Chat
The chat is a conversation with mechabedo itself. It is not a wrapper around one of your harnesses: it runs on mechabedo's own tiers, it holds tools over everything the app can see, and it can open and drive sessions on your behalf.
A turn is a list of blocks
Not a string. Text, reasoning folds, tool calls with their answers and their results, charts, and feedback chips, in the order they happened, persisted with the conversation.
A tool call is drawn where it ran, so a reply that fetched something says which thing, and clicking the fold shows what came back.
The model line
The pills at the top of the conversation are mechabedo's own tiers: fast, auto, think. Picking one moves this conversation.
/model on the prompt line does the same by name, and reaches a gateway model directly as well as a tier.
What the chat can do
Whenever an AgentDeck server is configured, a turn carries a tool set and the model runs a multi-step loop, so one instructive prompt can chain reads and actions.
Drawing the diagram…
A turn that ends early says so. The loop has a ceiling, and a reply that reaches it, or that runs into the model's output limit, closes on a line naming which of the two happened rather than stopping in the middle of the work.
A handoff is asked for, never inferred. Nothing hands work over by itself and no classifier guesses at it: a request becomes a handoff only when the model reaches for the tool. The prompt goes out through the relay rather than straight at the session, so when that session finishes the turn, what it said is delivered back into this conversation and the chat carries on from it.
A loadout is the only way it can name a model
launch_agent and open_session take a loadout name and nothing else. An unrecognised name comes back with the list of real ones rather than launching quietly on a default. See Loadouts and kits.
Chat kits
What the chat carries into a turn - which tools it may reach, which catalog skills it reads, the voice it answers in, and any standing instruction - is one named selection: a chat kit.
| Kit | Carries |
|---|---|
| Pro | Every category, every skill, no standing text. The default, and the fallback |
| Lean | A named list of categories, and the Lean register as standing text |
This is deliberately the inverse of the harness side, where the smaller kit is the default. A spawned session is aimed at a job; the chat is asked a question nobody knew in advance, and a chat that cannot reach a tool answers that it cannot.
Kits are edited on the Enhance page's Chat row, and the chat's own right-hand drawer picks which one it runs on.
Pro is what a dangling reference falls back to, which is the one thing that makes it undeletable.
The header counts
Along the top of a conversation: tokens in, tokens out, and the cached read. Those are the conversation's totals, not the last turn's, and the cached figure is there because it is most of the bill.
Long conversations
A conversation is not trimmed message by message. It runs whole until it reaches the history budget, and then the older part of it is folded into a summary by the Fast tier; from there the summary stands in for it and the rest is sent as it was said.
The budget is a slider in the right-hand drawer, and it is generous on purpose. Everything before the fold is a cache read on every later turn, so a long conversation is cheap as long as it stays the same at the front; folding early would cost a call and lose detail to save tokens that were already cheap.
Archived
A finished conversation is pushed to the same archive as every harness session, under the harness name chat. It is searchable in the Logbook beside the sessions, and a Refinery book can link it like any other transcript.
Where the model runs
The chat reaches its model through the server, not directly. The gateway key is the server's, so it is never inlined into the browser bundle - see Loadouts and kits.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- The chat works with no harness installed. It has fewer tools, and it says so.
- The chat does not work with no gateway configured. There is nothing for it to think with.
Next
- Loadouts and kits - the tiers the pills name
- Enhance - where chat kits are made
- AgentDeck - where a session the chat opened appears