v2 AI Workspace
Pro feature · BETA — see Free vs Pro. It works, but it's new; bug reports are very welcome.
AI Workspace installs and runs local AI tools for you — inside a dedicated, isolated environment, so nothing lands in the instances you actually work in. On Windows that environment is a WSL distro; on macOS it is a Linux VM. The same page also hosts the Sandboxes list.
| Tool | What it is | Dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Hermes Agent | Self-improving AI agent from Nous Research with persistent memory | http://127.0.0.1:9119 |
| OpenClaw | Personal AI assistant with a web Control UI | http://127.0.0.1:18789 |
| Open WebUI | Self-hosted chat UI for local and remote models | http://localhost:8083 |
These are independent third-party projects — this app just installs and supervises them. Whatever they need (a model, an API key of their own) is configured inside them, not in this app.
Windows: everything runs in a distro called ai-workspace, created automatically the first time you use the page (wsl --install Ubuntu --name ai-workspace). It is deliberately separate from any existing Ubuntu distro you may have.
macOS: everything runs in a Linux VM called ai-workspace. The page offers Set up automatically: it downloads the Debian cloud image (about 3 GB, reused if cached), creates the VM seeded from it, boots it headless and waits until the guest answers over SSH — with progress in the status bar. You can also create a VM with that name yourself from the Home page (a cloud image or an installed Linux VM with SSH). If the VM exists but is stopped, start it from Home; if its network setup broke, the page repairs it.
Open WebUI runs in Docker. Neither base image ships Docker, so the app installs it on first use of a Docker-backed tool and starts the daemon when needed.
Each tool card has four actions:
- Install — downloads and installs the tool inside the workspace
- Start / Stop — runs or stops the tool's background service
- Open dashboard — appears once a tool is running; opens its web UI in your browser
- Uninstall — removes the tool and everything it stored (asks for confirmation first)
The status dot and badge show whether a tool is Not Installed, Stopped, or Running. Installs stream their output, can be cancelled, and fail loudly instead of reporting a success they didn't have.
Open dashboard waits until the web UI actually answers before opening your browser. Hermes and OpenClaw each start their own dashboard server on demand (OpenClaw's link carries its gateway token, so the app fetches a fresh one each time); Open WebUI is served on a fixed port.
- First install takes a while. Creating the environment plus installing a tool can take several minutes — Hermes pulls Python, Node, ffmpeg and a sizeable git checkout.
- Watch your disk space. These installs are not small, and Docker images add more on top. Open WebUI does write-heavy first-run database setup and will fail (container exits) if the drive is nearly full. If a tool keeps dying right after starting, check free space first.
- Status is checked in the background at app start, and the last confirmed state is remembered between launches, so the page usually shows real status immediately.
-
Removing everything: uninstall the tools you no longer want, or delete the whole
ai-workspaceinstance from the Home page to reclaim all the space at once. - The workspace is not available while Remote WSL over SSH is enabled — it needs a local WSL or VM.
"Not installed" even though I installed it Usually the Docker daemon wasn't running when the check ran. The app starts it before checking, so reopening the page (or hitting Retry) should sort it out.
Dashboard opens but shows an empty response The tool's web server hadn't finished starting. The app waits for the URL to respond before opening it; if it still fails, the tool likely crashed — check free disk space and try Stop → Start.
macOS: "The workspace VM did not become reachable over SSH"
Open the VM's serial console from the Home page to see what the guest is doing. A VM created from an installer ISO needs sshd running inside it; the automatic setup (Debian cloud image) provisions SSH for you.