Working in a conversation

Each teammate has one conversation that goes on for as long as the teammate exists. This page covers what you can do in it.

Send, steer, stop

Type in the message box and press Enter (Shift + Enter starts a new line).

While the teammate is working, a card floating under the header shows the steps of the turn as they happen: the commands it runs, the files it reads, the edits it makes, and a Thinking row you can open. The teammate’s mark at the foot of the conversation shows what kind of work it is doing.

You do not have to wait for it to finish:

Send another message and it reaches the teammate while it works. On Hotline Agent, Claude Code, Codex and Muse Code it joins the task already in hand; other agents read it when they finish the turn.
Interrupt the turn with Esc in the message box. More → Stop the session stops the agent altogether; your next message starts it again.

When a turn fails at the network, at the provider or on a rate limit, its error card offers Try again. That runs the same request again without repeating your message.

Replies, reactions and copying

Hover over a message for a small bar with React, Reply and Copy, or right-click it for the same actions as a menu. With a few words selected, right-click copies just those.

Reply quotes the message above the box (“Replying to…”). Press R on a teammate’s message to do the same from the keyboard, and Esc to stop replying. Clicking a quote in the conversation goes back to the message it quotes.
React offers six emoji, the same ones as on the phone.

Code blocks have a copy key in their corner. A bare link gets a preview card. Mermaid diagrams are drawn in place, with a toggle to see their source. Pictures and diagrams open full size in the window’s own viewer.

Attach files and pictures

The + beside the message box (Attach a file) adds files. You can also drop them on the window or paste them. A pasted screenshot becomes an attachment named “Pasted image” and the time. See Pictures for what a teammate can see in an image.

A teammate can send you files back with send_file: a report, a chart, a screenshot of its computer. A picture shows in the conversation; a PDF opens when you press Open; any file can be saved where you choose. Nothing opens by itself.

Search

⌘/Ctrl + F, or the magnifier in the title bar, searches the open teammate’s conversation, every chapter of it (Here), or every teammate’s (Everywhere). With nothing typed, the search lists the chapters themselves, each with its handoff note.

Chapters

A model can only hold so much at once, so a conversation is divided into chapters. Each chapter is one working context for the agent. You see a chapter as a divider across the conversation with a title and a time.

A chapter closes in one of three ways:

After a quiet stretch. Settings → General → Conversations → Start a new chapter after sets how many quiet hours that takes. The default is 8. Quiet time counts from the last message, and a turn still running is never cut off.
When you ask. More → Start a new chapter closes the current one now. Do this when you change subject, so the teammate starts clean.
When the teammate asks. A teammate can close its own chapter when it finishes a piece of work.

When a chapter closes, a model writes a handoff note: the title, the goal, the outcome, what is still open, the decisions made and the files touched. The next chapter starts from that note and the last few lines, not from the whole history. The teammate can still search its earlier chapters when it needs something from them.

More → Reopen previous chapter goes back one chapter: the teammate picks up the context it had there. You can go back only one step, and only to a chapter that ran on the same agent; when you can’t, the menu item says why.

A long piece of work stays in one chapter. When a Hotline Agent teammate fills its model’s context in the middle of a turn, it makes room and carries on in the same chapter. Claude Code, Codex and the other harnesses manage their own context.

The More menu in the conversation’s header also has:

Start a side thread and Threads: see Side threads and subagents.
Reveal working directory, which opens the teammate’s folder.
Show teammate, which opens its pane (⌘/Ctrl + I, or press the teammate’s name).
Remove teammate…, which deletes the teammate and its conversation after asking.