BEAMdocs usebeam.sh →

BEAM internal beta — tester note (September 2026)

BEAM is in internal beta, by invitation. Nothing is for sale yet.

You're on the internal beta. BEAM is being finished for a funder pitch in late October, and the one thing that gates the new shell is a full week of you using it with no defect filed. This note is everything you need. It takes two minutes.

1. Turn on the new shell

In the terminal:

shell unified on

The page reloads into the Unified Surface: a Team rail on the left, People and Projects in the sidebar, the Terminal as the first tab in the centre, and an Agents rail on the right. Your work, docs, tasks, channels and DMs are all the same data; only the layout changed.

To go back to the classic layout at any time:

shell unified off

If you'd rather stay keyboard-only in the classic terminal for good, shell legacy on pins that and wins over everything else. shell legacy off releases it.

2. What's new that you'll notice

  • Channels & DMs now live in the People rail on the right. Unread badges count messages that arrived on this device while you were elsewhere; they are not shared between your devices.
  • Where you left off follows your account. Open BEAM on another device and it opens the same Team, Project and conversation. Window size and terminal scrollback stay per device.
  • Destructive commands ask properly. delete, purge, clear done, delete project, sync wipe-remote, account delete and reset now show exactly what will be removed, ask for a y or a typed code, and report what actually survived. reset confirm and account delete confirm are no longer one-liners; each is a two-step with a code.
  • Agents propose, you approve. Anything an external tool (an MCP client) tries to write lands in the Agents Inbox as a proposal. Nothing changes until you approve it in the terminal with proposals approve <n> (or reject with proposals reject <n>). Proposals live on the device where BEAM was open when they arrived.
  • Your own MCP servers are a per-account opt-in: Settings → MCP → "Your own MCP servers". Off by default and experimental. Servers you add are kept on your account and come back after a deploy, listed as disconnected until you press connect. A header you enter (for example a bearer token) is stored encrypted on BEAM's server and sent only to that URL; you can see that it exists but not read it back.
  • Voice draws on a monthly voice budget shared across engines, when a budget is configured on the server you are using. Settings → Usage shows what you have spent against it. Near the budget BEAM says so once; at the budget the call ends and says why. If you turn on the overflow engine (voice engine gpt), GPT answers, not Claude, and BEAM tells you so out loud.

3. What to do when something's wrong

File it, don't work around it. One issue per thing, on the BEAM repository you were given access to, titled [beta] <what you saw>, with:

  1. What you typed or clicked.
  2. What you expected.
  3. What happened (paste the terminal text; it's designed to be pasted).
  4. shell unified on or off, and which device.

If BEAM says something happened that didn't, or says nothing happened when it did, that is the highest-priority kind of bug here. File it even if it seems small.

4. What not to expect

  • No "real-time" anything is promised. Sync is a pull; it says "restored from your other device" only when it actually was.
  • Messaging is encrypted on your device before it is sent. That is the whole claim; nobody here will say more than that until an outside review has looked.
  • The GPT voice engine is new and being measured; the first ten sessions decide whether it stays.

5. Going back to the old layout permanently

shell legacy on

That's it. Thanks for testing. The week starts the day you flip the switch.