A control in a guide is not visible
A guide names a button that is not on your screen. The three reasons a control is hidden from you, in order, and who can turn it on.
- What you're seeing
- A page here names a button, a pane, a row or a surface, and it is not on your screen. Everything else on the page matches what you are looking at.
- What it means
- The control is gated rather than gone. Three things hide one: it belongs to an admin and you are a member; it is a per-channel permission that is off in this channel; or this channel's kind never opens that surface at all.
- What to do
- Check the chip under this page's title first — a page marked Admin documents an admin's screen. Then open Channel settings and read the Access rows, which say what agents may do on this work. Then check the channel itself: a dashboard channel has no shell and no pull requests, so the surfaces for them are not in its switcher. If none of the three explains it, send an admin the name of the control and the channel you are in.
- If you do nothing
- Nothing changes on its own. The control is still hidden days later, because what hides it is a role or a setting rather than a fault, and both are changed by a person.
The three causes, most common first
Your role is a member and the control is an admin’s. Settings is split in two: My settings, which is yours — profile, notifications, past sessions and their replays, appearance — and Account, which is the workspace’s. Account holds Directory, which is the membership and its roles, Providers for compute providers, Connections, Integrations, SSO and Credits and billing. An admin owns them, and single sign-on is the workspace owner’s.
Every page in these docs carries a role chip under its title, so you can tell before you read whether the screen it documents is one you have.
A per-channel permission is off. The Access rows in Channel settings govern what agents may do on this channel’s work: push to the branch, open pull requests, merge without a person, reach production. A control that acts on a row that is off is not offered in a channel that does not allow it.
The channel’s kind does not open that surface. A channel’s kind fixes which surfaces it can open at all, and the template chooses which of those it leads with. A dashboard channel is the board, so no shell, no editor and no pull request list appear behind its three-dot Switch surface menu. If the guide’s first line assumes a worktree and you are in a dashboard channel, that is the mismatch.
Asking for it
Ask in the channel, in writing, so the answer is on the record with the question. Name three things: the control as the guide spells it, the channel you are in, and what you were trying to do. An admin can then change the right thing rather than the nearest thing. If you are the admin, those three facts are what you need back from whoever asked.
A widened permission is a deliberate act, not an oversight being corrected. Widening a row that takes a person out of the loop is a choice somebody makes rather than a setting nobody noticed.
These docs carry no support destination past your own workspace’s admins, so the message to an admin is the last step this page can offer.
If the screen still differs
If the control is missing and none of the three fits, the page is ahead of the product. Pages here mark work that does not exist yet, so a sentence without that mark is meant to describe what runs today. That is a defect in these docs rather than a permission you are missing, and it is reported against the page itself: an admin can grant you a role, and cannot change what a page says. These docs carry no destination for that report yet, which is itself a gap.