Dexter

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Overview

Dexter is ProDex’s embedded AI operations partner. It has direct, sandboxed access to your factory’s data and platform artifacts, and works alongside you in natural language to ingest and transform data, build and run simulation models, configure planning optimizations, analyze results, generate shareable reports, and edit configuration across the platform. Dexter works in the open: it exposes its reasoning and every step as it works so you can audit what it did. How readily it stops to ask you when something material is ambiguous — a column’s meaning, a modeling assumption, a tradeoff — depends on the response mode: Max and Ultra ask clarifying questions, Fast asks only the most critical ones, and Turbo makes sensible assumptions instead of asking. Each Factory gets its own Dexter with its own memory and its own access boundary. Dexter cannot see across factories and has no open access to the public internet — it works inside your factory’s sandbox. It can, however, reach the external systems your organization has connected: configured integrations let it read from and call your ERP, MES, and databases.

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The Dexter Page

The Dexter page is where you start conversations and return to work already in progress. Its left sidebar keeps everything close at hand:

• New Conversation opens a fresh conversation with Dexter.
• Search finds past conversations and workflows by name.
• Workflows holds reusable procedures you can run with Dexter. Expand it to open an existing workflow or use + to create one. See Custom Workflows.
• Scheduled opens the Dexter tasks that run on a schedule. See Scheduled Jobs.
• Folders group related conversations: open a conversation’s menu and choose Move to folder → New folder. Each folder appears as its own section, and your other conversations are listed under History.
• Preferences, fixed at the bottom of the sidebar, sets how Dexter should work across every new conversation in this factory.

The center of the page offers Suggestions: guided starting points for common tasks. The composer stays at the bottom so you can start with your own request at any time. When a conversation has an active workflow, or Dexter is running sub-agents, a Context panel opens on the right of the Dexter page, with a tab for each: Workflow (the workflow Dexter is following), Agents (the sub-agents working on this conversation — click one to watch its transcript), and Workboard (the shared task board Dexter and its sub-agents use in Ultra mode). Collapse or expand it with the side-panel toggle. While you’re on other pages of the platform, an AI Assistant dock keeps the active conversation available.

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Starting a conversation

Start with New Conversation or just type in the current one, in plain language. A fresh conversation opens with quick-start cards that seed common starting points. The composer takes typed prompts, pasted screenshots, and drag-and-drop attachments, and lets you:

• Attach a file — open the + menu and choose Upload files, or drag files straight onto the composer. Anything you upload stays available to Dexter afterwards under User Files.
• Add workflow context — use the same + menu’s Workflow entry to choose the workflow Dexter should follow.
• Start a workflow with / — type / in the composer to pick a workflow and run it.
• Set a goal — choose Goal from the + menu for a long-running task with a clear finish line. Dexter keeps working toward the goal until it has verified it’s done; you can pause, edit, or remove the goal at any time.
• Dictate — click the microphone to speak your message instead of typing it. To turn dictation off or change its key, open your account menu, choose Settings, then select Voice dictation.
• Watch context usage — a live indicator of how full the conversation’s context window is. As it fills, older turns get compacted; a high reading is a good cue to start fresh.
• Set the response mode — the icon next to the send button shows the current mode. See Response modes.

Conversations are independent — each has its own working context and history — but the knowledge base and every platform artifact are shared across all of them.

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Message actions

Hover a message to act on it:

• Your own messages show when they were sent, a copy button, and — when a version of your factory was saved at that message — an hourglass. The hourglass opens two actions: Roll back restores your whole factory to how it stood at that message, discarding every change made since (the current state is saved as a version first, so you can undo the rollback), and Export downloads that version of the factory as a .prdx file.
• Dexter’s replies carry copy, thumbs up, and thumbs down. Thumbs are product feedback — your ratings go to the ProDex team to help us improve Dexter; they don’t retrain it or change how it behaves inside your factory. To change how Dexter works for you, set a rule or just tell it directly.

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Response Modes

The response mode sets how Dexter trades speed for thoroughness. Pick it from the icon next to the send button; new conversations start in Fast, and you can switch at any point in a conversation without losing its history.

• Turbo — quick lookups and small edits where you’d rather Dexter just proceed.
• Fast — everyday work that needs a quick, careful answer.
• Max — multi-step or consequential work.
• Ultra — work where correctness matters most and you’re willing to trade time for extra verification.

A few things change with the mode beyond the table. Turbo doesn’t run an exploratory analysis, and only Max and Ultra offer one when you upload files. If Dexter tells you something is only available in a higher mode, switch modes and ask again.

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Session Context

Dexter always knows what page you’re on and which objects you have selected when you send a message. You don’t have to restate “the Line A model” or “the run I have open” — Dexter reads that from the page.

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What You’ll See While Dexter Works

• Every tool call is visible and expandable — file reads, scripts, queries, edits. Nothing happens behind the curtain.
• Thinking vs. sub-agents — a “Thought for…” indicator is Dexter reasoning before it answers (expand it to read that reasoning); a sub-agent appears as its own pill when Dexter hands a subtask to a specialized helper (click it to watch that helper’s transcript).
• Long jobs run asynchronously — simulations, planning runs, and other long tasks kick off in the background and report back when they finish.

Alongside the reply stream, Dexter keeps a live task list and asks structured questions as clickable cards, including short approvals before involved work. The task list and the reports generated in the conversation collect as Tasks and Reports chips just above the message box. That’s the full interaction surface; see Chat, Tasks & Questions.

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Attachments

Drag files into the input or choose Upload files from the + menu. Dexter reads tabular data, documents, images, and CAD files. It profiles the data it inspects — sampling large files and disclosing the scope of what it read rather than implying it read every row — and, in modes that ask questions, checks with you before assuming what a column or code means. Uploads persist and are managed under Data → Files, in the Uploaded files folder; see User Files for formats, limits, and lifecycle.

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Capabilities at a Glance

• Data — profiles uploads and builds documented pipelines that trace every derived value back to its source. See User Files.
• Simulate — creates and edits every simulation object, runs models, and explains throughput, utilization, and bottlenecks. See Simulation.
• Plan — configures and runs the planning optimizer end-to-end. See Planning.
• What-if — runs each scenario as its own run and compares them side by side, and characterizes variability by replicating a run with several random seeds.
• BOMs & CAD — builds BOMs, explores the graph, drives the configurator, and analyzes CAD.
• Reports — authors polished, shareable PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel deliverables. See Reports.
• Custom modules — builds interactive pages for your factory, including dashboards for exploring your data, that you open from the Custom modules page. See Custom modules.

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Building Blocks

Each concept has its own page — the short version:

• Memories — Dexter’s structured, per-factory knowledge base of your operation, your data sources, and the artifacts it has built. A read-only organization layer sits alongside it.
• Rules & Preferences — your standing instructions for how Dexter works in this factory, applied in every conversation.
• User Files — everything you’ve uploaded, kept in the Uploaded files folder under Data → Files and readable in any conversation.
• Reports — polished deliverables Dexter generates on request, delivered in chat.
• Scheduled Jobs — recurring or one-off tasks Dexter runs on a schedule; each run opens as its own conversation.
• Custom Workflows — reusable procedures you and Dexter define once and trigger by name later.

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Limits

• No open web access. Dexter doesn’t browse the public internet. Through configured integrations it can read from and query the external systems your organization has connected (ERP, MES, databases), but nothing beyond those.
• Sandboxed to a single factory — one factory per conversation, no cross-factory visibility.
• Changes land immediately. The quickest way to undo a single change is to ask Dexter to revert it. When your factory has a saved version from before the change, you can also roll the whole factory back to it from Factory settings → Version history, or from the hourglass on a message where one appears.

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Best Practices

• Name specific entities (“the CNC station on Line B”, “the July demand plan”) rather than “the thing we looked at earlier.”
• Let Dexter ask. For consequential work, use Max or Ultra so Dexter asks clarifying questions. Answers are recorded once and reused — a five-minute Q&A up front saves rework later.
• Approve or push back when Dexter asks. An approval question is the point where Dexter is asking you to catch anything wrong before it becomes commitment, so look at the work it shows you before you answer.
• Iterate. Short, focused turns beat one giant prompt.
• Audit Memories and Rules periodically. They shape every future response — keep them accurate and prune what’s outdated.