Chat

Chat is a one-to-one conversation between you and an agent — stepping outside the issue board. The agent starts with no issue context — it isn't looking at your board and won't turn the conversation into issues on its own — and the entire conversation is fully private (nobody else in the workspace, including admins, can see it). It fits discussing an approach with an agent, brainstorming, or asking a question that does not belong to any issue.

Why not just @-mention the agent?

@-mention pulls the agent into an issue's context — it reads the issue description and every historical comment, and it can change the issue. Chat flips this: it pulls you out of the issue — the agent sees only this single conversation and starts with no issue context, so it isn't reading or acting on any issue unless you explicitly ask it to.

Two rules of thumb:

• You want feedback grounded in the context of a specific issue → @-mention
• You want to discuss a topic unrelated to any issue (or you do not want anyone else to see the discussion) → Chat

Start a conversation

Open Chat from the sidebar, pick an agent, and start a new conversation. The interface feels like any messaging app: you send a message, the agent replies. Each message triggers a run in the background (an enqueued task), so replies may take a few seconds.

What an agent can and cannot do in chat

The isolation in Chat is about context and privacy, not permissions. The conversation is private and the agent starts with no issue context — but each reply still runs with your workspace access, acting on your behalf with the same permissions you have. So when you explicitly ask, the agent can use the multica CLI to act on your workspace, including creating or changing issues.

Can do:

• Answer the questions in your current message
• Use its configured skills and MCP
• Read and write files in its own working directory
• Run multica CLI commands, including ones that read or change workspace data — for example, multica issue list returns your workspace's issues, and asking the agent to file one runs multica issue create, producing a real issue recorded with the agent as its creator. These act with your permissions in this workspace.

Cannot do:

• Auto-create or auto-surface issues — the prompt has no issue IDs, and merely recognizing task-shaped content in the conversation does not, on its own, create or pull up anything; the agent only touches issues when you explicitly ask.
• Read your other conversations — each run's prompt is scoped to this single chat; the contents of your other chat sessions are never given to it.
• Reach outside this workspace or your permissions — every run is bound to this workspace and acts as you, so it can't touch another workspace or do anything your own account couldn't.

How multi-turn context is preserved

Chat maintains multi-turn context via provider session resumption — the agent establishes a provider session on its first reply (for example, a Claude session), and the session ID is stored. On the next message, the task dispatch passes that ID back so the agent resumes from where it left off without re-reading history every time.

If one turn fails, Multica looks up the previous task that had established a session ID (whether that task succeeded or failed) and tries to resume — a single failure in the middle does not drop the memory of the whole conversation.

Note: not every provider actually implements session resumption — see the Providers Matrix for support status.

Archive a conversation

Conversations you no longer want to see can be archived — right-click in the conversation list or use the "Archive" button on the detail page. After archiving:

• The conversation disappears from the active list (you can still find it in the "Archived" view)
• Historical messages, session ID, and the working directory are all preserved — nothing is deleted

Next

• Autopilots — let agents start work automatically on a schedule
• Assign issues to agents — bring the topic back onto the issue board