Reference

The facts you look up once: what Motriz needs to run, how the window behaves, every keyboard shortcut, where data lives on disk, how the updater works, and where the product's current edges are. For the telemetry contract and agent access model, see Privacy and safety.

System requirements

Two conveniences run on Apple's on-device foundation models and need more than the baseline macOS 13: automatic work-item naming, and the Suggest buttons that draft commit messages and PR text in the Git and GitHub dialog. Neither has a cloud fallback — Motriz does not send this text to a provider behind your back. Without Apple Intelligence, new work items simply keep the title "New work", and the Suggest buttons explain: "Apple Intelligence suggestions require macOS 26, supported Apple silicon, and Apple Intelligence enabled. The fields remain manually editable." Everything else works the same on macOS 13.

The window

• Default size is 1440×900. Minimum height is 600. The minimum width is dynamic: 600 px normally, 940 px while a chat/workspace split or a staged prototype is on screen — macOS grows the window if it is below the new minimum. See Workspace and artifacts for how the split behaves.
• The title bar is an overlay: no native title text, custom-positioned traffic lights inside the app's header strip. Header strips drag like a title bar, and double-clicking one zooms the window.
• The window launches hidden and appears after the first paint, so startup never flashes. Only one instance of Motriz runs at a time.

Notifications

Settings → Notifications covers "macOS notifications for agent work that finishes while you're elsewhere." There are exactly two toggles, both off by default: "Run finished" ("A run completed") and "Run failed" ("A run stopped with an error"). The notifications read "{work item title} is done." and "{work item title} stopped with an error."

Notifications fire only while Motriz is in the background — hidden to the Dock or behind another app. As the settings page puts it: "Notifications only fire while Motriz is in the background — nothing interrupts you while the app is front and center."

Keyboard shortcuts

That is the complete set. There is no shortcut for opening Settings and none for the workspace panel.

Where Motriz stores data

Everything lives under ~/Library/Application Support/Motriz/. Three locations accept environment-variable overrides for relocation: MOTRIZ_DB (the database file), MOTRIZ_DESIGNS_DIR (the artifact store), and MOTRIZ_UPLOADS_DIR (prompt attachments).

There is no .env file; Settings is the source of truth for configuration. Repositories are never copied into this folder — a connected repository stays exactly where it is on disk.

The updater

Motriz updates itself from a single release channel. There is no update setting and no separate download step after the first install.

1. Check.

   Only when running from an installed Motriz.app bundle, Motriz fetches https://motriz.ai/downloads/latest.json at most once per hour. Failures are silent; it just tries later. An update is offered only when the published build id is strictly greater than the running one.

2. Offer.

   A pill appears at the top of the sidebar footer: "Update ready (v{version}) — restart". While runs are active the pill is disabled and reads "Update ready (v{version}) — stop active runs first"; installs are refused until every agent stops ("Stop all active agents before installing an update"). Motriz never swaps the app out from under live work.

3. Verify.

   The archive download is capped at 200 MB and checked against the manifest's SHA-256. The extracted app must also pass a strict code-signature check against the Motriz Developer ID team before anything is touched.

4. Swap and relaunch.

   The running bundle is replaced in place — the old app is kept aside and restored if anything fails, so you are never left without a working app — and Motriz relaunches. During the install the pill reads "Updating…"; problems show "Update failed: {message}".

If an update refuses to install or keeps failing, see Troubleshooting.

Version and About

The Settings page's sidebar footer shows the running version as motriz · v1.0.0. Settings → About ("App version and local paths.") lists the app version, the repository scan roots, and the absolute database path. Releases also carry a numeric build id; the updater compares build ids, not version strings, so a re-published build of the same version can still be offered.

Current boundaries

What Motriz 1.0.0 is not, stated plainly:

• macOS only, Apple Silicon only. No Windows, Linux, or Intel builds.
• The app UI is in English today. The web-search locale picker affects search results only, and the multilingual dictation models detect spoken language automatically — neither changes the UI language.
• Account identity is not repository sync. Your account carries identity, plan entitlements, and managed-service usage. Local products, repositories, conversations, decisions, and BYOK configuration do not follow you to another machine.
• Local and managed AI coexist. CLI subprocesses and calls to providers you connect run from the desktop. Explicitly invoked managed capabilities — such as the First Decision — use Motriz Cloud, show their maximum Motriz Compute draw before running, and consume the allowance included with your plan.
• One active journey product on the free account. The coding workspace has no such limit; plain repository products are not journey products.
• One managed job at a time on the free account. Managed research artifacts are retained for 30 days on Free — see Privacy and safety for export and deletion.
• No collaboration or multi-user surfaces. Motriz is a single-person workspace in 1.0.0.
• No top-ups, rollover, or overage charges. A free account includes 50 Motriz Compute per month; the allowance resets monthly and unused compute does not carry over. If it runs out, local work and providers you connect yourself remain available.

Broader cloud capabilities such as collaboration and repository sync are direction, not shipped product. This page describes only what 1.0.0 does.