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Chat Pane

The chat pane is a canvas node that renders a headless conversation with an LLM or an agent CLI — no terminal, no TUI. It sits alongside terminal-based agent sessions on the workspace canvas and is meant for quick asks, planning, and one-shot generations without the ceremony of a full agent tab. Add one from the canvas node picker (+ → Chat), or convert a selection into a chat via the canvas context menu.

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Three backends, one UI

Every chat node picks one of three backends via the model dropdown. The choice is per-node: Streaming, message rendering, tool-call display, and copy-to-clipboard behave the same regardless of backend.

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Model picker

Clicking the model chip opens a portal picker with two sections:
  • CLI Agents — grouped by agent (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Opencode). Each agent has a shortlist of its own models. When the experimental Warp toggle is on, Warp shows up here too with a provider/model list (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Kimi, OpenRouter).
  • BYOK providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI, Groq, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio — each with a shortlist. The active provider is remembered across sessions.
A search box across the picker filters both sections at once.

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CLI agent bridges

The four CLI-agent backends (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Opencode) all run through per-turn Node sidecars shipped inside the app under src-tauri/resources/{agent}-bridge/bridge.mjs. The Rust backend spawns the sidecar on claude_stream_start, streams NDJSON back over a claude://{streamId} Tauri channel, and the frontend maps it to typed chat events. Under the hood each bridge shells the vendor CLI in a specific non-interactive mode:
  • Claude Code — Anthropic’s Claude Code CLI in stream mode
  • Codex — codex exec --json --sandbox workspace-write (no per-tool approvals)
  • Gemini — gemini --experimental-acp speaking JSON-RPC ACP (per-tool permission prompts surface as chat UI)
  • Opencode — opencode serve on a free local port, consuming its SSE stream and permission POSTs
Auth for CLI bridges is whatever the CLI already has on your machine. Tempest does not hand a BYOK key to the CLI bridges — if you can claude in your terminal, you can chat with Claude Code in the pane.

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Warp (experimental)

Warp is an opt-in, single-round-trip gateway that routes any provider/model string through a Rust warp_chat command. Enable it in Settings → Experimental → warpllm. The Agents section of the model picker then shows Warp with its own model list. Warp reads the API key for the selected provider from either:
  1. The matching BYOK slot, or
  2. An environment variable — OPENAI_API_KEY, DEEPSEEK_API_KEY, MOONSHOT_API_KEY (for Kimi), or OPENROUTER_API_KEY
Warp responses are not streamed; you’ll see the whole reply arrive at once.

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Chat pane vs terminal sessions

Both surfaces are first-class. A common workflow is to plan and iterate in a chat node, then hand the final prompt off to a terminal agent session in a fresh worktree.
  • Settings → API Keys — BYOK slots consumed by both the API backend and Warp. See API Keys.
  • Settings → Experimental → warpllm — reveals the Warp backend in the picker.