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System overview

Operator is an intelligent task manager that sits between you and the tools that do the work. You give Operator concrete tasks, and it hands them to your agents, tracks progress across multiple steps, and keeps a record of what happened so you can trust longer running work. Instead of micromanaging every prompt, you:
  • Write simple tasks in plain language for the work you want done.
  • Let your coding agent work through them via Operator.
  • Use the Operator console (a chat-style UI) to ask what happened, what’s done, and what’s left.
When you use Claude Code, it stays in the editor doing the edits. Operator manages the work around it.

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Where Operator sits in your stack

  • Editor and agents: tools such as Claude Code are your coding surface.
  • Task layer (Operator): stores tasks, runs, status, and history.
  • Execution: your repo, tests, CI, and environments where changes actually run.
Operator keeps the task layer stateful so an agent can wake up, grab the next task, and keep going even when you are not actively chatting.

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Ask what’s happening

Operator keeps track of work so your normal chat with your coding agent is enough to understand what’s going on.
  • Ask your agent what it’s working on right now.
  • Ask what’s done, what’s next, and what’s blocked.
  • Ask why it stopped or changed direction.
Operator gives your agent the history and task state it needs to answer, instead of starting from scratch every time.

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Skills

  • add processes anything you send in, such as tasks, goals, and notes. It can break large goals into subgoals, categorize what you added, and write everything into Operator state.
  • search looks through that state for goals, tasks, and other records. You can sort and limit by time and filter by global state or by the current session.
  • retrieve returns the latest state that matches a query. It can pull global items or session specific items so agents can see current goals and tasks without reloading everything.
  • mark_inactive applies a one way transformation that marks items inactive so they stop being treated as active work.
  • notify sends a short message by email to the registered user so agents can surface important events, alerts, or completions.
Together, these tools form the Operator API that skills and agents use to add, search, transform, and retrieve state. Each user account in Operator has a single global workspace. All API keys for that account map back to that workspace, so different agents and sessions share the same global state while still having their own session level views.

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Use your coding agent

Your coding agent is still the tool that edits your codebase. Operator gives it better rails:
  • Keeps a shared context of goals, tasks, and notes for your project.
  • Lets you reuse the same task stack across branches or environments.
  • Helps you treat the agent like a real teammate with a backlog instead of a single reply autocomplete.
When Automode is on, Operator decides what the agent should do next based on goals and tasks in memory. When Automode is off, you can still ask Operator questions through skills, inspect how tasks have progressed, and add new tasks or goals. You can also add tasks from another Claude Code instance or from the Operator playground.