Where things are
The agent’s home is/home/daytona. This is that directory on the machine these
pages were written against, with the dotfiles left out:
reports/loan.csv because somebody asked for a
repayment schedule, briefings/2026-09-02.md because a morning job writes one a
day, expenses.csv because a ledger had to live somewhere.
You can steer that. “Put anything to do with the Q3 audit under
/home/daytona/audit” is a sentence the agent will honor and — if you also ask
it to remember — write into its notes so the next chat honors it too.
Name paths in full when you name them.
/home/daytona/notes works;
~/notes sometimes does not, because the agent’s own file tools do not expand
the tilde. The agent knows where home is — you do not have to say it — but when
you spell a path out, spell it out./work, /data and /app are not places:
Getting a file out
Ask for it. “Give me a download link for that CSV” produces a URL that works from anywhere — no sign-in, no session:Putting a file in
Attach it to a message with the + in the composer. What the agent receives is a link to the file rather than the bytes, so it downloads it onto the machine to work on it — and after that turn the file is on the disk, at a path the agent can tell you, and every later chat can read it. An attachment is not a one-turn upload; it is a file you now have. If it matters where it lands, say so in the same message.What survives, and what does not
Stopping a machine is not deleting it. Deleting it is: the disk goes with the
machine, and everything above goes with the disk. Chats survive that, but they
have nothing left to run on.
The practical consequence is for the programs you ask your agent to run — a bot,
a nightly job, a watcher. They keep going through the next chat and into
tomorrow, and they stop when the machine stops. Ask for a program that writes
what it is doing to a file and reads it back on start, and restarting it costs
nothing. A program that stopped when the machine did covers
the rest.
What a second chat can see
Everything, as long as it is the same machine. A chat is attached to a machine, and every chat on that machine reads and writes the same disk. So you can start a new conversation and say “what was in the CSV I gave you yesterday?” and it will go and find it. Sub-agents your agent hands work to are on the same disk too, which is why their output is a file at a path rather than something that has to be sent back. Two ways to end up looking at the wrong disk:- A different machine. The picker at the top left of a chat says which one it is running on. Switching machines switches computers — a different disk and a different checkout. A chat stays on the machine it was started on.
- A different account. Nothing is shared between accounts, including a chat you shared a link to: the reader sees the conversation, not the machine.
How much room there is
Thirty gigabytes, and the Machines screen tells you how much of it is gone:du -sh ~/* costs it nothing.
What is on the machine
The other half of the disk: the harness, and what is in it.
VS Code and SSH
Going and looking at any of this yourself.