Inspector

The Dawn Inspector is a browser-based UI for inspecting a running Dawn app's runtime state. It ships as its own package, @dawn-ai/inspector, and opens with dawn inspect. The first panel is Memory — browse, search, and govern the app's long-term memory records — and the shell is panel-based, so future panels (threads, runs, sandbox) slot in alongside it.

Launching

dawn inspect

The CLI starts the inspector's server on 127.0.0.1 at a free port, prints the URL, and opens your browser. Flags:

• --cwd <path> — inspect a different app root (defaults to the current directory).
• --port <number> — bind to a stable localhost port instead of a free one.
• --env-file <path> — load a .env file before resolving the store (overrides dawn.config.ts env and the default ./.env) — the same precedence as dawn dev.

Apps scaffolded with create-dawn-ai-app ship the inspector as a devDependency. In an existing app, install it once:

npm i -D @dawn-ai/inspector

dawn inspect resolves the package from the app's own node_modules; if it is missing, the command prints the install hint and exits.

Which store it inspects

The inspector serves the app's live memory store — it loads your dawn.config.ts and uses config.memory.store exactly as the dev server does. The default SQLite store, the pgvector backend, and custom MemoryStore implementations all work unchanged.

Two caveats follow from the inspector running as a separate process:

• It constructs a second store instance from your config. For SQLite that is a second connection to the same database file; for Postgres it is a second connection pool. Both are safe, but count it against connection limits.
• The store must be constructible from config alone. A store that closes over live objects created elsewhere in your server process cannot be re-created by the inspector.

The Memory panel

• Browse and filter — every record across namespaces and statuses (not just candidates), with facet counts by status, kind, namespace, and source type.
• Search — recall-equivalent ranked search, not a substring filter. It runs the same IDF-weighted keyword ranking the agent's recall tool uses, and when your config declares a vector embedder (and the provider key is available, e.g. via --env-file), the same hybrid keyword + vector fusion.
• Live refresh — lists and facet counts poll every 2 seconds while the tab is visible, so agent writes show up as they happen.
• Detail sheet — the full record (data, tags, confidence, source, supersession links) with the governance actions below.
• Approve — promotes a candidate with the same supersede-aware reconciliation as dawn memory approve: a contradicting active record with the same identity is superseded (history preserved), an identical one dedupes the candidate, and otherwise the candidate simply activates. When approving would supersede an active memory, the sheet shows a callout and the button reads Approve & supersede.
• Reject / Forget — hard-delete a candidate or any record, each behind a confirmation prompt.

Security posture

The inspector is a local development tool:

• The server binds to 127.0.0.1 only — it is never reachable from the network.
• Every API route verifies the Host header, and state-changing requests with a foreign Origin are rejected — protection against CSRF and DNS-rebinding from other pages open in your browser.
• Destructive actions (reject, forget) require an explicit confirmation in the UI.

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