Skip to main content
Beyond seeing and clicking, a linked machine can grant two deeper capabilities — each with its own guardrails.

​
Filesystem access

On the linked machine’s card in the Console you’ll find the Filesystem access toggle. The disclosure next to it says exactly what it does:
Lets this assistant read files from your home folder on request and save edited copies back — your originals are never overwritten. This exposes your entire home directory over a secure connection; turn it off any time to revoke access.
With it enabled:
  • Reading is on-request. Your assistant doesn’t crawl your disk. When you ask it to work with a file — “grab the Q3 contract from my Documents” — it browses to it and fetches that file over the secure channel.
  • Your originals are sacred. When your assistant edits something, the result is saved back as a timestamped copy alongside the original, in a review location — never over the file you had. You look at the edited copy and decide what to do with it.
  • Sensitive corners are skipped. Credential folders (.ssh keys and the like) and machine noise (caches, dependency folders) are excluded from what the assistant fetches.
  • Off means off. Flip the toggle any time; access is revoked and the keys that enabled it are cleared — taking effect within about a minute, even mid-session.
Filesystem access pairs beautifully with everything else: a file from your laptop can be summarized in chat, become a data table, or be updated and emailed on — without you ever moving it anywhere first.

​
Terminal & shell commands

Your assistant can also run commands on your machine — the newest addition to linked desktops:
  • “Run the backup script in my projects folder.”
  • “Check whether Docker is running and restart it if not.”
  • “Show me what’s eating disk space in my home directory.”
Two firm rules govern this:
  1. Only commands you ask for. The shell is for things you explicitly want executed on your machine. Your assistant won’t run commands there on its own initiative for its own convenience.
  2. The shell is not a back door to your files. Reading and fetching your files always goes through the filesystem access channel above, with its no-overwrite guarantees and exclusions — your assistant is expressly forbidden from using shell commands to dump or copy your file contents around them.

​
Whose rules apply where

A quick contrast with the assistant’s own computer, where none of this ceremony exists — it installs software, moves files, and runs commands freely on its own machine. On your machine the defaults invert: everything is on-request, originals are protected, and consent is checked continuously. Same assistant, very different manners — by design.