Pylon AI Assistant

Pylon is Terracotta's in-app AI advisory panel — a context-aware assistant that can answer questions about your infrastructure, repositories, pull requests, drift reports, guardrails, and more. Pylon understands what you're looking at and provides grounded, data-backed responses.

🚀 Opening Pylon

There are three ways to open Pylon:

Sidebar tab: Click the Pylon tab on the right edge of the screen (visible on every page).
"Ask Pylon" buttons: Hover over any PR, repository, guardrail, or event row to reveal an inline "Ask Pylon" button. Clicking it opens Pylon pre-focused on that specific entity.
Keyboard shortcut: Press Cmd+Shift+P (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux).

When opened via an "Ask Pylon" button, Pylon automatically sends a contextual opening question (e.g., "Give me an overview of this PR — status, risks, anything notable") and displays entity-specific suggestion pills.

🧠 How Pylon Works

Pylon builds a rich context for every message using a three-tier system:

Tier 1 — View Context (Current Entity)

When you're viewing a specific PR, repository, guardrail, or drift report, Pylon has access to that entity's full details:

Pull Request: Findings grouped by check type, plan resource changes, cost delta, guardrail results, severity breakdown
Repository: Enabled checks, projects (monorepo directories), credential status, latest drift report with items, 30-day check pass/fail rate
Guardrail: Rule text, rationale, linked repositories, recent violation history
Drift Report: Report type, drifted items with state vs. live attribute diffs

Tier 2 — Platform Context (Org-Wide)

Pylon always has access to your organization's overall state:

Connected repositories and their health
Recent pull requests and check results
Active guardrails and enforcement status
Drift reports with item-level detail
Subscription, usage, and member information
Check failure rates by type

Tier 3 — Historical Context (Trends)

Pylon can reference 30-day historical trends:

Weekly check failure rates
Guardrail violation trends by severity
Cost impact trends over time

💡 Suggestion Pills

When Pylon is open, contextual suggestion pills appear based on your current screen:

Screen	Example Suggestions
Dashboard	"Platform health check", "Summarize recent PRs", "Any drift detected?", "Active guardrails?"
Pull Request	"Summarize this PR", "What are the risks?", "Any guardrail violations?"
Repositories	"Connected repos?", "PRs this week?", "Drift detected?"
Guardrails	"Active guardrails?", "Coverage gaps?", "Any failures?"
Audit Logs	"Recent security events?", "Who made changes?", "Unusual activity?"

When focused on a specific entity (via "Ask Pylon" button), pills are tailored to that entity.

🔒 Rate Limits

Pylon is rate-limited to 30 messages per organization per minute. This applies to all users in your organization combined.

📋 TL;DR

Pylon is an AI assistant built into the Terracotta UI
Open via the sidebar tab, "Ask Pylon" buttons, or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P
Context-aware: knows your current page, entity, and org-wide state
Grounded in real data — not generic AI responses
Suggestion pills adapt to your current screen
30 messages/min per org rate limit