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Experiments

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The Experiments tab under Agents > Settings > Manage Agents is where administrators opt in to features that are still iterating. The behavior, configuration surface, and APIs documented here may change between releases without notice.

Note

Everything in this page is experimental. Pin a release before broad rollout and review the release notes before upgrading.

Virtual desktop

Lets agents drive a graphical desktop inside the workspace through spawn_agent with type=computer_use (screenshots, mouse, keyboard).

To enable, toggle Virtual Desktop on, then choose a Computer use provider (Anthropic or OpenAI). It also requires:

The portabledesktop module installed in the workspace template.
An API key for the selected provider configured under the Providers tab.

The Anthropic and OpenAI computer-use models are fixed by Coder per provider and are not selectable from this UI. Anthropic is the default when no provider is set.

Advisor

Lets a root agent pause its current turn and request strategic guidance from a separate, single-step model call. The advisor sees recent conversation context, runs without any tools, and returns concise advice for the parent agent rather than the end user. While active, it is the only tool the parent can call for that turn.

Useful for planning ambiguity, architectural tradeoffs, debugging strategy after repeated failures, or risk reduction before a destructive operation.

Field	Default	Notes
Advisor (toggle)	Off	Master switch. When off, the advisor tool is not attached to new chats.
Max uses per run	`0` (unlimited)	Caps how many times an agent can call the advisor in a single chat run. Must be a non-negative integer.
Max output tokens	`0` (server default)	Caps the advisor model's response length. `0` uses the server default of 16,384 tokens. Must be a non-negative integer.
Reasoning effort	Use chat model	One of unset, `low`, `medium`, or `high`. Unset delegates to the underlying model's default.
Advisor model	Use chat model	Optional dedicated chat model config for the advisor. When unset, the advisor reuses the parent chat's model.

The advisor is not available in plan mode or to subagents. Failed advisor invocations refund the per-run budget, and advisor calls are not metered against the parent chat's usage limit.

The same configuration is available at:

GET /api/experimental/chats/config/advisor
PUT /api/experimental/chats/config/advisor

Chat debug logging

Records a detailed trace of each chat turn for troubleshooting: the normalized request sent to the LLM provider, the full response, token usage, retry attempts, and errors.

Off by default. Three layers control whether it runs for a given chat:

Deployment override. Setting CODER_CHAT_DEBUG_LOGGING_ENABLED=true (or --chat-debug-logging-enabled at server start) forces debug logging on for every chat. The runtime admin and user toggles become read-only.
Runtime admin gate. With the deployment override unset, the Let users record chat debug logs toggle decides whether users can opt in. Configure it at GET/PUT /api/experimental/chats/config/debug-logging.
Per-user toggle. Users with the admin gate enabled can turn debug logging on for their own chats from Agents > Settings > General under Record debug logs for my chats. The endpoint PUT /api/experimental/chats/config/user-debug-logging returns 409 Conflict if the deployment override is active and 403 Forbidden if the admin has not enabled user opt-in.

Important

Debug logs may contain sensitive content from prompts, responses, tool calls, and errors. Treat them with the same care as conversation history. Only the chat owner (or a user with read access to the chat) can fetch a chat's debug runs through the API. Administrators do not get blanket access to all users' debug data.

When debug logging is active for a chat, a Debug tab appears in the right panel of the Agents page (alongside Git, Terminal, and Desktop) for that chat's owner. The tab lists recent debug runs and lets you expand a run into its per-step request, response, token usage, retry attempts, errors, and policy metadata.

Export debug logs

You can export the same captured debug data from the UI:

Navigate to Agents.
Open a chat with debug logging enabled.
Open the Debug tab in the right panel.
Click Export debug logs to download the chat's recent debug runs as JSON, or expand a run and click Export this run to download one run.

The chat-level export includes the full run detail for the runs returned by the debug run list endpoint. The current list endpoint returns up to 100 of the newest runs.

API access

The same data is available through the experimental API:

GET /api/experimental/chats/{chat}/debug/runs lists the most recent runs for a chat (up to 100, newest first).
GET /api/experimental/chats/{chat}/debug/runs/{debugRun} returns a single run with all of its steps, including normalized request and response bodies.

Fetch a single run and save it as JSON:

export CODER_URL="https://coder.example.com"
export CODER_SESSION_TOKEN="$(coder login token)"
export CHAT_ID="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
export RUN_ID="11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111"

curl -fsS \
  -H "Coder-Session-Token: $CODER_SESSION_TOKEN" \
  "$CODER_URL/api/experimental/chats/$CHAT_ID/debug/runs/$RUN_ID" \
  | jq . > "coder-agents-debug-run-$RUN_ID.json"

Fetch every run returned by the list endpoint and save a chat-level export. Using the same CODER_URL, CODER_SESSION_TOKEN, and CHAT_ID variables from above:

RUN_IDS=$(curl -fsS \
  -H "Coder-Session-Token: $CODER_SESSION_TOKEN" \
  "$CODER_URL/api/experimental/chats/$CHAT_ID/debug/runs" \
  | jq -r '.[].id') || {
  echo "Failed to list debug runs" >&2
  exit 1
}

RUN_EXPORTS=$(mktemp)
trap 'rm -f "$RUN_EXPORTS"' EXIT

for RUN_ID in $RUN_IDS; do
  curl -fsS \
    -H "Coder-Session-Token: $CODER_SESSION_TOKEN" \
    "$CODER_URL/api/experimental/chats/$CHAT_ID/debug/runs/$RUN_ID" \
    >> "$RUN_EXPORTS" || {
      echo "Failed to fetch debug run $RUN_ID" >&2
      exit 1
    }
  echo >> "$RUN_EXPORTS"
done

jq -s \
  --arg chat_id "$CHAT_ID" \
  --arg exported_at "$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)" \
  '{
    version: 1,
    scope: "chat",
    exported_at: $exported_at,
    chat_id: $chat_id,
    run_count: length,
    limited_to_most_recent: 100,
    runs: .
  }' "$RUN_EXPORTS" > "coder-agents-debug-chat-$CHAT_ID.json"

Debug runs are stored alongside the chat and are removed when the parent conversation is deleted (manually, by retention, or by chat purge). See Data Retention for the conversation retention controls.