v3.5 settled the material — colour, type, motion. Nothing here changes it. What 4.0 versions is the layer above: how surfaces are arranged, how an object reads, and how much a person has to hold in their head to use Relay on a phone. The whole proposal is legible in one switch below.
One sheet. Everything secondary lives here, not above the list.
The rail carries places. Actions are not places: Send is a button, Search is ⌘K
(shell law 4), and identity settings live under You. Three of the removals are not judgement calls —
Streams, Series and Sessions are literally one table in the platform (pulse_contexts,
differing only by pulse_type), so they are one surface with a type lens, not three pages.
| v3.5 rail item | Where it goes in 4.0 | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard · Inbox · Requests | Now | All three answer one question — what needs you. Five bands, empty bands render nothing. |
| Getting started | Now band 0 | A band that disappears when done, not a permanent rail row. |
| Transfers | Relays | Renamed to the object. The user-facing noun is a relay; transfer is the API word. |
| Stream · Series · Sessions | Streams + type lens | One table in the platform. One surface, three types, one shared list shell. |
| Catalog · Trash | Files | Libraries and shelves are the taxonomy; trash is a scope, not a destination. |
| Graph | Explore | Graph · Catalog · Journey are three lenses over one corpus, behind one door. |
| Network · Connect · Capture | Connect | Everything you are connected to — agents, integrations, people, orgs — in one place. |
| Search | ⌘K | Shell law: ⌘K is the principal search. A search page is a second vocabulary. |
| Send | Primary button | An action, not a place. It belongs where the thumb is. |
| Organizations · Contract · Team · Profile · Settings | You | Account management is a hub you visit, not chrome you carry on every screen. |
| Demo · Receive · Admin Console ↗ | You (role-gated) | Hide, don't disable — and don't reserve rail space for three people. |
streamlined cohort flag already shipped as a
server-side lever for hiding advanced surfaces. 4.0 makes the streamlined shape the default
and lets depth be something you walk toward.
Relay already has a Cloudflare-grade layer model — access, projection, features — but the product never names it, and "lens" is currently spent seven different ways across the estate. 4.0 gives a person exactly two verbs. Switching a hat re-seals: objects in another workspace are not dimmed, they are not there. Switching a lens re-weights: everything stays, emphasis moves. Positions never change — that is what proves a hat is a boundary and not a filter.
Narrowing a view must never widen access. Authorization is evaluated once, server-side, before any
lens renders — so a lens is presentation over an already-filtered set. This is already law in
projection.py; 4.0 makes it visible vocabulary rather than an internal invariant.
Today one string covers all of them: "not available on your plan." It is wrong twice out of three times. 4.0 branches on the denial source — plan → upgrade · org → ask an admin · absent here → switch hats.
Arrange lenses, scope lenses, library lenses, audience lenses, search lenses, list lenses and workspace lenses all currently share a name. 4.0 ships a glossary: the switcher is the hat; Force/Time/Orbit/Heat is Arrange; Active/All/Archived is scope; audience is audience.
Graph transfers, chains and the corpus map stay as deep as they are. What 4.0 standardises is the door: every rich surface opens on a bounded, current working set — never a dump — and the person pulls the thread from there. This contract is already ratified for the Graph Map (render cap 250, hard ceiling 500, capsules over members); 4.0 applies the same door to Files, Journey, and any surface that can exceed a screen.
This page imports /brand/generated/relay-tokens-v36.css and invents no colour. Neutral surfaces,
teal on touch points only, one italic display moment per view, flat, 0.5px borders, mono for data.
If a 4.0 screen needs a new token, the composition is wrong.
These pages once overrode the fill to #0f766e ahead of the ruling, because the shipped
#0d9488 is 3.74:1 with white and fails AA at button sizes. RCTX-240 was ratified on
2026-08-12, so the override is gone — the fill now reads straight from
--rly-accent-fill like every other value here.
Code, not PIN. Receive on the button. Stream, not the old wire name. Relay is the object and the
verb. ⇄ stays the Code anchor in rich and plain alike. 4.0 renames surfaces, never the
primitives.
relay-board/docs/product/experience-4-0.md
Console concept →
Hats & Lenses v1 →
All concepts →