Atlas

Working in a room

A conversation is a shared room, not a private chat. Two things decide what happens in it: who Atlas is listening to, and whose turn is allowed to change anything.

A room, not a chat

Every conversation has an owner, members, and live presence — even a conversation you start alone, which is simply a room of one.

  • Access is membership-only. A room is never open — not even to the rest of your workspace — and you cannot browse or read one you don't belong to.
  • Presence shows who else is here, so you can see when someone joins the conversation you're in.
  • The room is anchored to an area of your organization. That decides what Atlas is allowed to look at on your behalf — that area and the ones above it, never your whole workspace.
  • The area is fixed once the room has messages in it, so what Atlas could see cannot be widened retroactively.

Getting an answer, and making it stick

These are two separate things, and most confusion in a room comes from reading them as one. Anyone can get an answer out of Atlas. Only one person at a time can have Atlas change something.

Getting an answer

Atlas is a participant you address. Anyone in the room can do this, and everyone gets a real answer.

  • Mention @Atlas and it answers — and keeps answering your follow-ups without being re-addressed each time.
  • Mention a person instead, and Atlas steps back out of the conversation.
  • Mute stops it explicitly. Un-muting is the same as addressing it again.
  • A room you start alone begins with Atlas already listening; a room you create with other people begins quiet until someone says @Atlas.

Making it stick

Only the participant currently editing the canvas can have Atlas change anything — a card, a new version, or a definition staged for review.

  • Anyone else who asks Atlas still gets a full answer. It just doesn't change anything.
  • Atlas reads the whole room, so a suggestion from someone not editing can be acted on the moment the person editing agrees to it.
  • This is why turns are taken one at a time: two conflicting instructions cannot be merged into one coherent step.
  • You're editing, Atlas is listening You get an answer, and changes land on the canvas for everyone.
  • Someone else is editing You still get a full answer to anything you ask. Nothing you ask for changes the canvas until you're the one editing.
  • Atlas is muted, or hasn't been addressed It stays quiet and reads along. Mention @Atlas, or un-mute it, to bring it back in.

Who is editing the canvas

One participant at a time holds editing. The room header always says who — and whoever holds it when a change lands is recorded as the author of that version, which is where a definition's co-authorship comes from.

What the header can say

  • You're editing Your turns can change the canvas.
  • ‹name› is editing Ask them, or ask to take over.
  • No one is editing It's free — take it over to make changes.

How it moves

Request editing
Ask the person who has it. They decide.
Give editing
Hand it to a named participant when you're done.
Take over editing
Available when no one holds it, or the holder has gone away.
Take back editing
The room's owner can always reclaim it.

It stays with whoever holds it while Atlas is taking its turn — the header keeps naming them — but it is locked, so a hand-off waits for the current instruction to finish. And it comes back to the room's owner if the holder goes idle, so a room never stalls behind someone who left.

Changes land beside the conversation as new versions — The Canvas covers what they are and what you can do with them.

Talking to the room

Everyone types in their own box — there is nothing to fight over. What is shared is the transcript and the canvas beside it.

  • Mentions

    Type @ to name anyone in the room — people and Atlas alike. The mention travels with the message and shows on the sent bubble.

  • Skills

    Type / at the very start of the box to pick an installed skill and have Atlas follow that procedure for this turn, instead of choosing one itself. A slash anywhere else in a message is just a slash.

  • Attachments

    Drop images, text files, or a PDF onto the composer — up to 5 per message, 1 MB each. Atlas reads them, so you can ask what's wrong with a screenshot or what a spreadsheet says.

  • Reactions

    React to any message, including Atlas's answers. Hover a reaction to see who left it; click your own again to remove it. Everyone sees it immediately.

    👍 👎 🎉 🚀 👀 😄

  • Picking up where you left off

    Atlas remembers how far you had read. When you come back, you see what moved while you were away instead of re-reading the thread.

Who is in the room

Rooms are invite-only or ask-to-join, never open. The owner invites a teammate by name, or someone outside your organization by email; anyone who follows a shared link lands on the members page and can ask to join, which the owner approves or declines.

Owner
Full control — manage members and their roles, and the room itself.
Member
Takes part in the conversation, and can hold editing.
Viewer
Follows along and can chat, but does not edit the canvas.

Removing someone keeps their past messages attributed to them, and re-inviting them restores the same membership.

Reading what Atlas did

Every answer carries a collapsed activity log summarising both what the turn did and what it changed — for example "1 tool invocation, 1 canvas change". Open it to see each step.

  • A step that produced a card

    Shows what went in and what came back, plus a link straight to the card it made — opened at the exact version that step created.

  • A step that produced no card

    A query against your warehouse, or a call that failed, has no card to point at — so it carries its trace and nothing else.

  • A web search

    Appears in order with the query it ran, and the answer gains a Sources list of the pages it was grounded in.

  • A knowledge page it read

    Linked inline in the answer itself and opened in a read-only viewer — named in the sentence rather than filed as a separate card.

How a step can end

  • Ran The step completed and its result went back to Atlas.
  • Failed The step ran and something went wrong. Atlas was told, and worked on.
  • Not run The turn hit its limit on how many steps it may take before reaching this one. Nothing went wrong and nothing happened — ask again to carry on.

For the full list of what Atlas can do in a room, see What the agent knows , which lists every tool and the permission each one enforces.