Operator Assistant
The Operator Assistant is a conversational AI surface built into Colony Cloud. It appears as a floating action button on every authenticated dashboard page. Click it to open a slide-in chat panel where you can ask natural-language questions about your pipeline and issue workflow, or trigger write operations with a single confirmation click.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”The assistant is backed by Claude and runs over the same Colony tools as the MCP & Editor Integration. There is no separate tool catalogue to learn — the same 18 Colony tools available in your editor are available here. See MCP & Editor Integration for the full tool reference.
When you send a message, the assistant decides which tools to call, calls them against your live pipeline data, and streams a response back to you — all within the dashboard, with no external client setup required.
Where it appears
Section titled “Where it appears”The assistant button (☰ chat icon) is fixed to the bottom-right corner of every authenticated dashboard page. Clicking it opens a side drawer. The button is hidden if your plan does not include the Operator Assistant or while your session is loading.
Confirm-before-write
Section titled “Confirm-before-write”Write actions — pausing, cancelling, retrying, resuming, filing issues, creating drafts, and importing plans — require explicit operator approval before they execute.
When the assistant wants to run a mutating tool, the dashboard pauses and shows a confirmation dialog:
Confirm tool use — Allow the assistant to run
colony_pause?
You must click Allow before the tool runs. If you click Cancel, the tool is not invoked and the assistant can continue the conversation without the write action. In-app navigation is also blocked while a confirmation is pending to prevent accidental navigation away.
This applies to the following tools: colony_pause, colony_cancel, colony_retry, colony_resume, colony_file_issue, colony_create_draft, and colony_import_plan.
Read-only roles
Section titled “Read-only roles”Sessions with the viewer role cannot execute any write tool. The server enforces this independently of the confirmation UI — viewer sessions receive a permission-denied response from the server even if they attempt to inject approval. Read-only tools (colony_status, colony_issues, colony_estimate, colony_tracks, colony_why, colony_findings, colony_intelligence, colony_intelligence_retrieve, colony_workflows, and colony_workflow_show) are always available to all roles. colony_review reads the Colony reviewer’s verdict for a pull request and is also viewer-safe — it is not part of the confirm-before-write set.
Plan availability and quotas
Section titled “Plan availability and quotas”| Plan | Monthly requests | Monthly cost cap |
|---|---|---|
| Open | — | — |
| Solo | — | — |
| Team | 500 | $20 |
| Business | 2,000 | $80 |
| Enterprise | 1,000,000 | $10,000 |
When either cap is reached for the current calendar month, the assistant returns an HTTP 429 response and displays an error in the chat panel. Caps reset at the start of each calendar month.
Conversation model
Section titled “Conversation model”The assistant is stateless on the server side — the full message history is sent with each request and maintained in the browser. Refreshing the page or closing the drawer clears the conversation.