The Agent chat window

The Agent chat window is where you interact with the AI agent in the Anvil Editor. You can open the Agent chat window by clicking from the Sidebar Menu.

Here is the Agent chat window with the most important parts labelled:

1. The Chats panel lists all your chats for that app. Click a chat to open it. Each chat item shows how long ago the chat was active and a status dot representing the session state. Hover over a chat item to reveal the Conversation menu () to delete the conversation.
2. Click New Chat to start a new conversation with the agent.
3. The Conversation area is where your prompts and the agent’s responses appear.
4. The Prompt box is where you type and send your prompts to the agent. Type / to see available skills and commands. A skill is a set of reusable instructions that tells the agent how to approach a specific type of task. Type @ followed by a name to mention a specific Form or Module in your app and the prompt box will autocomplete the name.
5. Click the Attachment button (+) to attach images up to 10MB to your prompt.
6. The Context window tracks the agent’s available memory for the current conversation. It shows how much conversation history the agent can see and reference, as a percentage and token count. The agent automatically compacts the conversation when the context window is full. See Prompting best practices for tips on when to compact manually.
7. The Provider selector lets you switch between supported AI providers (e.g. ChatGPT/Codex, Claude).
8. The Model selector lets you choose the model for your prompt.
9. The Reasoning selector controls how much thinking the agent does before responding. Higher reasoning levels give better results but take longer.
10. Click the Dictate button () to dictate your prompt using your microphone. (Only available in Chrome-based browsers).
11. The Send button sends your prompt. While the agent is working, it becomes the Stop button which you can click to cancel.

Chat window positions

The chat window can be displayed in different positions in the Anvil Editor. To change position, click the menu () at the top right of the open conversation.

1. Sidebar: opens the conversation in the sidebar.
2. Bottom Panel: opens the conversation as a tab in the bottom panel, alongside Version History and Background Tasks.
3. Editor Tab: opens the conversation as a tab in the main editor area.

Agent activity

Each chat in the Chats panel shows a status dot representing the current session state. Hover over the dot to see the status.

The possible statuses are:

• needs_auth_to_start: authentication is required. You will be prompted to choose and connect to an AI provider in the conversation area.
• needs_auth_to_continue: your session requires re-authentication. A login button will appear above the prompt box to reconnect.
• pending: the agent session is being set up
• running: the agent is active and ready to receive prompts
• stopped: the agent session has ended. Sending a new prompt will start a new agent and resume the conversation.

Do you still have questions?

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