Chat
The conversation window, the context gauge, and when to compact rather than clear.
Where
Employee sidebar → Talk → Chat. It is also what the Chat button on an employee card opens.
What it does
A normal conversation, with two differences worth knowing.
It is not only your messages. Anything the employee is told from elsewhere surfaces here: cards created or moved on its kanban board, tasks handed over by Nova, notifications from its channels. The chat is the employee's inbox for everything, not just for you.
The employee shows its work. When it runs a tool, the step appears in the thread, collapsed, so you can open it and see what was actually executed rather than trusting a summary.
The composer
Along the bottom: attach a file, reopen a past exchange, insert an emoji, and speak instead of typing. On the right, two indicators:
- the context gauge, a percentage — see below;
- the model tier the employee is running on,
MaxorMediumfor example, which you can change here without going into its settings.
The percentage here is not your credits. Credits are shown on the employee's own dashboard, as Credits used with the balance left. This one is about the conversation itself.
The context gauge
Hover it and it reads, for example, Context: 6k / 262k tokens (2%).
It is how full the current conversation is. Everything in the session counts: your messages, the employee's answers, the tools it ran and what they returned. It fills up on its own as the work goes on, and a long tool output can move it several points at once.
It only appears once a session has real usage. A new session, or one that has just been compacted, shows nothing.
| Level | What you see | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| under 50% | grey | nothing to do |
| 50% and over | amber, plus a compact button | act at your convenience |
| 85% and over | red | act now |
Compacting
From 50% onwards, a small compact icon appears next to the gauge. It asks for confirmation first — Compact this conversation? — and explains what it does:
Compacting summarizes everything so far into a shorter form, freeing up room so your employee can keep working without losing track of the task. It runs right away and may take a few seconds.
Compacting is the right move in the middle of a task: the employee keeps going, with the thread rewritten as a summary.
Compact, or save and clear?
Left alone, a conversation fills to the top and gets compacted anyway. That works, but a summary is a summary: the detail behind it is gone, and each compaction summarises the previous summary.
Between two tasks, the cleaner move is to save and clear. Ask the employee to write down what matters — a file, a note in its memory, a card on its kanban — then use Clear Session. The gauge goes back to zero and the next task starts on a clean thread rather than on a digest of the last one.
Rule of thumb:
- mid-task, gauge going amber → compact, and carry on;
- task finished → have the employee save what matters, then clear.
The default
A new employee starts with an empty conversation and no memory of you. What you tell it in the first exchange is what it will work from, so state who your company is and what you expect once, rather than repeating it.