Exploring CoCo Desktop
1. Exploring CoCo Desktop
Let's take a tour of the CoCo Desktop interface. We have a lot to cover in this tour. We are going to look at some common interface items, projects, sessions, the Files panel, the SQL playground, and Editor view. Before we get started, keep in mind that CoCo Desktop undergoes constant updates, so what you see here may be slightly different than the current version of software. CoCo Desktop has two different views, selectable from the top-right: Agent view and Editor view. Right now we are looking at Agent view. Agent view makes your interaction with the AI agent the priority, by putting it front and center. This is the Prompt Box, where you enter your prompt to the AI Agent. Here you can switch between Agent Mode and Plan Mode. In Plan Mode, CoCo is in read-only mode and will describe what it plans to do without executing any changes. Agent Mode will allow CoCo to build and modify your environment. The Model Selector allows you to choose the best model for your prompt. You can even switch models within a session. Auto will pick the best model for your region. Auto Intelligent will favor the most capable models, but at a higher cost. Auto Efficient will lower costs, but may reduce the quality of results. The context ring shows how much of the context window is being used. With any AI, the context window is the amount of text and other content that the model can consider at once. If the context window gets too full, CoCo can lose track of what has happened in the conversation. You can hover your mouse over the ring to see a breakdown of how the context window is being used. In addition to the main area in the center, there are additional tools and functions on the sides. Automations allow you to automatically run common prompts at a scheduled interval. CoCo Desktop is very powerful at building Apps. This section lets you easily manage apps that you have built locally or ones deployed in Snowflake. Agent view makes it easy to work on multiple projects at a time. It is typical to have multiple projects. Here, we see a project for a Data App, and a Playground project. Here, on the right, is where you can open the Files Panel. CoCo will likely be building and modifying many files. You can view the files of the current project here. This is the Agentic Browser. CoCo Desktop includes a web browser that CoCo can access. This lets CoCo browse the web, perform automated UI testing and more. The SQL Playground is a scratchpad to quickly run SQL statements against your Snowflake account. Need to run a quick terminal command? You can pop out a terminal panel, here. If you are working in a git repository, the changes between branches can be seen here. Let's talk a bit more about the Projects section. CoCo Desktop organizes everything into Projects. You would typically have a separate project in CoCo Desktop for each project that you are working on. For example, you may have one Project for the Data App that you are working on and another for a machine learning model you are building. Being able to see multiple projects at a time is unique to Agent View, and does not appear in Editor View. As you might guess, it can make multitasking easy. It is typical for developers to enter a prompt in one project, and, while waiting for it to execute, write another one in a separate project. Each Project is associated with a folder that contains all of the files and sub-folders belonging to the project. When you use CoCo to create things, they will be created within that project folder. You can create new projects with the Add New Project button, here. As I mentioned before, each Project is associated with a folder. So to create a new Project within CoCo Desktop, you simply point it to your project folder. In addition to using a local folder, you can also connect to a host using SSH, or clone a git repo. You probably noticed that each Project has one or more items listed beneath it. These are not files associated with the project, but CoCo Sessions. A session is a conversation that you have had with CoCo. It includes a log of everything you said, along with what CoCo said and did. Let's take a look at an existing session. When CoCo works within a session, it loads the entire conversation history into its context window. If the session gets too long, it may not fit into the limited context window and you may not get the best results since CoCo essentially loses track of what happened earlier. For this reason, it is helpful to keep sessions focused to a single task. It is typical to have many sessions for each Project. In this Session, CoCo created the folder structure for a React app. We can see the prompt that was used, here at the top. CoCo will explain its process below. As you can see, it has reported the files and folder structure that it created. We could continue building out this app by writing another prompt, here. Since we'd be working in the same session, CoCo will remember the files and folders it already created. The most recent prompt created and modified files, so we see this section here, showing the changed files. Here are the 6 files that CoCo created. Notice that you have the option to either keep or undo these changes. Although CoCo usually does a great job doing what you asked, it can sometimes do something unexpected. The Keep and Undo options allow you to stay in control so that you can keep an eye on CoCo and easily fix things if it goes astray. Let's look at more detail for one of these files. Clicking that file actually opened the File panel that you learned about earlier. In addition, it also opened the package.json file. Since this file was changed, it has opened it in diff view. Green highlighted text is text that has been added. Red highlighted text is text that was removed. Since this is a new file, everything is green. This view lets us examine the changes that CoCo made in detail and keep or undo the changes individually. Let's take a look at this second project, called "Playground." This session is within the Playground project. The Playground project is a special project that is always included in CoCo Desktop. It is a scratchpad area that you can use to try out prompts that are not associated with any of your real projects. Let's open the File panel. As you can see, this shows a different set of files than the last time we had the Files panel open. This is because we are now in a different Project. Before, we were seeing the project folder for the Data App Project. Now we are looking at the project folder for the Playground Project. In addition to the Playground Project, there is also the SQL Playground. The SQL Playground is a place where you can execute commands against your Snowflake account. Remember, CoCo Desktop is already connected to your account to access the AI models, so it can execute SQL through that same connection. The SQL Playground is a great place to test out some quick SQL statements or explore your data environment without having to open up Snowsight. Let's execute the SQL statement. Whichever SQL statement contains the cursor is executed and the results are shown below. So far, we have been exploring Agent View. Let's switch to Editor View to take a quick look at it. This is the Editor view. As you can see, instead of emphasizing the agent, the main panel in the center shows files from your project, while CoCo is located in a smaller side-panel to the right. While Agent View let you easily work on multiple Projects at a time, Editor view only shows one Project. But it does let you focus more closely on that Project and makes it easy to view and edit multiple files from it. If you are familiar with Microsoft VS Code, Editor view should look familiar. The left panel has many of the familiar items that you see in VS Code, like the File Explorer, Search, and Source Control. But there are also some new items that are unique to CoCo. This opens the Snowflake Catalog panel, which will let you browse the databases, schemas, tables, and other objects in your Snowflake account. This is the same Agentic Browser that was available in Agent View. It is a web browser embedded within CoCo Desktop. Both you and CoCo can use it. CoCo Desktop is very powerful at building Apps. This section lets you easily manage apps that you have built locally or ones deployed in Snowflake. Automations allow you to automatically run common prompts at a scheduled interval.2. Let's practice!
Create Your Free Account
or
By continuing, you accept our Terms of Use, our Privacy Policy and that your data is stored in the USA.