The assistant

The pane on the right is a conversation with your library. It has two modes, and the difference matters.

The switch is the mode picker under the message box, labelled with whichever mode you are in: Read only or Edit.

Read only

The default. Ask anything — “what did we decide about the ingest schema?”, “what's still open on the trip plan?” — and the assistant answers from your pages, citing the pages and sources it used. Read-only mode never changes your library, so it's always safe to poke around — and it never uses an agent run, so you can ask as much as you like on any plan. See Plans & limits.

By default it finds the relevant pages itself. To control exactly what it sees, tick specific pages in the library or pin a highlighted passage to the conversation.

Edit

Switch the picker to Edit and the assistant can act: update pages, restructure a section, merge duplicates. Small, safe changes are applied directly; bigger or riskier ones are queued for your review in your Inbox first. Each Edit-mode turn is one agent run against your daily allowance.

The split is not a judgement call you have to guess at. Changes that only add go straight in: filing something from the inbox, adding links, updating metadata, creating a new page from a source, appending a claim that cites a source, or recording an inference that is marked as one. Everything that could lose or distort what you already trust waits for you:

  • Changing or deleting a confirmed fact.
  • Resolving a conflict between sources, or merging duplicate pages.
  • Editing a page you marked protected.
  • Moving content from one space to another.

And some things the agent never does at all, in either mode: send or publish anything, expose private information, or take an action outside your library.

Reviewing what the agent did

Changes waiting on your approval land in your Inbox (bottom-left), alongside anything else awaiting your attention. Click anywhere on one — or its View changes link — to read the exact edit as a diff, added and removed lines per page, so you can see precisely what would change before you Approve or Reject it. The diff opens full-width in the middle of the screen and your Inbox stays open beside it, so you can work through a stack of them without losing your place.

Activity (bottom-left) is the ledger: every run and what it changed. Undo anything that landed. Each entry is tagged with how it ended:

  • Review (gold) — it needs you. Approve or reject it in the Inbox.
  • Committed (ink) — it landed. There's an Undo on it.
  • No action (ink) — the run finished and deliberately changed nothing, because there was nothing to change. Not a failure, and not a silent one either: a run that decides your library is already correct says so rather than inventing an edit.
  • Failed (terracotta) — the run did not complete. Nothing was written.

A failed entry shows the reason underneath it, and that reason is whatever the agent or its model provider actually said — sometimes a plain sentence (“your credential has no access to that model”), sometimes a line of tooling output. It is deliberately not smoothed into “a run failed”: the specific string is usually the difference between fixing it in a minute and guessing. Nothing is lost when a run fails — re-run it once the cause is dealt with.

Conversations that keep up

  • Chats are saved and sync across devices — start on the desktop, continue on the phone.
  • Chats title themselves after the first exchange.
  • A question already running is not tied to the screen you asked it on. Switch to another chat, reload the page, or close the tab — the assistant keeps working and its answer lands in the conversation you asked in. Come back to a chat that is still working and you see it working, trace and all.
  • The assistant takes one turn at a time, because it answers with your own connected subscription. While one chat is working, the others say which one it is and offer you the way back to it.
  • Past chats live behind the History button at the top of the assistant, newest first and grouped by age. Rename or archive one from its row there; restore an archived chat from Settings → Archive.
  • Enter sends; Shift+Enter makes a newline.

The assistant can also work on a clock: schedule a prompt — a morning brief, a weekly task sweep — and it runs unattended, landing results in its own conversation. See Routines.

Answers are only as trustworthy as their sources — see Sources & trust for how citations and knowledge statuses keep the assistant honest.