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Assistant chat

How to talk to an assistant — text, attachments, and what happens behind the scenes.

Available on
  • Desktop
  • Web Portal
  • Mobile

Each assistant has a chat channel. When you send a message, the assistant wakes, reads its context, replies, and may start a session if the work needs one.

Where chat lives

On every surface, open the assistant and pick the Chat tab. The transcript is the entire history with this assistant: your messages, the assistant’s replies, system notes when sessions are spawned, and references to tasks the assistant created or finished.

Chat is per-assistant. Two assistants on your account have two different chats. Within an assistant, every user with access reads and writes the same channel; messages are attributed to the user who sent them.

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. The assistant reads your message, its memory, the recent transcript, any due routines, and its tasks.
  3. The assistant decides what to do:
    • Reply on chat.
    • Spawn a coding session inside its working directory.
    • Add or close a task.
    • Update its memory.
    • Some combination of those.
  4. You see the reply appear in chat. If a session was spawned, the session shows up in the sidebar with its own status dot.

The “decide what to do” step usually takes a few seconds. For longer work, the assistant replies quickly to acknowledge (“Starting a session for that…”) and then the session does the rest.

Composing a message

The chat composer accepts plain text and Markdown. Press Enter to send. To share files or other artifacts with the assistant today, drop them into its workbench (see Workbench) — the assistant can read from there. Attaching files directly to a chat message is not supported in the current release.

On the portal

Same layout as desktop. Pinned questions and approvals from the assistant’s spawned sessions also surface here so you don’t have to switch tabs.

On mobile

The chat is the default landing tab when you open an assistant. The mobile keyboard supports voice input; see Mobile > Voice input.

What’s saved, what isn’t

  • Saved: every message, both sides. References to tasks and sessions.
  • Not saved: drafts you typed but didn’t send (they’re cleared if you close the surface).

The full chat transcript is part of the assistant’s wake context up to a recent window. Older messages are still on disk; the assistant can search through them with the recall tool if needed.

Multiple users in one channel

When two users on your account both have access to an assistant, their messages interleave in the same channel. Each message is tagged with the sender. The assistant sees who said what and can ask the right person clarifying questions.

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