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Agent Chat

Agent Chat

The board connects to the coding agent you already have installed, Claude Code or Codex, and lets you chat with it without leaving the board. Ask it what's blocking a release, have it break an epic into stories, then let it implement one in its own worktree. xpo ships no agent of its own: the chat runs your agent on your machine, with your login and settings, and it uses the same xpo tools as any other agent.

Requirements

Agent chat needs Claude Code (claude) or Codex (codex) installed and logged in. xpo board finds which ones are on your PATH. Without either, the Agent item and button don't appear.

To work on issues (Work Mode), the project must be a git repository.

Two ways to open it

  • The Agent view — Agent at the top of the personal section of the sidebar (g a). A full-page chat at #/agent, and each chat has its own URL (#/agent/<id>). The new-chat page asks "What should we build in <project>?" and offers suggestions and your recent chats. Press / to focus the composer.
  • The popup — the Agent button in the status bar, or Cmd/Ctrl + J, from any view. It opens above the status bar, and you can resize it from its top edge and sides. Minimized chats stay as pills in the status bar.

The popup's expand button moves its chat into the Agent view, and the dock button in the Agent view's header puts it back. The chat's draft goes with it.

Context

When you have an issue open, the composer shows it as a chip, and your next message carries it as context: "this issue" means that issue. Remove the chip to ask about something else. Issue IDs in answers become chips too: click one to open the issue, hover for a preview.

Agent, model and effort

The composer's footer picks the agent, the model and the effort:

  • Model — one menu lists every installed agent's models, grouped by agent. The agent locks once a chat has messages.
  • Effort — Medium by default. The trigger also shows the model's context window once it's known.

Opening a chat restores the agent, model and effort its last message used, and new chats start with your last pick. Set project defaults with chat.agent and chat.model in config.yaml (see Project Configuration).

Attachments

Paste or drop files into the composer, or use the paperclip next to Send. Up to 10 per message: images up to 5 MB, other files up to 10 MB. Images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP) go to the agent as images; for other files, such as logs or PDFs, the agent gets the file's path and reads it with its own tools.

Where chats live

Chats are stored per user in .xpo/chats/, which is git-ignored, with their attachments. They never enter the issue log. What the agent does — issues it files, comments, specs, commits — is recorded like any other agent's work, under your name ("Claude Code for Alice"; see Agent identity).

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