Contexts

Once you have more than a handful of workspaces, it helps to group the related ones together. A context is that grouping — a named set of workspaces you think of as one area of work.

You might put your three client workspaces in a Clients context, your internal reporting workspaces in Operations, and keep personal admin on its own. Switching into a context tells your assistant, "for now, focus on just these."

Availability: Contexts are part of the General agent & contexts beta feature. To use them, go to Settings → Preferences → Beta features and turn on General agent & contexts (each beta feature has its own switch). That reveals the Contexts and General Agent settings, groups your workspaces in the switcher, and lets you focus the assistant on a context — everything described below.

What a context is

A context is a label that gathers workspaces together. It doesn't move or copy anything — your files and chats stay exactly where they are, inside their own workspaces. The context simply groups them so you can find them quickly and point your assistant at the whole set at once.

A few things worth knowing:

• A workspace can belong to more than one context. The same "Quarterly Reports" workspace could sit in both a Finance context and a Leadership context. Adding it to one doesn't remove it from another.
• Contexts are yours. They organize your view of your workspaces; they don't change who can see what.
• A workspace doesn't have to be in any context. Anything you haven't grouped simply shows up on its own.

Creating and managing contexts

Go to Settings → Contexts. Click + New and fill in:

• Name — what the context is called (for example, "Clients"). This is the heading you'll see in the workspace switcher.
• Slug — a short, URL-friendly version of the name (for example, clients). It's filled in for you from the name, and you can edit it.
• Color — a colored dot that marks the context in the switcher, so groups are easy to tell apart at a glance.
• Spaces — tick the workspaces that belong to this context. You can change these any time.
• Instructions (general agent) — optional standing guidance the assistant follows only while you're working inside this context (more on this below).

To change a context later, expand it in Settings → Contexts to rename it, recolor it, adjust which workspaces belong to it, or edit its instructions. You can also delete a context — deleting it only removes the grouping, never the workspaces inside it.

Working inside a context

Open the workspace switcher (click your workspace name at the top of the sidebar). Your workspaces appear grouped under their context headings, each marked with its colored dot. Anything you haven't put in a context shows up under Ungrouped.

From there:

• Tap a context heading to enter that context. You land on the context view, which shows every workspace in the group at once (described next), and your assistant narrows its focus to just those workspaces (see below).
• Tap a workspace under a context to open that single workspace while staying inside the context. You see that workspace's files and chats, and the assistant stays focused on the context's set.
• Tap an ungrouped workspace to open it on its own, the ordinary way.

Putting your contexts in the order you want

The context headings sit in an order you control. Each heading carries two small arrows on the right — use them to move that context up or down the list, so the one you reach for most can sit at the top. They work with a mouse, a finger or the keyboard, and the arrow at the end of the list is dimmed because there's nowhere further to go. (The arrows only appear once you have two or more contexts.)

The order is saved to your account as soon as you move something, so it's the same when you reopen the switcher, reload the page, or sign in on another device. Adding a new context puts it at the bottom rather than disturbing the order you've set, and deleting one leaves the rest where they were. Ungrouped always stays last.

Two things worth knowing:

• The arrows only move a context — they never open one, and they never change which workspace you're in.
• A context you haven't put any workspaces into doesn't appear in the switcher, but it keeps its place in the order and shows up in Settings → Contexts in the same sequence.

If a move can't be saved (you're offline, say), the list slides back to where it was and a short Move failed note appears under it. Nothing is lost — try again once you're connected.

What the context view shows

Entering a context lays out every workspace in the group side by side, kept clearly apart:

• The sidebar lists each member workspace under its own heading. Expand a heading to see that workspace's files, skills, integrations, schedules, and activity — the same things you'd see inside the workspace on its own. The first heading is open and the rest start collapsed, so a context with many workspaces opens quickly and only fetches a workspace's contents when you expand it.
• Opening a file from any workspace shows it in the file viewer, exactly as it would inside that workspace. When you have files open from more than one workspace, each tab is labelled with the workspace it came from, so they're never mixed up.
• Editing, creating, renaming, starring, and organizing files all work as usual, and each action affects the workspace the file actually belongs to.
• The chat is the context's assistant — it works across every workspace in the group, not just one.

Nothing is merged or moved: the context view is a lens over your existing workspaces, each of which keeps its own files, chats, and settings.

How your assistant's focus changes

Your assistant can work across workspaces, not just inside one. A context controls which workspaces it considers:

• No context (the default). The assistant can look across all your workspaces and figure out which one a request belongs to.
• Inside a context. The assistant is limited to the workspaces in that context. It only sees the files and chats from those workspaces — nothing from your other work leaks in. When you ask it to do something, it works out which workspace you mean and tells you which one it's using — and if it isn't sure, it asks you to pick. Once a chat has settled on a workspace, it stays there for the rest of that conversation; start a new chat to work somewhere else.

This is what makes a context more than a folder: it's a way to tell the assistant "these workspaces go together, and right now I only care about these."

Context-specific instructions

Each context can carry its own standing instructions, set in Settings → Contexts under Instructions (general agent) — for example, "When in this context, use a formal tone and always cite the source file."

Those instructions apply only while you're working inside that context. They stack on top of your account-wide instructions (set in Settings → General Agent → Instructions), which the assistant follows everywhere. So you can keep one set of habits for all your work and layer context-specific guidance on top where it matters.

Contexts and workspaces, side by side

See Workspaces for what lives inside a single workspace and how switching between them works.