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The assistant (Cobb)

Cobb is the chat assistant that lives inside a workspace. It answers questions, and when you ask it to, it acts on your workspace: create a record, update one, run an action. Cobb runs on the AI provider you connected; with none connected it drops to basic mode.

What Cobb can do​

  • Answer questions, including ones that have nothing to do with your data. If a question touches what you have tracked, Cobb weaves that in.
  • Look at your actual records before answering, rather than guessing. It can search across kinds, list and read records, follow the links between them ("which projects use this part?"), list the kinds and actions your workspace has, and read your put-away plan.
  • Propose a change: create a record, update fields on one (including the custom fields you added, with their dropdown choices), delete one, tag or shelve one, or run a registered action on a record it found by name.
  • Change a workspace setting, such as your label-code prefixes, through the same confirm step as any other change.
  • Design a whole workspace from a description, which hands off to the AI builder.

Cobb acts through the same tools the rest of the app exposes, under your own permissions. It cannot see or do anything you could not do yourself.

What Cobb won't do​

  • Run a change without you, in its default setting. Every write comes back as a proposal with a confirm button first.
  • Run an action silently. Actions can have real side effects (printing a label, adjusting stock), so they always ask, even when record edits are set to apply on their own.
  • Exceed your role. A member cannot use Cobb to reach admin-only settings.

Opening Cobb on a screen​

Open Cobb from the panel and it is there for the whole workspace. Many screens and detail modals also carry their own Ask Cobb button. Open it there and Cobb docks alongside what you are looking at, with a short opening line about what it can do on that screen. Both stay usable side by side, so you can act on the thing in front of you without re-describing it. Your earlier conversation parks behind a quiet "Earlier" divider; scroll up to read it.

Cobb also reads a one-line summary of the screen you are on. Ask "what do I have going on?" from the Scan Inbox, Inventory, Purchases, or Machines page and the answer reflects what that page is showing. A workspace-wide question still gets a workspace-wide answer.

Cobb shows his state​

Cobb is the little cobbler you see on the AI surfaces, and his pose tells you what is happening: he greets you, works at his bench while something is running, points at what he is proposing while it waits on your confirm, and holds up the result when a build lands. The Ask Cobb button wears his face rather than a generic sparkle, and it stays lit even with no AI connected, because basic mode still answers. When a feature does need AI and none is connected, a greyed, resting Cobb sits on the notice that says so.

Your conversation stays​

The chat is kept per workspace on your device, so a refresh or reopening the panel picks up where you left off. It is not uploaded. Only the plain back-and-forth is kept, not a live confirm card. A trash icon in the panel header clears it whenever you want.

At the top of the chat are two controls that decide what Cobb is allowed to do in this workspace. They are per person, so your settings are yours.

Read my data. On by default. Cobb may read your records into its answers. When it does, the matching records go into the prompt to your workspace's AI provider; with a shared AI, that is another member's connection. Turn it off and Cobb answers from general knowledge only and will not claim to know what is in your workspace.

Changes, a chip that cycles through three settings:

  • Changes: off removes change proposals entirely. Cobb answers and explains, but offers no creates, updates, or actions.
  • Changes: ask is the default. Every change is a proposal you confirm before it runs.
  • Changes: auto applies record creates, updates, and deletes immediately. Each one is tracked and can be undone. Actions still ask, because their side effects have no clean reverse.

The change ledger and undo​

Every write Cobb makes, whether you confirmed it or it applied automatically, goes through a ledger. Before each change, Cobb captures a snapshot of the record, so an undo is mechanical:

  • A create is undone by deleting the record.
  • An update is undone by restoring exactly the fields that changed.
  • A delete is undone by recreating the record from the snapshot, under a new id (stated plainly when it happens).
  • An action is recorded but not undoable, since arbitrary side effects have no inverse.

An undo is itself a ledger entry, so you can undo an undo. The ledger is what makes the Auto setting safe to offer: nothing applies that you cannot walk back.

When the provider has no tools​

Some models do not support the tool-calling protocol Cobb prefers. With one of those, Cobb falls back to a simpler one-move-at-a-time exchange: proposals and confirmation work the same, but it is less able to chain several reads and writes in one turn. Which providers support the full loop, and how to handle a local backend that runs its own tools, is on Choosing a provider.