Web UI — the journey from your first sentence

Two surfaces, one flow: arona is the headless control plane (models, keys, ledger, memory); shittim-chest is the workbench you actually look at (chat, panels, seeing the world). Every screen below is a chest view — chest talks to arona over its RPC surface; arona itself ships no UI.

Models: from source to invocation

A model travels from "existing" to "chat-ready" in four stages: source (the Providers catalogue — metadata, not inference) → registration (an ollama or OpenAI-compatible external backend, persisted across restarts) → deployment (the Agents page hands a model ID to an arona-agent node; an empty model name auto-picks the idlest node) → routing (the Models page; least-in-flight load balancing with session affinity). External backends are fail-closed until the first probe succeeds. The exact API for each step lives in the arona docs.

Identity and metering

API keys are your identity — the gateway authenticates /v1/* with Bearer tokens, and both curl and chest present one at the door. Usage is a per-call ledger per key: tokens, model, backend, cost. Billing tiers set quotas (USD / tokens / rate limits); hitting one is a hard refusal, not a slow-down.

Chat and memory

Every chat turn passes through the memory service — the badge on each turn tells you whether it did. Memory on means relevant long-term memories were injected before routing; Memory offline means the memory service is unreachable (an honesty signal, not a bug); disabled means nothing relevant was found. Completed turns are extracted into episodes and persisted, so memory survives restarts — and write-back entries can be deleted directly from the Memory page.

Panels and industrial control

One prompt creates a panel; the engine generates the layout and persists it into scepter's workspace storage. Editing is structural — data-source bindings, component lists, connection states — not a black box. Topology and Holographic are two views of the same fleet; Reports adds semantic search over history. Industrial writes pass policy validation and human approval before anything moves: the end of the closed loop, and its heaviest step.

Where to go deeper

• The full arona platform reference — arona docs
• The chest workbench and its panels — shittim-chest docs
• Agents, workspaces and the industrial write gate — entelecheia docs