Docs

Aetower Feature List

Current shipped product surfaces, technical capabilities, and maturity notes.

Aetower is a local-first macOS observability and operator dashboard. It helps a technical user, developer, or AI agent understand what is making a Mac slow, hot, noisy, memory pressured, storage constrained, or expensive to run.

Updated: 2026-07-14 Applies to: Developer Preview 0.9.0

This document is the product feature inventory. For product direction and priorities, read Product Direction. For navigation, read Tab-by-Tab Guide.

Feature Overview

1. Monitor

What it does for people

Monitor is the first place to look when the machine feels bad. Instead of forcing the user to scan hundreds of raw processes, Aetower groups related processes into understandable entities such as an app, daemon family, terminal session, local AI runtime, or browser group.

Technical details

• Samples host and process-level runtime signals.
• Groups raw processes into higher-level entities using identity, origin, runtime, repository, workspace, and launcher context where available.
• Presents ranked entities and drill-down detail instead of only process IDs.
• Supports guarded process-action previews through explicit operator surfaces.

2. Friction Scoring

What it does for people

Friction is Aetower's shorthand for "how much this thing is costing the machine right now." A high friction score can come from CPU, memory pressure, wakeups, disk churn, network activity, energy impact, thermal contribution, or unusual change from recent behavior.

Technical details

• Produces a 0-100 score for triage and ranking.
• Separates host pressure from per-entity contribution.
• Feeds recommendations, anomaly explanations, trend cards, timeline events, and top-findings surfaces.
• Keeps scoring explainable from collected signals.

3. Entity Detail, Provenance, And Action Planning

What it does for people

When an entity looks suspicious, detail views explain what it is, which processes belong to it, why it is ranked highly, and which actions are safe or reasonable.

Technical details

• Shows entity process membership and tree relationships.
• Uses process origin metadata to explain launch paths and runtime context.
• Provides recommendations based on dominant burden signals and environment context such as battery or thermal pressure.
• Keeps actions preview- and approval-gated.

4. Activity

What it does for people

Activity answers time-based questions: what changed, what happened earlier, and what sequence of events led to an incident.

Technical details

• Overview summarizes recent changes, event pressure, history coverage, and load state.
• History persists seven days of local entity snapshots by default under normal budget and exposes paged historical access.
• Timeline correlates lifecycle events, host changes, sensor alerts, restart-loop signals, and AI-session markers.
• Storage reports history DB/WAL size, retention coverage, quarantine, and maintenance state.

5. Storage

What it does for people

Storage helps the operator reclaim disk space and understand growth without overstating safety or reclaimable bytes.

Technical details

• Provides Quick, Complete, Forensic, and Custom scan profiles.
• Reclaim focuses on quick wins, duplicate review, old screenshots, staging, and move-to-Trash flows.
• Similar is a first-class redundancy page for exact duplicates, similar images, docs/text, videos, binaries, and other redundancy.
• Explore handles indexed browsing, visual full-disk/treemap/table views, cold data, optimization leads, and raw artifacts.
• Audit records local cleanup actions.
• Separates logical bytes from local APFS estimates, hardlink dedupe, sparse files, cloud placeholders, purgeable capacity, and clone-lineage caveats.

6. Repos

What it does for people

Repos shows which local repositories are active, stale, dirty, duplicated, growing, missing agent contracts, linked to AI sessions, or carrying large rebuildable artifacts.

Technical details

• Opens from cached repository inventory.
• Uses Git/index/config fingerprints to mark stale repos without hiding them.
• Sorts by attention, size, growth, artifacts, AI spend, or name.
• Shows detail tabs for Actions, Storage, Contracts, Scorecard, Git, and Live.
• Surfaces agent-contract readiness for AGENTS.md and .agents/*.yaml.
• Includes estimated per-repo cost, energy, and carbon only when attribution is strong enough, with source/confidence labels.

7. Projects

What it does for people

Projects maps local repositories to provider status so a user can see the outside-world context for a local workspace.

Technical details

• Stores local project records keyed to repository roots.
• Supports GitHub and Cloudflare connectors.
• Surfaces pull requests, workflow runs, checks, and Cloudflare deployment status when credentials and links are configured.
• Keeps provider configuration deliberate through Settings and connector cards.

8. Agents

What it does for people

Agents makes the cost of local AI work visible: which session is active, which runtime is heavy, what repo is involved, and how much energy or money was estimated.

Technical details

• Detects and groups common local AI tools and model runtimes.
• Integrates optional Chau7 context for sessions, terminal tabs, repositories, branches, active apps, and cost data.
• Shows GPU and unified-memory source badges such as "GPU inferred" rather than claiming exact per-process VRAM.
• Accumulates session and repo cost through the shared resource-cost model when attribution is available.

9. Local MCP And CLI

What it does for people

Trusted local AI agents and shell scripts can ask Aetower what is happening on the machine without starting a second monitor.

Technical details

• Runs an app-owned local MCP server when Aetower is active.
• Uses a local Unix socket and packaged stdio helper for supported clients.
• Offers one-click registration for supported Claude and Codex clients; automatic registration remains off by default.
• Exposes snapshot, host, entity, history, diagnostics, storage, repository, recommendation, cost, and support-bundle tools.
• Operator actions are visible by default for trusted local clients, hideable in Settings, and still preview- and approval-gated.
• Ships an aetower CLI with top, storage, repos, alerts, findings, doctor, tab, and call workflows.

10. Diagnostics

What it does for people

Diagnostics explains whether Aetower itself is healthy before the user files an issue, exports a support bundle, or investigates why a sensor, adapter, database, or collection path is unavailable.

Technical details

• Tracks subsystem events for engine, collector, adapters, persistence, history, MCP, UI payloads, and export paths.
• Surfaces pipeline timing and payload pressure.
• Reports capability state and permission/adapter availability.
• Provides support-bundle previews and diagnostics summaries.

11. System And Fleet

What it does for people

System covers machine state, startup state, Aetower health, and optional local peer discovery.

Technical details

• Sensors show thermals, fans, power, storage, battery, Bluetooth, and per-core load.
• Startup scans login items, launch agents/daemons, active-now links, scanned locations, and attention items.
• Fleet uses remembered opt-in local-network discovery and shows nearby Macs running Aetower with Fleet enabled.
• Peer data is local-network oriented and not a cloud fleet service.

12. Settings, Privacy, And Runtime Tuning

What it does for people

Settings lets users choose how much detail Aetower collects and exactly when data can leave the Mac.

Technical details

• Controls startup checklist, appearance, collection cadence, repository roots, integrations, AI-client registration, notifications, automation, updates, and advanced reset/support operations.
• Shows Outbound Data status for telemetry, Fleet, VirusTotal, provider tokens, and MCP clients.
• Keeps telemetry, Fleet, VirusTotal, automatic MCP registration, scheduled storage scans, and privileged helper behavior off by default.
• Makes CLI readiness visible in setup and AI-client flows.

13. Export And External Observability

What it does for people

Teams with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or internal observability systems can optionally export selected metrics.

Technical details

• Supports optional OTLP/HTTP metric export.
• Documents collector and dashboard setup.
• Keeps export opt-in so local machine metadata is not sent accidentally.

14. Release Validation

What it does for people

The public site should not claim a feature that the app, release scripts, or published artifacts cannot support.

Technical details

• Validates history retention days, MCP operator visibility/hiding, outbound defaults, Fleet defaults, appcast metadata, release artifacts, source archives, CLI bundling, Homebrew cask, and published URLs.
• Runs before website deploys.
• Keeps changelog and website language tied to release facts.

Feature Maturity Notes

Aetower is a Developer Preview. The Monitor, Activity, Storage, Repos, Diagnostics, Settings, local MCP, CLI, and release-validation workflows are primary product surfaces. Some integrations depend on local permissions, provider credentials, Chau7 availability, supported AI clients, or release build configuration. Optional helpers, exports, Fleet, VirusTotal, and provider lookups are deliberately configurable instead of always-on behavior.