Teammates working together

Teammates can talk to each other. One can ask a colleague a question, or hand off a piece of work to it. Either way, you approve the pair first, and you can read everything they said.

Asking and handing off

• A question is answered on the side. The colleague answers from a conversation of its own with the asker, using its own folder and tools, and its conversation with you is left alone. The asker carries on with its work, and the answer arrives later as a line in its conversation, with the colleague’s picture and the start of what it said.
• A handoff gives the colleague a piece of work to do. It opens a work thread on the colleague with a brief saying who sent it and why. The colleague works on it with its full tools while you keep talking to it in its main conversation. When it finishes, the result goes back to the teammate that handed it over.

Ask a teammate in plain words: “ask Mack whether the API change is merged”, or “hand the release notes to Clementine”. It decides which kind of message fits.

A teammate can also see what its colleagues are doing: whether each is idle, working, waiting on you or stopped, and what it is working on. It never sees what anyone said.

Approving a pair

The first time a teammate tries to reach a colleague, a card in its conversation asks you to allow it. It names the two teammates and says what the colleague may do. Choose Allow this session, Always allow and the asking teammate’s name, or Deny.

A grant goes one way. Allowing Mack to ask Clementine does not let Clementine ask Mack, and it does not let Clementine pass the work on to anyone else. (A Hotline Agent teammate with Whole machine access needs no approval.)

Standing grants are listed in the colleague’s pane, under Permissions → Collaboration, each with Revoke.

Handoffs

In the sender’s conversation, a handoff is one line: “Handed to” the colleague and the title of the work. The colleague’s conversation with you does not fill up with handoffs. One line says what it is working on and for whom (“Working on a handoff from…”), and opens its threads.

Press Open on either line to read the work thread in the Threads pane. A handoff is read along, not chatted in. The brief shows in full, and in place of the message box a bar says who handed what to whom, with a link to the sender’s conversation. To steer the work, talk to the sender there. You can stop the thread’s turn while it runs. If the colleague needs something from you, the bar becomes a box for your answer.

A teammate works on up to three threads at a time. A handoff to a teammate that is fully busy waits its turn. Threads take turns on the teammate’s computer, if it has one, and a thread that finds the computer busy is told who has it.

Conversations between two teammates

A question, and the back-and-forth after it, is kept as a conversation between the pair. Each side has one line for it in its conversation (“Waiting on…” or “Talked with…” for the asker, “…asked” for the colleague). Pressing that line opens the conversation, read-only, in the Threads pane. The Threads section of a teammate’s pane lists every colleague it has talked to.

When they go on too long

When two teammates have sent each other twelve messages without you, both conversations show a Paused card. Choose Keep going or Stop exchange. Anything you say to either teammate also resets the count.

What it costs

Each teammate runs on its own driver and model, so a question to a colleague on a paid model costs what that model costs. Handing work to a teammate on a cheaper or local model is a way to spend less on routine work.