One machine, several accounts. A work Claude account and a personal one; a Codex account per client; a shared team account you keep away from your own. Without profiles every agent Desk launches uses whichever account that CLI happens to be logged into — so the answer to “which account is this agent spending?” is “the last one I logged in as”, for all of them at once. A profile is a named provider account. Assign one to a session and that session runs as that account, whatever the others are doing.

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What a profile actually is

Desk does not hold your credentials or log in on your behalf. It points the agent CLI at a directory of its own:
for CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR (Claude Code) or CODEX_HOME (Codex). The CLI then authenticates into that directory exactly as it would into ~/.claude or ~/.codex, and writes its own credential files there. Desk creates the directory 0700 and never reads what the CLI puts in it. A profiled launch also unsets inherited provider credentials — ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and friends — so an ambient key in your shell cannot silently outrank the account you picked. Choosing a profile means choosing it.

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Create a profile

1

Open Settings → Profiles

The gear icon in the toolbar. Profiles is the first section.
Desk settings showing the agent profiles panel with claude and codex accounts

The Profiles settings panel: one row per provider account

2

Add the account

Pick the provider (claude or codex) and give it a label you will recognise in a dropdown — an email address works well. Desk mints the id from the label.
3

Sign in inside the profile

A new profile is empty: it has no credentials until the CLI writes some. Assign it to a session, start that session, and log in there. An ambient login in your own terminal does not carry over — that is the point.
You can also create one without leaving the session form: the + beside the Profile picker opens Settings and brings you back with what you had typed still in place.

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Assign a profile to a session

In Add session or Edit session, the Profile row sits directly under the agent picker:
The add session modal with the profile dropdown open, showing the ambient account and two Codex accounts

The session form: the Profile picker lists only accounts for the chosen agent, and + creates one without losing the form

  • Ambient account — the default. The CLI uses whatever it is logged into.
  • A named profile — the session runs as that account.
The picker only offers profiles whose provider matches the session’s agent; a Claude session cannot be pointed at a Codex account. In the manifest the field is profileId, and a mismatch is a manifest error rather than a quiet fall-back to ambient — see Configuration.

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What moves with a profile, and what does not

This is the part worth reading twice. The third row is the one that surprises people. Claude Code keeps its conversation history inside its config directory, so a session’s transcripts live in whichever profile it ran under.
Changing a live session’s profile points it at a different history. The conversation it was resuming is still on disk under the old profile, but --resume will not find it from the new one, and the session starts fresh.Decide the account before a long conversation, not during one.

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Back it up

~/.config/desk/profiles holds real credentials. A backup that copies desk.yml, channels, and notes but skips it restores a workspace whose agents are all logged out. Back up the whole of ~/.config/desk — see the backup answer.

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Troubleshooting

The agent asks me to log in again after I assigned a profile. Expected: a fresh profile has no credentials. Log in inside that session once. My conversation disappeared after switching profiles. It did not — it is under the previous profile’s directory. Switch the session back to that profile to resume it, or start a fresh conversation under the new one. The profile picker does not show my account. Its provider must match the session’s agent. A profile created as codex never appears on a Claude session.

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Next steps