Agent transparency

What this accomplishes

See the agent’s options before it acts, approve its plan, and monitor sub-agents.

Miton shows the agent’s decision-making at three levels:

1. Option matrix — the agent’s options before it chooses a path
2. Pre-flight plan — the plan before it executes
3. Sub-agent dashboard — live monitoring of running sub-agents

Current availability

This page documents behaviour verified in Miton development builds. Miton is still pre-release and is not publicly downloadable; invited beta users will receive a signed desktop build with automatic updates.

Before you start

• A Miton development build and an active project.
• A connected cloud or local model, plus any credentials or local runtime required by this task.

Option matrix

When the agent encounters a task with two or more meaningfully different approaches, it shows you an option matrix before acting.

Each option card shows:

You can:

• Select an option — the agent proceeds with your choice
• Ask for more options — the agent generates additional approaches
• Let the agent decide — the agent picks the highest-confidence option

The option matrix only appears when the agent’s confidence in any single option is below a threshold. For straightforward tasks, it proceeds without showing options.

Pre-flight plan and task checklist

Before executing a multi-step plan, the agent presents a pre-flight plan — a summary of what it is about to do:

• The active milestone (from your project blueprint, if you have one)
• A task checklist: every planned action, in order

The task checklist lets you act on each item before execution starts:

Click Run approved tasks to start execution with the accepted items. The agent runs them in order and updates the checklist as each step completes.

Sub-agent dashboard

The sub-agent dashboard is the right-side panel that shows all sub-agents spawned in the current session.

Opening the dashboard

Click the Agents icon in the right sidebar.

What the dashboard shows

Each sub-agent card shows:

• Role — Explorer, Verifier, Debugger, Test Runner, or Orchestrator
• Status — running / completed / cancelled / failed
• Elapsed time — how long it has been running
• Cost so far — cumulative token cost (estimated)

Setting ceilings

Every sub-agent run has two hard ceilings that auto-cancel the run when exceeded:

Cost ceiling:

• $0.10
• $0.50
• $2.00
• Unlimited

Time ceiling:

• 30 seconds
• 2 minutes
• 10 minutes
• Unlimited

Set ceilings before spawning a sub-agent, or update them on a running agent from its dashboard card. When a ceiling is tripped, the sub-agent is cancelled immediately and a banner summarises what it completed.

Cancelling a sub-agent

Click Cancel on any running agent card. The agent is killed immediately. Changes it has already made to files are not reverted — use per-turn rewind to restore to a state before the sub-agent ran.

Routing chip — current model

The status bar shows a RoutingChip with the active model and routing profile for the current turn. Per-turn routing details (model selection, category classification, cost) are also visible in each turn’s tool cards in the transcript. There is no separate routing-history panel or Cmd+Shift+P shortcut; if you need historical routing data, review the turn-by-turn cards in the transcript or the usage analytics view.

What success looks like

See the agent’s options before it acts, approve its plan, and monitor sub-agents. The result remains attached to the active project when you move to another workspace.

Common failures and recovery

• Confirm the correct project and model are active.
• Read the exact error and the requested permission before retrying.
• Retry only the failed step so completed project work remains intact.

Related next action

• Per-turn rewind — restoring to a state before an agent action
• Cost intelligence — session cost tracking and budget alerts
• Sessions — session lifecycle and the status bar