Discuss

Discuss is the first of the three surfaces, and it is where the work starts. Almost everything you do in Task Machine happens on one of three surfaces — Discuss to decide, Inbox to approve, Tasks to steer — and Discuss is the strategic one: a chat with a single agent where you reason about what to do before any of it becomes a task. In the app the navigation calls this surface Chats, because each conversation is its own chat; this chapter calls it Discuss to keep its job in view. You think out loud here, the agent thinks with you, and the decisions you reach fan out into the tasks and agents that carry them out.

A chat is a conversation with one fixed agent

Each chat is a conversation between you and one agent, chosen when the chat is created. The agent is fixed for the life of the conversation, and that is deliberate: the agent's runtime history and working-directory state belong to that one conversation, so swapping the agent mid-thread would orphan everything it had built up. A chat carries only its own framing — the workspace it belongs to, its agent, its owner, a title, a status, and when it last saw activity. When you want a different agent, you start a different chat.

Because the agent is fixed, a chat accumulates context the way a working relationship does. The agent reads the workspace knowledge it is entitled to, remembers what it has been told across turns, and stays oriented to the thread you are in. That continuity is what makes Discuss the place to reason rather than to issue one-off commands.

Messages come from the runtime, not a message log

What you see in a chat is the runtime transcript, not a separate table of chat messages. When you send a prompt, Task Machine compiles it together with the agent's instructions and the knowledge it may read, then queues a runtime job for the chat's fixed agent. The agent runs that job on a connected machine, and the transcript events it produces — your message, the agent's reply, and the internal prompt that framed the turn — are what the chat surface renders, in job order.

One consequence is worth knowing: a chat runs one turn at a time. Only a single queued, running, or in-flight job may exist per chat, so a new prompt waits until the current turn finishes rather than racing it. The agent also needs a place to run — its profile's default runtime has to be online — so a chat does real work only when a machine is connected, the same condition that governs every other surface.

Pasting a long passage offers to save it as a document

Discuss stays readable even when the material you bring to it is long. Paste a large block of text into the composer and Task Machine asks whether to keep it as a document instead of letting it swamp the thread. A short dialog opens with a title — seeded from the first line you pasted — a markdown editor holding the text, and a folder button that opens the same "Move to folder" browser the document drive uses, including its New folder action, so the document lands exactly where you want it. Create it and the composer drops in an @ reference to the new document rather than the raw text; the agent follows that reference to read the document in full, and it becomes a durable, linkable part of your knowledge base. Prefer to keep the text in the message? Skip the dialog and the passage is inserted as a fenced code block, untouched.

The composer also renders markdown as you write it — a heading shows as a heading and **bold** shows as bold, without the surrounding syntax — so what you compose reads the way the agent will receive it.

Chats are private by default and shared deliberately

A chat starts private to its owner, who holds implicit control over it, and stays that way until you share it. Sharing is explicit and graded: you grant another member or a whole role one of three levels — read to follow the conversation, participate to send prompts into it, or manage to administer it. A private chat simply has no grants; the moment you add one, the conversation opens to exactly the people and at exactly the level you chose.

Chat access and agent administration are kept separate on purpose. Being able to read or join a chat does not let you reconfigure the agent behind it, and being able to manage agents in the workspace does not silently admit you to someone's private conversations. The workspace role still gates whether a grantee can use the underlying action at all, so a grant never hands out more reach than the member's role already allows.

Discuss feeds the other two surfaces

Discuss is for thinking; it is not a second task system, and it intentionally stops short of becoming one. The reasoning you do here turns into work when it leaves the chat and lands on a task — the durable record with an assignee, a status, and a full history. From there an agent picks the work up, and anything that needs your judgment comes back to the Inbox. That is the loop this chapter traces: you decide in Discuss, you steer on Tasks, and you approve in the Inbox.