Steer a session that drifts

A steerer is a small watcher you attach to a live session. After each turn it asks a model whether the work is still on the task you described. If it has wandered, mike queues a short corrective note and adds it to the session’s next request. Steering changes what is sent to Anthropic and sends the session’s text to the model that runs the steerer, so it is off until you turn it on. It does not stop a session, edit files or answer for you; the session reads the note and decides what to do with it.

Open Steering Monitor in the menu for what steerers are doing now, or Steerers to manage them. Both are tabs of one page, http://localhost:9990/steering: Monitor and Fleet. Settings for the whole feature are at http://localhost:9990/settings/steering.

This is a fictional example. The docs session in ~/projects/site is a small demonstration; nothing here comes from a real capture.

Steer the example session

Continue the example from Quickstart: the docs session has the goal “Rewrite the install page”, and you corrected it with “Put Homebrew first on the install page.” Suppose Claude then starts restyling the whole site instead. You want something to bring it back without you typing.

1. Open http://localhost:9990/settings/steering and switch on Steerer — acts on live sessions. The page keeps the switch disabled until an OpenRouter key is set; the note beside it reads “Configure your OpenRouter key in Integrations to enable the steerer.” You should see the switch on and the model table below it.
2. Open Steerers. With none yet, the page reads No steerers registered yet. Choose Create your first steerer.
3. Step 1, Which session do you want to steer? Search for docs and select it. Step 2 shows the session’s recent turns so you can see what it has been doing.
4. Step 3, What should the steerer watch for? Type what the session should stay on, for example Rewrite the install page only. Put Homebrew first. Do not touch the site's styles. This is the prompt anchor: the steerer compares each new turn with it. Help me write this asks a model to draft the anchor and the settings below; Accept suggestion keeps them and Edit manually lets you change them.
5. Choose how forceful a correction is and how it arrives (both are explained below), then Review + create → and Create + enrol session.
6. Open the Monitor tab. Until the first evaluation it reads Watching 1 enrolled session…. After the next turn an event appears in the feed; select it to see the Injected payload, the exact note that went into the session.

If the docs session drifts, the next request carries a note headed “Steering note from the operator’s proxy”, inside a <system-reminder> block. The note is labelled as coming from the steerer’s proxy, not typed by you. Only a steerer set to command asks the session to say so in a line when the note is already done or does not apply.

What you choose for a steerer

A change to authority or mode takes effect on the next evaluation. Priority orders steerers when several are enrolled; the lower number is evaluated first.

Enrol and disenrol a session

A steerer only watches sessions enrolled in it. The guided flow enrols the session you picked. To enrol another, open the session and find Steering activity, then Enrol in a steerer and choose one. If no steerer is enabled, the panel says No enabled steerers available and offers Create one for this session. Disenrol on the same panel stops it. Switching a steerer off in the Fleet table, or deleting it from its page (Delete, then Confirm delete, which cannot be undone), stops it for every session.

Read the Monitor and the Fleet

The Fleet tab lists each steerer with On, Name, Abilities (its authority and mode), Scope, Model, Priority, Enrolment and Live activity. Use the switch in the first column to turn one on or off, New steerer to add one and the name to edit it.

The Monitor tab is a live feed across all enrolled sessions. Each event shows what the steerer decided. A steerer’s decision is one of:

A fired note can later read as processed (the session took it), expired or reverted.

Guard questions

The turn guard is a separate, narrower watcher. It asks four fixed questions of finished turns and may wake the model or add a note to its reply when one fires:

• Does this reply repeat a correction you already made?
• Did the model wait on something it never backed up?
• Did the model hand back work it was authorised to keep going on?
• Did the last turn’s work actually ship?

It is off by default and has its own switch in Settings. Every note it sent appears at Guard nudges (http://localhost:9990/sessions/improvement/guard), one panel per question, and you can mark each nudge right or wrong there. mike withholds a share of would-be nudges at random (10% by default) so it can compare sessions with and without them. See Judge for the pages that show what these labels led to.

What leaves your machine

• Sent to Anthropic: yes. A note from a steerer that corrects the session is first pushed to it as a message over Remote Control when the session has an open Remote Control connection. If it has none, or another note woke the session in the last 30 seconds, the note is queued: mike retries the push every 10 seconds while a connection exists, and otherwise adds the note to the session’s next request. Notes about efficiency, and notes about a subagent the session dispatched, are always queued for the next request.
• Sent to another service: yes. Each evaluation sends the session’s recent prompts, assistant text and a summary of tool calls to the steerer’s model. The model name decides where: a name that begins claude/ (for example claude/sonnet) runs the claude program on this machine, codex/ runs the local Codex program, and other names such as openai/… or google/… go to OpenRouter.
• Stored: every decision and every note, so the Monitor and the session page can show them.

See Privacy for everything mike stores or sends.

When there is nothing to see

mike features everything switches steering on together with every other feature; the watch-only and recommended choices leave it off. See Setup.