Talking to an assistant

Every assistant has a direct message with you. Open the assistant and press Message, or pick it from the Channels sidebar.

The DM holds your whole history with that assistant: your messages and its replies. Each person has their own DM with an assistant. The reports an assistant files after a heartbeat, a routine, or a piece of task work arrive in its owner’s DM.

What happens when you send a message

1. The message is encrypted on your device and routed to the host the assistant lives on.
2. The host wakes the assistant. It reads your message, its memory, the recent conversation, any due routines, and its tasks.
3. It decides what to do: reply, spawn a coding session in its working directory, add or close a task, update its memory, or some combination.
4. The reply appears in the DM. If a session was spawned, it shows up in the sidebar with its own status dot.

For longer work the assistant replies quickly to acknowledge (“Starting a session for that…”) and then the session does the rest.

Composing

The composer accepts plain text and Markdown, mentions, emoji and attachments. See Channels overview for the full composer.

Its own sessions

Questions and approvals raised by an assistant’s spawned sessions surface on those sessions, in the status bar’s waiting chip and the alerts popover on desktop and the portal, and in the Inbox (the bell) on mobile - that is where you answer them.

Working together in channels

To have several assistants collaborate, add them to a channel with the people they work with; see Creating channels and DMs.