Slate is a phone built around a coding agent that lives on the hardware. Tell it what you want. It plans, writes the files, commits, and runs the result on the same screen. No laptop, no tab, no round trip to a datacentre.
The phone here is live. Type into it.
Most assistants answer. Slate does the work, then shows you exactly what it did, because a step you cannot inspect is a step you cannot trust.
Every goal becomes a numbered list of tool calls before a single file is touched. You see the whole plan up front, not a surprise at the end.
Write files, patch them, bundle, commit, deploy. Each call reports what it actually did, and a failure halts the run instead of quietly continuing.
What the agent wrote executes on the same device that wrote it. Files, diff and git history are all there to read afterwards.
A coding agent reads everything. Your project, your keys, your half-written thoughts at midnight. Sending that to someone else's machine is the part everyone has quietly agreed to stop noticing.
Slate does not have a cloud to send it to. The model, the harness and the filesystem sit on the device. Aeroplane mode changes nothing about what it can do.
What leaves the device
intent build:tip
planner on-device
steps 6
tools fs.write, build, preview, git.commit
ms 41
ok true
The words you typed are not on that list, and neither is a single byte of what it wrote. We record which kind of thing was asked for, so we know which tools to make better.
The compromises are all in one direction. Everything here exists to keep a model resident in memory and a keyboard under your thumbs.