Field guide
Everything, as a lookup
The same ground the Academy covers, with the teaching removed. Open this when you already know what you want and need to know where it lives, what it accepts, or which key it needs.
Capability index
What Peak can do, and where you reach it from.
| Capability | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Root pages | Five pages always behind your tabs: Landing, Dashboard, Activity Hub, Arcade Hub, Mesh Hub. | Swipe or click from the root |
| One input | One field, five outcomes: Search, Note, Tasks, Whiteboard, LLM chat. Each opens as a tab. | Landing |
| Split view | Two tabs live side by side, both marked in the strip, restored on reopen. | Right-click a tab → Show Beside |
| Morning brief | Daily headlines on your topics, every link a page Peak actually fetched. Off until enabled, never in the background. | Under the weather chip |
| Search engines | Fourteen engines behind one list, shared by the landing input and the toolbar. | Settings → General |
| Semantic search | Find saved material by meaning, indexed locally by an on-device embedding model. | Settings → MLX → Search |
| Profiles | Isolated cookies, sessions, caches and local web storage, each with a name, icon and colour. | Dashboard |
| Incognito | Skips history and activity persistence entirely. | Dashboard |
| Block notes | Headings, paragraphs, to-do, code, markdown, links, separators, images, tables. PDF export on macOS. | Landing → Note |
| Kanban boards | Lanes, cards, drag and drop between lanes, local persistence, mesh-aware. | Landing → Tasks |
| Whiteboards | Infinite canvas: freehand, four connector styles, six shapes, embeds, groups, export, icon and map assets. | Landing → Whiteboard |
| Slides | Decks drawn at any size, edited element by element, exported as numbered PNGs. | Ask for a deck |
| Sites | Multi-file sites with Tailwind, Lucide icons, three.js and map runtimes, exported as a folder. | Site Builder |
| PeakUI | A validating subset of SwiftUI in .peakui files, previewed as HTML and exported verbatim into Xcode. | Site Builder |
| Publishing | Push a site to GitHub from inside Peak. Needs a personal access token, kept in Keychain and sent only to api.github.com. | Site Builder |
| Projects | Groups conversations, files and standing instructions so a new chat starts with the context. | Dashboard |
| Timeline | Video editor with overlapping rows, trims, fades, titles, a mixer and a tempo grid. | Intermission → Tools |
| Auto Edit | Removes silence from a recording by loudness, keeping picture and sound together. | On a talking recording |
| Deadnet | A search engine over an invented web, marked as fabricated on every page, permanently. | Search engine list |
| Peak Mesh | Nearby devices over the local network — no account, no relay, per-type sharing toggles. | Mesh Hub |
| Built-in tools | Background removal, text extraction, image compression, palette, SVG trace, 3D extrusion, transcription. Most run on device. | Intermission → Tools |
Models and providers
AI is optional and unbundled: no Peak account, no Peak inference server, no subscription to us. Every row below is a route you bring yourself.
| Provider | What it gets you |
|---|---|
| OpenRouter | One key for models from every vendor, and the only route for generating images, video, music and speech. |
| OpenAI | GPT models directly from OpenAI. |
| OpenCode | A curated set of coding models on one subscription, including Claude, GPT and Gemini. |
| xAI Grok | Grok models directly from xAI. |
| Google Gemini | Gemini through Google’s OpenAI-compatible endpoint. |
| Moonshot Kimi | Kimi on the pay-as-you-go platform. Keys start sk-. |
| Kimi Code | Kimi on the kimi.com subscription. Keys start sk-kimi- and use a different endpoint. |
| Ollama Cloud | Open models on Ollama’s servers — same names, no local download. |
| Ollama | Models on this Mac. No key, nothing leaves the device. |
| Peak Local | Peak’s own on-device engine, and an embedding source for indexing your library. |
Four ways to answer without a cloud provider
| Route | What it needs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Peak’s own engine | Settings → MLX, one download | Peak suggests a model the device can hold and refuses one that will not fit. |
| A Mac nearby | Let Peers Use My Models, on the Mac | Appears under Nearby Mac. One request at a time; the reply streams back. |
| Apple Intelligence | Latest system, feature switched on | No download, no key. Answers questions; cannot use Peak’s tools. |
| Ollama | The daemon running locally | Listed under On this Mac. Tool support comes from what the daemon reports. |
Model lists are asked for, not remembered. Any provider with a models endpoint is queried at launch and its roster merged in, because names change faster than app releases. A provider that answers is believed in both directions, so a model it retired disappears rather than lingering until it fails.
“Allow models hosted in China” is about hosting, not weights. A model running on your own device is unaffected by it whatever it was trained by — the switch governs where a request is sent, and an on-device model sends nothing.
Generation is OpenRouter’s, whoever is answering. Image, video, music and speech run through OpenRouter’s extension to the chat API. Without that key those tools are not supplied to the model at all, and Peak says so rather than letting it describe a picture it never made.
The local endpoint
| Address | http://127.0.0.1:52424/v1, OpenAI-compatible |
| Reachable from | Loopback only — nothing on the network can reach it |
| Auth | A bearer token that exists only on this device |
| Lifetime | Exists only while the engine runs; turning it off closes the port |
What the agent may touch
Settings → Tools is the ceiling. Nothing widens it — not a skill, not a prompt, not a project instruction.
| Area | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Research | Search, navigate, click, fill fields, scroll, extract text and screenshot — in a hidden viewport that never touches your tabs. |
| Page media | List the images and video a page actually displays, including srcset, <picture>, CSS backgrounds and Open Graph tags. |
| Repositories | List a public GitHub repo’s tree, read files, search across them. Nothing is cloned; files are held for that conversation only. |
| Your library | Semantic search over saved bookmarks, notes and history. Local only; it never touches the web. |
| Media search | Across images you already generated or attached, so it reuses what exists. |
| Building | Create sites, write and edit files, read them back, run a page to diagnose it, screenshot what it wrote and look at the result. |
| On-device tools | Palette extraction, whole-site design language, subject cut-out. No key needed. |
| Approval | Requested changes are held in the AI inspector until you accept them. On by default. |
Built-in skills
A skill is instructions, a tool policy, knowledge and templates — deliberately data, never code. A skill’s policy can only ever narrow what Settings already permits.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Site Builder | Multi-page sites with real images and no placeholder text. |
| Video Studio | Cuts video on a timeline: overlapping rows, titles, generated shots that continue the last one. |
| Slide Design | Decks and animations with one palette, one axis, and shapes that hold text rather than decorate it. |
| Diagrams | Flowcharts, sequences, ER, Sankey, Gantt and thirty more, as self-contained HTML. |
| Scroll World | Scroll-scrubbed video pages: generated scenes, seamless camera moves, no cuts. |
| Long Take | Long generated films: frame-chained clips, a beat sheet and a soundtrack. |
| Deep Research | Reads several independent sources, then answers with what they actually support. |
| Terse | Strips filler. Same substance, far fewer words. |
| Narrator | Turns an explanation into narrated video — script, voice and soundtrack. |
| Minimal | A handful of tools rather than all of them. The sensible default for a small or on-device model. |
| Visual Browser | Works the tab you are looking at rather than the hidden research one. Needs Workspace AI and its browser permissions on. |
Runtimes a generated site can use
Offline, from Peak’s own asset paths — nothing fetched from a CDN.
| Runtime | What it gives you | How it is reached |
|---|---|---|
| Tailwind | Utility classes with no build step. | One script tag |
| Lucide | Around seventeen hundred icons as inline SVG. | data-lucide plus lucide.createIcons() |
| three.js | Real-time 3D, including orbit controls and model loading. | An import map plus a module script |
| World map | A choropleth of around two hundred and twenty countries as inline SVG, from a plain object of values. | One script tag plus a data-worldmap element |
Live — the world map runtime
Not a picture of the capability. This is the runtime named in the row above, running on this page, drawing from a plain object of country values written into the markup.
Sizes and formats
| Thing | What it accepts or produces | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Deck sizes | Drawn at any size and re-drawn rather than scaled, so type stays sharp. | Ask for a deck |
| Deck export | Numbered PNGs, one per slide. | From the deck |
| Block note export | PDF, on macOS. | From the note |
| Site export | A folder of real files you can read and edit. | Site Builder |
| PeakUI export | A multiplatform Xcode project: one app target for macOS and iOS, folder-synchronised groups, a shared scheme. | Site Builder |
| Rendered video | Diagrams, plots, equations and slide-style explainers, rendered on-device and instantly. | In a conversation |
| Generated video | A slow cloud job measured in minutes, with a spend ceiling per conversation. | Needs an OpenRouter key |
| Generated filenames | Named from their content rather than a timestamp, and reachable by name in later turns. | Everywhere |
| Starting cuts | Announcement · three-point explainer · open/middle/close · lower thirds · blank. | Intermission → Tools → Timeline Structures |
Keys and gestures
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Summon Peak over everything | Control + 1, changeable under Settings → General |
| Reopen a tab closed by accident | Shift + Command + T |
| Put a tab beside another | Right-click a tab you are not on → Show Beside. Press and hold on iPad. |
| Move the toolbar to the other pane | Click that pane’s tab |
| Go back to one page | Close Split, from the same menu |
| Refresh local models | At the bottom of the model menu, after starting Ollama |
What is stored where
Browsing history, saved sessions, bookmarks, activity logs, notes and attachments, task boards, AI chat history, whiteboards, sites, workspace profiles, dashboard layout and mesh message history.
All of it lives in Core Data, app support files, UserDefaults and Keychain, and can sync through your own private iCloud using CloudKit. Peak has no access to that database.
| Peak does not |
|---|
| Ship built-in analytics, advertising SDKs, or cross-app tracking |
| Require an account — there are no Peak servers holding your workspace |
| Relay mesh through the cloud — nearby means nearby |
| Use your chats for training |
When something is missing
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| Generation tools are missing | Image, video, music and speech run through OpenRouter. Without that key the tools are not supplied at all. |
| No local models | The engine is off until you turn it on, under Settings → MLX. For Ollama, use Refresh local models after starting the daemon. |
| Nearby devices are not appearing | Nothing advertises until the room passphrase is set, and it must match on both devices. |
| A borrowed model will not answer | The Mac holding the weights has to switch on Let Peers Use My Models first, and it answers one request at a time. |
| Apple Intelligence will not search the web | It answers questions but cannot use Peak’s tools. Switch to a tool-capable model. |
Where this page and the app disagree, the app is right. The documentation is regenerated with each release; the Academy teaches the same material as worked courses.