Operator runs AI agents on computers you own, and puts the decisions in your pocket.

That sentence has three parts, and each one is a thing you will set up once.

The three pieces

The Mac app is the engine. It holds your API keys, starts the agents, keeps the record of what happened, and owns the sandboxes each job runs in. It is called the Companion, and it lives in your menu bar. Nothing works without it running.

The iPhone app is the remote control. It shows you what your agents are doing, lets you talk to them, and asks you to approve the things that should not happen without a person. You can be anywhere. The phone talks to your Mac through an encrypted channel that no server can read.

The Apple Watch shows approvals when your phone is in your pocket. Optional, and very good.

The idea

Agents are genuinely capable now. They write code, move files, call APIs and spend money. The problem was never capability. It was that you had to sit and watch, because the moment one of them does something irreversible is the moment you needed to be there.

Operator keeps a person on the “should this happen?” decision without keeping them in the chair. Work runs on your machine, in a sandbox, and the moments that need judgement come to you.

The five tabs

Everything in the phone app is behind one of five tabs.

Tab	What lives there
Home	What needs you right now. Approvals land here first, with a badge on the tab.
Solutions	The catalog. Installable packs of jobs, and the bots you can add.
Sessions	Two halves. Work is jobs running or finished. Bots are the companions that stick around.
Hub	Conversations. Chat with a running agent, or with a bot, without opening a job.
Settings	Keys, integrations, machines, memory, billing.

The Mac app mirrors the useful parts: the fleet of running workers, the policy that decides what needs approval, and the audit log.

Two words worth learning now

Worker. One agent, running one job, in one sandbox. Workers are disposable on purpose. When the job is done, the worker goes away.

Session. The case a worker was working on. Sessions are durable. The files, the run history and the git history outlive every worker that touched them, so a finished worker never takes your work with it.

That split is most of the design. Anything that must survive lives on the session, and anything convenient lives on the worker.

What it costs to run

Operator does not sell you tokens and does not proxy your model calls. You bring your own API key, or run a local model on your own silicon, and the bill goes to you at cost. The keys are stored in your Mac’s Keychain and sealed into a job only at the moment it starts.

Next: get it installed and paired.