Chatting with your agent

The dashboard chat is the main way you work with the agent. You type (or dictate) in plain language; the agent decides which of its tools to use — you never call tools directly. This page covers the controls around the chat itself.

The built-in help

The fastest reference isn't this page — it's the ? button next to the settings gear in your own dashboard. It generates its content live from your install, so it always lists exactly the slash commands and capabilities your version and add-ons actually have, even after updates.

Slash commands

A few things are quicker as a direct command than a sentence. Type /help in the chat for the current list; the staples are:

• /image <prompt> — generate an image directly, skipping the language model (fastest way to test a prompt).
• /model <name> — switch the local model for this session.
• /backend local|claude — switch between the local model and the Claude API.
• /new — start a fresh chat.

Watching it work — and stopping it

While the agent is thinking, a small status line under the spinner shows what's actually happening ("Using generate_image…", "Transcribing recording.mp3…", elapsed seconds). If you realize you asked the wrong thing, the Send button turns into a Stop button during a turn — clicking it cancels the model mid-generation, server-side, and nothing further is changed.

Clarifying questions

For anything expensive or hard to redo — image generation, long research, file changes — the agent is instructed to ask one short clarifying question first when your request is genuinely ambiguous, rather than guessing and wasting minutes. Answering it in the chat continues the work; for quick asks it just proceeds and tells you what it assumed.

Quick actions

Open the menu (☰, top-left) to find the Daily Briefing and Goal Review quick actions. They run pre-built prompts with read-only tools — they can summarize and flag things but never change data. You can also simply ask for them in chat ("run my morning brief"). See Daily briefings & goals for scheduling these to run automatically.