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 |
|---|---|---|
| Bots | Colleagues with a job: instructions, a model, skills, memory, knowledge files, a look and a voice. Peak hosts; the rest are yours. | Basecamp → Crew |
| Round table | @name brings one bot into any chat; @all lets every bot answer in turn; the Everyone thread hands work to whoever’s job it is. | Any chat, Basecamp, Mesh |
| Basecamp | One long spoken conversation in four places, with the Stage for what a reply makes. | The mountain on the start page |
| Wake-ups | A bot that wakes on a beat, at an hour or on a Mesh message, with runs a day, gaps and quiet hours. | Basecamp → Routine |
| Telegram and Siri | Ask Peak from a Telegram bot you pair, or with “Ask Peak”. Off until turned on. | Settings → AI → Telegram; Settings → Privacy |
| Slash commands | /new, /compact, /model, /think, /fast, /retry, /copy, /export, /help. Never reach the model. | Type / in any chat |
| Sharing | Boards, whiteboards, notes, calendars, projects, sites, drawings, decks, households, studios and Hours teams, shared through iCloud, end-to-end encrypted. | The people button |
| Peak Hours | Timer, timesheet, flex and absence, budgets, invoices as PDFs, expenses with receipts, a year-end export, and teams with approvers. | Tools → Business |
| Contour | Vector drawing with Illustrator’s tools, pages, flowing text, tracing, and SVG, PDF and PNG export. | Tools |
| Darkroom | Photo and raw development with layers; the original never touched. | Tools, or a photo in the Library |
| Folio | PDF pages, markup, forms, signatures, smaller copies and the pictures inside. | Tools, or a PDF in the Library |
| IMAP with an app password; drafts in your account’s Drafts; only a person sends. | Settings → Tools → Mail | |
| 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 |
| Answers that draw | Typeset maths, Mermaid diagrams, charts and plots, live Tailwind and three.js previews, and a picture gallery — drawn on the device, offline. | In a Peak AI answer |
| Python | Python 3 with numpy, pandas and matplotlib, run on the device in a sealed page when you press Run. | A python block, or ask Peak AI |
| Finance | Accounts from imported CSV, OFX or QFX files — or, optionally, followed through Enable Banking — with budgets, recurring payments, goals and reports. Lockable; syncs end-to-end encrypted or stays on one device. | Intermission → Tools → Finance |
| Understudy | Voices made from a short clip with a consent record, twenty-six ready-made voices, dubbing, audiobooks, stories, and transcripts by speaker. | Intermission → Tools → Understudy |
| Stem Splitter | Vocals, drums, bass and the rest, separated on the device; a backing track or an a cappella. | Intermission → Tools → Stem Splitter |
| ASO Studio | App Store search analysis, rank tracking in every country, competitors, reviews, a Global view and the listing — pulled and pushed with your own App Store Connect key if you add one. | Intermission → Tools → Growth |
| SEO Audit | A site crawl with more than forty checks and a health score, or one page at a time. | Growth |
| Social Studio | A brand profile and drafted posts for six networks, planned on a calendar. You post them yourself. | Growth |
| Schedules | Things Peak does on its own — a daily rank check, a weekly re-crawl — in one list. | Growth |
| Peak for Safari | A Safari extension: open in Peak, save, ask Peak AI, translate, and skip YouTube ads (a switch in its popup). Peak Blocker blocks ads and trackers in Safari. | Safari → Extensions |
| Share sheet and widgets | Send to Peak from any app. Agenda, Recent Activity and Quick Actions widgets. | The share sheet; home and Lock Screen |
| Peak in Messages | Send a recent page, note, image or calendar item into a conversation, or ask Peak. iPhone and iPad. | Messages → + |
| MCP server | Lets Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP apps use Peak on the Mac. Read-only until Allow changes is on. | Settings → Tools → MCP Server |
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. |
| Finance | Reads it only when you ask about your money, and only within fifteen minutes of your last having Finance open. While it is locked it asks you to unlock. It never moves money. |
| Growth | Reads and drafts: App Store analysis, site crawls, post drafts. It never posts, and never sends a listing to Apple. |
| Python | Runs it in a sealed page with no network. A python block in an answer waits for you to press Run. |
| Voices | Speaks words you asked for in your voices, on this device. Studio voices go through your OpenRouter key and send only the text. |
| Outside apps (MCP) | Read-only until you turn on Allow changes. Nothing can be deleted, and every run is recorded in a chat named after the app. |
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 |
Runtimes an answer can use
Also offline, and also on the device: an answer draws and runs with these, with nothing fetched.
| Runtime | What it gives you | How it is reached |
|---|---|---|
| MathJax 3 | LaTeX typeset as vector drawings in the colour of the surrounding text. | $…$ in a sentence, $$…$$ on its own line |
| Mermaid 12 | Flowcharts, mind maps, sequence, state and class diagrams, timelines and Gantt charts. | A mermaid block |
| Charts and plots | Bar, line, area, scatter and pie charts; plots of y = … functions. | A chart or plot block |
| Python 3.14 | numpy, pandas and matplotlib, in a sealed page with no network, run through WebAssembly. | A python block and its Run button |
| Tailwind and three.js | The same runtimes the Site Builder bundles, as a live preview. | A tailwind or three block |
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 |
| Run a Python block | Press its Run button, or Command + Return |
| Step through the pictures in an answer | Open one, then the arrow keys |
| Give a picture the whole display | Full Screen, in the picture viewer |
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.
| What | Where it is kept |
|---|---|
| Finance — accounts, transactions, budgets, goals | On this device. Synced through your own iCloud, end-to-end encrypted, unless you keep it on one device from the lock menu. |
| A connected bank’s application key | This device’s Keychain. No Peak server is involved. |
| A voice, and what it has said | On this device. The clip a voice was made from is not kept; Understudy → Files lists everything the studio does keep. |
| A cloud clone’s reference | On this device — its first twenty seconds, sent with every line you ask it to speak. |
| Python’s variables | In memory only, until Peak quits. |
| 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. |
| Finance asks to unlock | The lock is on: it locks when you leave Finance or Peak goes to the background. Peak AI asks you to unlock rather than reading your accounts. |
| An outside app cannot connect over MCP | The server is off until Settings → Tools → MCP Server is on, and only apps on the same Mac that hold its token can connect. Without Allow changes it can only read. |
| A voice is not offered for a language | A voice made on the device speaks one language, and cloud voices that do not speak the dub’s language are not offered. Gemini’s studio voices speak Norwegian. |
| Python seems stuck the first time | The first run loads Python. Anything that runs for more than a minute is stopped. |
| Ask Peak in Messages needs a key | It uses your OpenRouter key: add one under Peak → Settings → Keys, then open Peak once. Peak in Messages is on iPhone and iPad only. |
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.