The worksite
Four words the rest of these docs spend as though you already had them: the machine, a sandbox, a persona, a project. This page is the one picture they all sit in, and the place each of them is defined.
On this page(7 sections)
One camp, many workers
Four words the rest of these docs use as though you had them. A building camp is the useful shape to borrow, because the thing everyone already knows about a site is the thing that is actually true here: the ground decides nothing, the work is done by people who each carry their own tools and their own orders, and what goes up outlasts every shift that worked on it.
Which one do you reach for
Most questions about intentic are one of these four in disguise. The answer is usually the smallest part that changes: a persona before a sandbox, a sandbox before a machine.
| You want | Add | What that gets you |
|---|---|---|
| Your agents are slow, or you want the work off your laptop | A different machine | Compute is the only thing it decides. Moving is a switch, not a migration: the workspace keeps its address and its name. |
| Two jobs should not see each other's code, tools or credentials | Another sandbox | A separate container and separate volumes on the same machine. Nothing crosses between them. |
| The same sandbox should work differently on a certain kind of task | Another persona | Same code, same tools installed, different set handed to the turn: other accounts, another folder, other instructions. |
| There is more code for the agents already in there to work on | Another project | A repository in the workspace. Every conversation in that sandbox can reach it the moment it arrives. |
The fork between the middle two is worth reading in full once you are running more than one job: another sandbox, or another persona?
Where the drawing stops being true
A picture that is never corrected turns into a belief. Four things about a building camp do not hold here, and each of them is a place readers otherwise guess wrong.
No worker lends a tool
Two sandboxes in one camp share the hardware and nothing else. Separate containers, separate volumes, separate credentials: neither can read the other's files, and removing one leaves the other untouched. A real crew passes tools across the yard all day. This one has no way to.
A worker can move to another camp
Export a sandbox as a definition and the same workspace comes back up on a different machine, keeping its address and its name: the same hut, the same belt, the same keys, on ground it has never stood on. Nobody walks into a strange camp and finds their own bench waiting, and it is the more useful half of the truth: the machine is the part you are least tied to.
One worker is on several jobs at once
A sandbox runs many conversations at the same time, each with its own branch, its own terminal and its own half-finished thought. One body on a scaffold cannot do that, and it is where the picture is thinnest: if the number has to be right, read a worker as a workshop with a crew inside it rather than as one pair of hands.
Nobody in the camp is the foreman
The camp is hardware and the workers do what they are put on. Direction comes from you, and every change a worker makes arrives as a diff you read before it joins your tree. An agent that wants something its assignment does not carry asks you, rather than fetching it.
Related pages
- Architecture: the same parts as a system map: where identity, code, state and compute actually live.
- Glossary: every other word these docs use as if you had it.
- Where it runs: the machine choice in full, including what it costs.
- Parallel agents: what happens when several agents are put on one project at once.