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The desktop app is where most people will use Pioneer. It is a native app, not a web shell. You use it to connect gateways, manage workspaces, talk to models, inspect tool runs, configure providers, manage skills and MCP servers, and keep an eye on tasks. The important thing to remember is that the desktop app is a client. It gives you control, but the gateway owns the work. Provider calls, tool execution, task runs, skills, MCP servers, and stored Pioneer state belong to the gateway you are connected to.

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Local Use

For a single-machine setup, the desktop app can start and manage a local gateway. This is the easiest way to try Pioneer: install the app, start the local gateway when prompted, add a model provider, and create a thread. In this setup, tool calls happen on your computer. If an agent lists files, it lists files visible to your local gateway. If it runs a shell command, it runs on your machine as the gateway user.

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Multiple Gateways

One desktop app can connect to any number of gateways. This is useful when your environments should stay separate. You might keep a local gateway for everyday experiments, a work gateway close to work repositories and accounts, a home server for long-running personal tasks, and a sandbox gateway for testing risky skills or MCP servers. Switching gateways is more than changing a label in the sidebar. You are switching execution environments. A thread on Work uses work provider keys and work tools. A thread on Home Server uses the server’s files, network, and services.
When you connect to a remote gateway, tools run on the remote machine, not on the computer running the desktop app.

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What You Do In The App

Most daily work happens in three places. The gateway switcher tells you which environment you are using. Check it before running tool-heavy prompts. The workspace selector at the top of the main thread sidebar shows the active workspace. Use it to create workspaces, switch between them, or rename them. Switching workspaces reloads the thread tree and workspace-scoped configuration for the connected gateway. Threads are where conversations happen. The thread timeline shows messages, model output, tool calls, tool results, errors, retries, and final responses. When an agent changes something or a tool fails, the timeline is the first place to inspect.

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Settings

Settings are split between app-level preferences, gateway-owned configuration, and workspace-scoped configuration. Provider credentials, skills, MCP servers, and tasks belong to a workspace on the connected gateway. If you switch workspace or connect to another gateway, configure them there too. That separation is intentional. It lets one desktop app control several independent Pioneer environments without mixing their state. Gateway bearer tokens saved by the desktop app are stored in the desktop keystore. The gateway registry keeps only auth_token_ref values, so raw bearer tokens are not serialized into gateway-registry.toml.

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Localization

The desktop UI includes English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese locales.

Workspace

Create, switch, and rename workspaces, and decide when to use gateways.

Threads

Read timelines, tool events, and conversation history.