The fastest way to understand Operator is to watch one job go from a sentence on your phone to files on your Mac.

1. Install a Solution

Open Solutions on the phone. A Solution is a pack: one or more jobs, plus the skills, connectors and settings those jobs need. Installing one is free and instant, and it does not start anything.

Pick one whose jobs you actually want. Research Assistant is a good first choice, because it needs nothing but a model key and it produces something you can read.

Tap Install Solution. The card now shows its jobs.

2. Run a job

Tap a job. You get a launch sheet with:

• What to work on. A text box. This is the actual instruction, so write a real one.
• Attachments, when the job takes files.
• The agent and model. Which brain runs this. Leave the default the first time.
• Where it runs. Your Mac, unless you have added another machine.

Tap the launch button. The phone hands the request to your Mac.

3. What happens on the Mac

The Mac builds a sandbox, starts the agent inside it, and gives it only the folder for this job.

The first job on a new kind of box takes a few minutes, because the image gets built once. Every job after that starts in about a second. If the image is a big one, the Mac tells you before it starts and refuses if the disk is too tight, rather than filling it.

4. Watch it

Back on the phone, the job appears under Sessions, in the Work half. Open it.

You can see the steps it is taking, the files it has produced, and a terminal if you want to look around the box yourself. You can talk to it while it runs. You can stop it.

Everything it does is written to an audit log that you can read later and cannot quietly change.

5. Answer an approval, if one comes

Some jobs pause and ask. A card appears on Home, on your lock screen, and on your watch. It says what the agent wants to do and why, and you tap yes or no.

The agent is genuinely blocked until you answer. Nothing times out into a yes.

6. Collect the result

When the job finishes, the worker goes away. The session does not.

Open it and you have the files it produced, the full run history, and the git history of everything that changed. You can hand the session to another job later, or restore any point of it as a branch.

This is the split worth remembering: workers are disposable, sessions are durable. You never lose work because an agent finished.

If something goes wrong

• Nothing starts. The Mac app is not running, or the phone lost the pairing. Check Sessions for a connected Mac.
• The agent complains about credentials. No model key for the agent you picked. Add one in Settings on the Mac.
• It sat there for minutes and then began. That was the one time image build. The next one is instant.