Surfaces answer to the conversation

A surface in Crusible is a tool view that opens because the conversation pointed at something, and it answers to that conversation rather than the other way round. The editor, the terminal, the dashboard and the pull request are all here, but none of them is the place you live. The conversation is, and every surface is somewhere it sends you to look.

The “go look at this” gesture #

The way a surface opens says most of what there is to say about it. An agent posts an artifact card, a diff, a test run or a plan, and the card carries a door: Open in Project, Open in Test, Open plan. Walking through it is a “go look at this” gesture. The surface takes the centre of the screen, the conversation steps aside without going anywhere, and when you close the surface the conversation is back where it was.

That is a different relationship from the one an IDE has with its panels, and the difference is deliberate. In an IDE the editor is the building and everything else is furniture inside it. In Crusible the conversation is the record of the work, so the record has to stay primary: a surface is how you inspect one thing the record mentions, and it is never allowed to become the place where the record is kept. What you decide while looking at a diff goes back into the conversation, tagged as a decision, not into a comment inside the editor that the channel cannot see.

Two solos #

Sometimes talking is the work, and sometimes looking is. Both get the whole width.

When the conversation goes solo it fills the window, and the header widens with it: the channel’s name, its state, its pull request badge and its one-line description sit on one line, and rolled-up agent updates show as a single row. This is what a planning discussion or a design call looks like in Crusible, when nobody needs an editor open.

A surface can go solo in the same way, when inspection is all you are doing: reading a long diff, watching a shell, sitting with a dashboard during an incident. The conversation is still one gesture away, and nothing posted while you were looking is lost, because it landed in the record whether you had it on screen or not.

Why chips, and not tabs #

The channel header shows at most two surfaces as chips, Project and Docs on a feature channel, Terminal and Project on a worktree, Dashboards and Docs on an incident channel. A worktree channel’s starter card says which one leads: Terminal is the default surface for this channel. Behind the three-dot button beside them sits Switch surface, a menu of the rest, each with a one-line description: Diagrams as a brainstorm board, Design as a live component preview, Test for runs, repros and session replay, Review for the pull request, its checks and its comments, Flow for the agent and CI orchestration graph.

A new reader looks at that header and expects a tab strip. It is not one, and the reason is worth knowing, because a member who reads it as tabs misreads the whole screen. A tab strip says “these are the places; pick one”. It puts every surface on equal footing, it makes the surface the thing you are in, and it invites you to stay there. The chips say something narrower and more useful: “these are the two surfaces this work is looking at right now”. They are chosen by the channel’s template, so a worktree leads with its shell and an incident channel leads with its dashboard, and the overflow holds the rest for the moments the conversation points somewhere else.

The alternative, a strip of every surface on every channel, was considered and it fails on two counts. Most channels need two or three surfaces, so a strip of all of them is mostly wrong for every one of them. And a strip has no way to express what the chips express, which is that the surfaces on show follow the work, and are not a fixed geography you navigate on your own.

What this means for you #

The header is not a tab strip, and reading it as one is the most common misreading of the screen. The chips are where the work is looking right now, and the three-dot button holds the rest.

A link on a card is the front door to a surface. Opening it is not leaving the conversation; it is looking at one thing the conversation mentioned, and closing the surface brings the conversation back.

What you decide while looking belongs in the conversation. The surface is a place to inspect, and the record is where the outcome goes, which is what The conversation is the record is about.