Orbit (the brain)
Orbit is the AI copilot at the centre of Jorv Builder. The chat panel on the left of the cockpit is your conversation with Orbit; the Mission Board on the right is what Orbit is doing in your project.
Orbit is brain-first: a single capable model (Claude Opus by default, configurable in Settings → AI Models) reads your repo, plans the work, and executes with full tool access. Heavier work is delegated internally to "drones" (cheaper Sonnet workers) for parallelism, but you don't see that — you just see Orbit.
What Orbit can do
- Read any file in your project
- Edit / write / delete files (with diff approval for non-trivial changes)
- Run shell commands (
npm test,git log, etc.) — gated by an approval prompt - Create and update Mission Board cards
- Spawn parallel drones for independent sub-tasks
- Run expert audits
- Open brainstorm sessions for any Review-state card
- Generate images, voice, and video via configured providers
What Orbit won't do
- Modify PRODUCT.md or ARCHITECTURE.md without going through
propose_execution— these are protected contract documents and always require your sign-off - Push code without you having approved an Auto-Push setting (default on)
- Skip git hooks (no
--no-verify) - Take destructive shortcuts (force-push, hard-reset) without explicit user instruction
Brain vs. Drones
Most user-visible work is the brain (Opus). Drones (Sonnet workers) fire when:
- Orbit explicitly delegates a parallelisable sub-task via
spawn_workers - An expert audit runs (each expert is a worker-tier call)
- A Ralph Loop iterates (each iteration is its own worker call)
You can pick the brain and worker models independently in Settings → AI Models. Defaults work well; only change them if you have a specific reason.
Documents Panel
PRODUCT.md and ARCHITECTURE.md aren't just files Orbit reads — they are Jorv Builder's contract with your project. Orbit builds from them. The Documents Panel lets you read them inline in Jorv Builder, edit via Quick Edit, and roll back to any of the last 10 git versions.
See How-to: Recover from a bad doc edit.