine draws the same region, and each session remembers whether its region is open.

CAD and Game sessions always show their own tabs. The Files button brings the tree out beside them. A file opened from the tree becomes a last tab, closed by its own ×. A paired machine's CAD or Game session draws the plain Files region instead.

Coding

Runs Claude Code's own built-in tools — Bash, Read, Edit, and the rest — against a working directory in a terminal-style session. Coding mounts no pane of its own. It adds a single tool beyond the built-ins, reporting the session's own id and working directory back to the model.

Coding v2

Carries the same tools and panes as Coding. The agents' creed sits ahead of everything else in its system prompt; nothing else differs from Coding. Coding v2 appears among the new-session screen's choices only once Settings's Offer Coding v2 setting is switched on. A session already running under it keeps running under it either way.

Assistant

Runs against a working directory with none of Claude Code's own system prompt. Assistant replaces that prompt entirely rather than adding to it, so nothing built into Turret tells the session what it is working on. The working directory's own CLAUDE.md is what defines the session's job, since that file still loads regardless of the replaced prompt. Assistant mounts no pane and adds no tool of its own.

Productivity

Runs against a working directory with none of Claude Code's own system prompt, the same as Assistant. Productivity mounts no pane and adds no tool of its own. The working directory's own CLAUDE.md is what defines the session's job, since that file still loads regardless of the replaced prompt.

Its session window opens with the Files region beside the transcript. The folder's tree sits on the left, and the open file's editor on the right. A .md file gets a markdown editor with a formatting toolbar. Anything else gets a code editor with line numbers.

The tree's selection marks which file is open. A Save control appears over the editor while there are unsaved changes. ⌘S (⌃S on Windows) saves from anywhere in the window.

The tree creates files and folders, renames or moves an entry, and deletes an entry to the operating system's Trash. Every write is confined to the session's working directory. The tree hides dot-files and folders like node_modules until its own menu is asked for them.

The region is the person's own surface, and nothing about it reaches the model. The agent opens and edits files through the ordinary Read and Edit tools every session already has.

CAD

Mounts a viewer pane per design open in the session. It adds tools for the loop a design is written in.

• design_build runs a design package's Python and writes the result into the package's build/ folder.
• design_render draws the latest build.
• design_measure reads exact sizes from the latest build.
• design_load_for_user puts a design on screen in the viewer.
• design_current_user_view reports the camera, the objects and the marks currently drawn.

Every tool reads the latest build in the session's own folder. Nothing is registered first, and nothing else has to be running. CAD mode stops at geometry files: it does not plate, slice or print.

The new-session screen labels the working-directory field Repository folder for this mode alone. Nothing checks that the folder picked is actually a repository.

Game

Mounts two panes, Game and VFX, each for a child process it drives: a built game binary and a built effect binary. It adds eighteen tools split across the two processes, covering loading a binary, stepping it and reading back what happened.

load, step, observe, reset and set_state reach the game. effect_load, effect_step and effect_observe reach the effect.

The tools, the system prompt and the two game skills come from the game engine, a component that updates apart from Turret. A session takes its tool list and prompt from the engine running when the session starts, and keeps them. The Game and VFX tabs show a band when a newer engine is ready or the engine stops. The Game engine group on the General tab of Settings names the running engine's version and source.

The new-session screen labels the working-directory field Project folder for this mode alone. A Game session opens against a plain working directory, the same as Coding does; which binary it runs is named later, once load is called.

Chat

Turret creates a folder of its own for the conversation, under a chat root, rather than opening an existing folder. The New Chat screen is the only way to start a chat. The new-session dialog never offers it, at any setting. Chat mounts no pane and adds no tool of its own.

Chat's system prompt replaces Claude Code's own prompt entirely, as Assistant's does. Nothing built into Turret tells a chat what it is working on beyond that replacement.