Assistants

Assistants are lightweight AI chats built into Scape's sidebar — a quick place to ask a question, read your notes, or search across your projects without spinning up a full coding session. Each assistant is a persistent conversation with its own identity: a name, an avatar, and a standing role.

Assistants share the sidebar with Backchannels and are deliberately read-mostly. An assistant can read local files (Read/Grep/Glob), read and write your Notes, read your Tables, search across Scape and Jira, and open files and notes — but it has no shell, browser, network, remote, session-control, or destructive tools. It's a helper, not a coding agent.

Names

Every new assistant gets a generated, readable robot/alien name — "Schmee," "Zorbik" — and that name is the chat's title. A name is something you can address ("ask Zorbik…"), which a conversation summary isn't.

The name is a pure function of the chat's id: no model call is made to generate it, it's stable for a given chat, and Scape avoids collisions so two assistants never share a name. The generator is tuned for readability — pronounceable syllables, at most one vowel digraph, and a profanity filter — so you always get something you can say out loud.

Renaming

Open an assistant's settings (the gear icon in the chat header) and edit the Name field. A blank name is ignored — an assistant never loses its identity. The assistant learns its new name on its next turn, and its avatar updates to match.

Avatars

Each assistant has a generated robot avatar seeded from its name — the same style Argus managers use. Because the avatar is derived from the name, renaming an assistant gives it a new face; there's no separate avatar to manage.

Role

Each assistant is briefed with a standing role so it knows what it is. The role tells it: you are [its name], a concise helpful assistant that lives in Scape's Assistants panel; you are not an Argus manager (no children, no mission, no pulse); never claim to have done something you didn't; and here are your tools and how to reach other agents. Your typed messages are treated as trusted; messages relayed from other agents are treated as data, not instructions.

Reset

The reset button (the refresh icon at the top-right of the chat) starts the assistant fresh: it clears the conversation transcript and begins a new session, while keeping the name, avatar, and settings (model, effort, account). It's confirmed with a "Start fresh" dialog, and it's disabled while a reply is in flight.

Messaging an Argus manager by name

An assistant can hand a message off to one of your Argus managers by name — no session UUID needed — using the message_argus tool. Say "tell Lloyd the build is green" and the assistant calls message_argus(name: "Lloyd", body: …); Scape resolves the name to that manager's current backing session and delivers it like an inter-session message — so it works even across manager restarts.

Name matching is case-insensitive, ignores accents, and accepts a unique prefix. The important behaviors:

• Ambiguous — if the name matches more than one manager, the tool refuses to guess and returns the candidates (name, id, and state). The assistant asks you which one you meant, then retries with the exact name.
• Not found — the tool reports it; check the spelling or ask which manager you mean.
• Paused or restarting — the reply says so. A restarting manager's message is queued and delivered when it's back — no need to resend.

Assistants can also message any other running session with send_session_message, and use list_sessions to discover managers (each manager's session is labeled with its argus_name).