product
Software developers working in Orbit Editor who delegate coding tasks to AI agents while retaining direct control of their repositories, models, tools, and changes. They need to move between the IDE and a dedicated agent-focused window without losing context, focus, history, or access to agent capabilities.
Orbit Editor is a privacy-conscious, agentic development environment built on VS Code. It lets developers run agents against their codebase, inspect tool activity and changes, manage conversations and checkpoints, and use their preferred model providers without Orbit retaining message content. Success means the agent workflow remains reliable, understandable, and fully functional whether it is used in the IDE sidebar or the standalone Agents window.
Focused, capable, trustworthy. Orbit should feel familiar to experienced editor users, keep attention on the work, and communicate agent state with quiet precision.
Do not create a visually separate or reduced-function “companion” experience for the Agents window. Avoid decorative redesigns, unfamiliar editor affordances, hidden tool activity, surprising cross-window navigation, or any behavior that makes the standalone window feel secondary to the IDE. Cursor’s agent-centered window is a behavioral reference for independent, simultaneous IDE and agent use, not a request to copy its visual styling.
- Preserve flow across windows: actions stay in the surface where the user initiated them.
- Show the agent’s work: tool calls, reasoning, approvals, results, and errors remain visible and actionable.
- Keep one coherent product: shared data and capabilities must not create competing focus, duplicate actions, or inconsistent states.
- Prefer earned familiarity: reuse Orbit and VS Code conventions instead of inventing new interaction patterns.
- Fail locally and recoverably: one broken card, provider, or auxiliary surface must not blank or block the rest of the workflow.
Maintain keyboard-complete operation, visible focus states, semantic controls, screen-reader labels for icon actions, theme-token contrast, reduced-motion support, text zoom resilience, and platform-appropriate behavior across macOS, Windows, and Linux.