Apollo, the Co-pilot
Apollo is the co-pilot built into Orbit. It is the operational counterpart to Orbit Chat: where Chat is for planning, Apollo is for doing. It lives in a floating, always-on-top window you open from the titlebar, and it knows your projects live because it is itself a client of Orbit’s MCP server.
Live project awareness
Section titled “Live project awareness”When you open Apollo, it loads the things it needs to be useful immediately: your projects’ AI reference, recent completions, and the active queue. It isn’t working from a stale snapshot — it reads current state through the same MCP tools any AI client uses, so it can answer “what’s running right now” and “what shipped last” accurately. A set of live status pills in its Observatory visual system reflects what’s happening as it happens.
The action system
Section titled “The action system”Apollo doesn’t just talk — it can execute real Orbit operations. It does this by emitting action markers that Orbit intercepts and runs: generate an image, read a file, queue a prompt, open a panel, embed icons, or run a git command through the shell tool. For high-complexity or destructive actions, Apollo surfaces a confirmation card first, so nothing irreversible happens without a deliberate click.
Artifacts and events
Section titled “Artifacts and events”Apollo keeps its output organized. A collapsible Artifacts panel holds a live setup checklist, long replies auto-extracted into documents you can drag out as Markdown, and generated images you can preview and save straight to a project. Inline event cards surface build, server, sandbox, and prompt lifecycle events in the conversation without triggering an AI turn, and they persist with the conversation.
Persistence and handoff
Section titled “Persistence and handoff”Conversations are stored server-side in SQLite, so they survive restarts, and they’re searchable, star-able, and renameable. A context-fill meter shows how full the current conversation is getting, and a “Hand off” action generates a summary you can carry into a fresh conversation when you’re approaching the limit.