Why the selection is explicit
An answer is only as good as the knowledge behind it, so MSOCK never guesses which knowledge produced one. Cockpit shows the selection at the top of the screen, and changing it is something you do on purpose.
Cockpit is the right place for this control: it is where work is done, it already installs what a workspace needs, and every other surface can read the selection it records.
Choose a harness
- 01
Open the SOCK selector
It sits in the Cockpit header and names the harness currently grounding this workspace's sessions.
- 02
Read the list
It lists the versions your workspace has published. Each row says what clicking it will do.
- 03
Activate, or download and activate
A version already on this machine is activated locally and immediately. A version you do not hold is a download and the row says so before you click — a published harness can be hundreds of megabytes.
- 04
Wait for it to settle
A download reports progress and can be cancelled. When it finishes, that version becomes the active selection.
When a change takes effect
A session answers from the selection that was active when that session started, for its whole life.
- Changing the selection affects the next session you start.
- While a session is open in the pane, MSOCK refuses a change rather than letting a running conversation drift onto a different corpus mid-answer.
- To move to a different body of knowledge, close the session, change the selection, and start a new one.
Walking a harness's own versions
The selector switches between different harnesses. Moving between versions of the same harness is done in SOCK, in that harness's own version history. Keeping those two apart is deliberate: one is "which knowledge", the other is "which version of this knowledge".
States the selector can show
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A named harness and version | Sessions are grounded on it | Nothing |
| Nothing selected | This workspace has no active selection | Pick a published version, or publish one from SOCK |
| Downloading | A version is being fetched | Wait, or cancel |
| Cannot be opened | The downloaded bytes do not match what was asked for, or the copy is incomplete | Download it again |
| Cannot be checked | MSOCK could not confirm which knowledge line this machine is on | Reconnect and retry; if it persists, ask your administrator |
Workspaces that use legacy knowledge
A workspace migrating from an earlier AIDLC setup can be on the legacy documents line, where knowledge comes from a documents bundle rather than a SOCK harness. On such a workspace, Cockpit grounds sessions from that bundle and the SOCK selector behaves accordingly.
Moving a workspace between lines is an administrative operation. See set up a workspace and upload a legacy SOCK import.
Reading published knowledge without Cockpit
You do not need Cockpit to read a published harness. Download it in SOCK and use its own Review and Ask screens. Reading a published harness does not require workspace provisioning; building your own does.