Elyra agent
If the Elyra coding-agent CLI is installed, Conductor can open a native agent panel in a tab and drive it over JSON-RPC. Crucially, Conductor remains a host for the agent — it never becomes the agent. All reasoning, model calls, keys, prompts, and tools stay inside the Elyra process.
See Architecture & boundaries for why this boundary is a hard rule.
Detection
On startup Conductor runs detect_elyra to find the elyra binary. Binaries are
resolved through your login shell, so an elyra installed via nvm/Volta/asdf is
found even when Conductor is launched from the GUI (Finder/Dock), not just from a
terminal. When detected, agent entry points appear in the UI; otherwise they are hidden.
Opening an agent
- Sidebar: the agent button on a project.
- Command palette:
⌘K→ New Elyra agent here. - File tree right-click: New Elyra agent here (on a folder), or Ask Elyra about this file (on a file) — which opens an agent tab pre-seeded with a prompt about that file.
Each agent runs in its own tab, rooted at the chosen directory.
How it works (Level 1 — RPC host)
Conductor spawns elyra --mode rpc and communicates over the child process's stdio using
line-delimited JSON-RPC (JSONL). The Rust bridge lives in agent.rs (agent_spawn,
agent_send, agent_kill); the panel is AgentPanel.svelte.
To stay strictly a host/renderer, Conductor only does transport and UI mapping:
| Elyra host request | Conductor UI |
|---|---|
notify / setStatus / setTitle |
tab title and status |
confirm / select / input |
native dialogs |
| agent-waiting | the existing notification rings |
get_session_stats |
token / cost display |
No intelligence enters Conductor: it forwards messages it displays and the buttons you press. Think of it as a terminal emulator for an agent.
The agent panel also has a Restart button. The RPC child is given the login-shell
PATH so its Node runtime is found in GUI launches.
Agent command center
Conductor derives one coarse presence state per agent from the RPC stream it already processes, in priority order:
| State | When |
|---|---|
waiting |
the agent issued a confirm / select / input request — blocked on you |
working |
between agent_start and agent_end |
exited |
the agent process ended |
idle |
ready, nothing pending |
waiting wins because a blocked agent is wasted time. The state shows as a per-tab dot
and a pill in the tab strip (how many agents are working vs waiting), and a notification
fires when an agent starts waiting while you're focused elsewhere. Running several agents
in parallel — one per branch — is covered in Worktrees & parallel agents.
Levels recap
- Level 0 — launch only: spawn
elyrain a terminal tab (same spirit as "Open in Zed"). No AI logic in Conductor. - Level 1 — RPC host: the native panel described above. Still host-only.
Related
- Architecture & boundaries
- Tauri commands —
agent_spawn,agent_send,agent_kill,detect_elyra.