What the assistant can do

When you would want it

When it cannot do a job with a proper tool, an assistant improvises with shell commands no Undo can reverse, gives up on anything slower than half a minute, or tells you to run the server yourself. With the right tools it just does the job, and you can put it back.

Where to find it

• All Features → What the assistant can do
• Show the built-in tools

What you get out of it

• Nothing the assistant deletes or moves is gone for good: one Undo puts the whole turn back.
• "npm install" and full test runs finish instead of timing out after thirty seconds.
• A dev server keeps running for the rest of the conversation instead of blocking it.
• Search shows the lines around each match and finds code like add( as plain text, so the assistant reads less to find more.
• Edits survive an indentation mismatch instead of failing and starting over, and documentation pages come back as clean text, not raw HTML.

How to use it, step by step

1. Ask for the job in plain words - "move the images into assets and fix the links", "rename utils.js to helpers.js", "delete the old landing page", "start the dev server and check the home page".
2. Deletes, moves and renames happen with proper file tools, not shell commands. The Changed files card under the answer lists them, deletions struck through, and Undo puts every one back - images and other binary files byte for byte.
3. Long commands - installs, builds, test suites - may run for up to ten minutes and report their real exit code. Press Stop and the command ends along with everything it started.
4. Servers and watchers run in the background while the assistant keeps working: it reads what they print, spots the address a dev server announces, and looks at it. They stop when you close the folder or quit.
5. For a bigger job, a Plan card appears in the conversation with every step, ticked off as each one finishes.
6. To see every tool in plain words, run Tools: The Assistant's Built-in Tools from the command palette.

Why this beats the usual way

Agents without these tools improvise: rm and mv in a shell, which no Undo reverses; servers started in the foreground that hang the turn; thirty-second limits that kill every install. Agentfly gives the assistant the tools a careful engineer would use, puts every file change under one Undo, and shows its plan while it works, so you can let it run and still put things back.

Find it in Universal Search

What the assistant can do · The assistant · delete file · move file · rename file · dev server · background command · npm run dev · long command · timeout · plan · checklist · todo list · undo delete · agent tools · what can the ai do · assistant abilities