First conversation
Where it starts
A new chat opens in ~/.opencli/workspace unless it belongs to a department,
in which case it opens in that department's directory.
That matters more than it looks. The agent's sandbox can write anywhere inside its working directory, so the directory a conversation is open in is the whole of what it may change. It used to default to your home directory; it does not any more, and the reason is Sandbox and approvals.
Change it with the folder button above the composer.
Asking for something
Ordinary sentences. It has your files, a shell, and whatever connectors you have added:
Read invoices.csv and list every row that breaks the rules in rules.md
What changed in this repository over the last week?
Compare their-draft.md against our-terms.md and list every clause that differs
What happens before anything is changed
By default the agent shows you a command that is not known to be safe before running it, and shows a file write before making it. Approve or deny each one.
Three settings, in Customize:
| Ask before anything unfamiliar | every command that is not known-safe is shown first |
| Ask only after something fails | commands run unattended; you are asked when one needs more access |
| Never ask | nothing is shown before it runs |
The last one is for a directory you would let a script loose in. It is explained properly in Sandbox and approvals.
Seeing what it did
Artifacts lists the files the agent edited in this conversation, with
their diffs. One honest limit: only edits made with the agent's file-editing
tool are listed. Files written by a shell command it ran — a heredoc, a
script, git checkout — are not tracked and will not appear.
When it stops making sense
A conversation that has grown long is summarised so it keeps fitting. You will see Summarising the conversation…, and afterwards the thread continues with a summary in place of the older turns.
If summarising cannot help — because the length is coming from tool schemas rather than from the conversation — it says so once rather than doing it again every turn.
Next
One conversation is one conversation. To have work happen without you being there, set up a department.