LOFTai › Getting Started
Core Concepts
The idea
Loft is built around intent: you describe what you want and the Assistant does the work — routing to the right model, running jobs, and recording the result. Instead of wiring a pipeline by hand, you converse with it, and the durable artifacts (assets, generations, lineage) accumulate as you go. Learning the handful of nouns below makes everything else click.
How things are organized
- Project — a body of work. It runs in Virtual (cloud) or Local (your folder) mode.
- Library (category) — a group within a project: Characters, Environments, Shots, Editorial, etc. These are the entries under LIBRARIES in the sidebar.
- Asset — a single thing in a library: a character, a shot, a cut, a daily. It has metadata, tasks, notes, and a set of tools (tabs).
- Asset item — an individual file inside an asset (an image, a video, an annotation). Assets hold many items.
- Take / version — successive results for the same asset; the review status marks which ones matter.
Review status — the pipeline signal
Every file carries a status that drives the rest of the pipeline:
- New — not yet reviewed
- Selected — a candidate you've picked
- Published — the finalized, deliverable take (Editorial conforms to the latest Published take of each shot)
- Dropped — rejected
- Reference — an internal input for generation, not a deliverable
The pieces that do the work
- Assistant — the conversational agent (header button). Finds things, answers questions, generates, and takes action across the project.
- Queue — every generation job lands here; it's where you watch progress and inspect parameters.
- Playbooks — standing guidance the Assistant reads every turn (project / asset / user / model), so you teach it your conventions once.
- Lineage — each derived item records what it came from, so a generation's history is never lost.
Tip: Want to see all of this in practice rather than in the abstract? Do Your First Hour in Loft — every noun above shows up as something you click. Otherwise read Virtual & Local Modesnext, then follow the Workflows that match what you're doing.