CLI and dashboard

Autolab gives you two surfaces over the same project:

• the CLI — where you write code, submit experiments, attach compute, and change settings;
• the dashboard at app.autolab.ai — where you watch it happen: live run logs, metrics, the agent's analysis, and a chat with the agent itself.

Neither replaces the other. A normal session is: work in the terminal, and keep the project's dashboard page open in a browser tab.

The terminal is not a progress feed

autolab commands return as soon as the control node has accepted the request — they don't stream the experiment, and nothing more will print. If your terminal has gone quiet after start or serve, that's success, not a hang. Run output, metrics, and the agent's reasoning are on the dashboard.

Open it

autolab open           # this project's dashboard page
autolab open <id>      # one experiment: its live logs, metrics, diff and analysis

init, start, submit, and status each print the project's URL — https://app.autolab.ai/projects/<owner>/<slug> — as does serve once it backgrounds the node. That link is the dashboard.

What's where

Dashboard page	What it's for	Nearest CLI
Overview	project + agent state, active runs, metric trend	autolab status
Chat	ask the agent about results, steer it, queue work in plain language	— (browser only)
Jobs	every experiment; open one for logs, metrics, diff, analysis	autolab log (list only)
Graph	the lineage tree — what branched from what	autolab graph
Code	browse any experiment's code, or compare two of them	autolab checkout, autolab diff
Nodes	attached machines, health, and each node's runner log	autolab nodes
Log	project event stream — state changes, decisions, errors	— (browser only)
Settings	objective, constraints, cost cap, keys, collaborators, theme	autolab settings

Rule of thumb: the CLI changes things, the dashboard shows things. Anything that produces output over time — a run, an analysis, an agent conversation — is read in the browser.

Which log is which

Several different things are called a "log". This is the most common source of confusion:

Where	What it is
autolab log (CLI)	History, not output. One line per experiment, like git log.
Job page → Logs → Run (browser)	Your experiment's actual stdout/stderr, streaming live.
Job page → Logs → Setup (browser)	Environment prep (e.g. uv sync) before the run.
Job page → Agent Activity (browser)	What the agent did on this experiment, step by step.
autolab serve log (CLI) or node page → Node Log	The machine's narration: registration, accepted jobs, failures. Not your experiment's output.
Project → Log tab (browser)	Project-level events across all experiments.

There is no CLI command that prints an experiment's run output — use autolab open <id>.

A typical loop

autolab status            # where things stand
autolab submit -m "…"     # queue an experiment (prints its project link)
autolab open <id>         # …then watch it in the browser: logs, metric, verdict

Between those, the agent is working on the dashboard side: coding, running, analyzing, and merging what improves the objective. Ask it what it's doing in Chat, or steer it from the CLI — see Drive the agent.

---

Next: Run experiments for the submit/diff/checkout loop, or Execution nodes to attach the compute that makes any of it run.