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Desks and chats

There are two places to talk. An agent's desk is where you talk to one agent and answer its questions. The Chats drawer is a plain chat with Claude that is not tied to any agent.

Where you see it​

An agent's desk. Tap Talk on an agent's row, or tap the agent in the room. You see its face, a speech bubble, and a reply box. Every open question the agent has for you is there too, asked in its own words. If the agent names a document, a Read button opens it. On a phone the reader fills the screen, and wide tables scroll sideways inside their own box.

Talk is greyed out while the agent is awake. A wake (one working session of an agent) must never be cut off halfway. So the button waits until the agent goes back to sleep.

The desk is one conversation per agent per person. It is kept on the box, so you can walk away and pick it up later from any device.

The Chats drawer. Tap Chats in the Office header. A drawer slides over the page. It has a list of past chats with a search box and a New chat button. Each chat can be renamed, archived, or deleted. This is an ordinary chat with Claude. Use it for anything that is not one agent's business.

The message box is the same in both places. You can type, paste an image, drop in a file, or talk into the mic. A small chip picks a fast model or a deep one.

What happens, step by step​

  1. Nora has a question: "Should I send a reminder to the 12 people who signed up?" Her row in the Office shows a note icon.
  2. The owner taps the row. Nora's desk opens with the question as a card.
  3. The owner answers one item at a time: yes, no, pick one, or add a note. Once answered, the card disappears everywhere it showed.
  4. Later the owner opens the Chats drawer to ask something general, like help with a price list.
  5. While Claude is still writing its answer, the owner thinks of one more thing. The Stop button turns back into Send as soon as text is typed.
  6. The owner sends the second message. It is folded into the answer already running, with a small note that says it was added to the answer above. There is no second bubble and no waiting.

What powers it​

PartWhat it does
conversation.jsThe shared message box. Sending, streaming the reply, stopping, uploads, the mic, the model chip.
thread.jsThe shared look of a conversation. Bubbles, formatting, pictures inline.
chats_drawer.jsThe drawer that slides over the Office and holds the list of chats.
/api/agents/{name}/threadHolds the one ongoing conversation with each agent.
/api/readOpens a document an agent named, for the Read button.
resident-wake.pyWakes agents. It holds a lock (a "busy" sign) while an agent is awake, which is why Talk goes grey.
sdk-sessions/A folder on the box with one file per chat. Up to 100 active chats. Archived ones do not count.

Why it works this way​

The desk and the drawer load the same message box. So every feature works the same in both places: paste an image in one, and you can paste it in the other.

The Chats drawer was once a page of its own. When the Office became the front door, that page was folded into a drawer on top of it. So there is one place to land, and chat is one tap away.

Send never waits

If you think of something while an answer is still coming, you can send it right away. It joins the answer in progress. The owner asked for this so a second thought never has to wait for Stop.

Connected to​