Your first Channel

Time to give Rally a job. A Channel is one conversation about one piece of work, so the first thing to decide is what that work is. It can be small. "Plan the team offsite" is a Channel. So is "Why is the invoice from March wrong?"

Start a Channel#

1. Click New channel (a speech bubble with a plus) at the top of the sidebar.
2. In the Start a new channel dialog, pick a Space from the list. In a new Organization the only choice is General, which makes this the easiest decision you will make all day. If you have a Space's pill selected, the new Channel goes in that Space.
3. Type a Name of channel, up to 180 characters. A few words is plenty.
4. Click Create.

You can also right-click an empty part of the Channel list and choose Start New Channel. The same menu has Import Channel from Claude or ChatGPT, which brings in a conversation you had elsewhere, covered in Bring in a conversation from Claude or ChatGPT. New Spaces have a button of their own, covered in Spaces.

Write the opening message#

Clicking Create does not make the Channel yet. It opens a starting screen with your Channel's name at the top, and the Channel comes into being the moment you send its first message. Until then, nothing has been saved, and you can close the screen without leaving an empty Channel lying around.

The starting screen has two parts.

• Participants at the top, for bringing teammates in from the start. Click Add people and type a name. Matches are numbered, so ⌘ 1 to ⌘ 9 picks one without reaching for the mouse. If the Space is private, this bar says Managed by the space instead, because the Space decides who is in its Channels. On your own in a brand new Organization, you can leave it alone.
• A message box that says Describe what this channel will be used for. Type what you want Rally to do. Press Return to create the Channel and send, or ⇧ Shift Return for a new line.

Mentioning a teammate by name in that first message adds them to the Channel too. People in the room has more on who is in a Channel.

The new Channel appears in the sidebar as soon as you press Return, and Rally starts on your message straight away.

What to ask#

Write to Rally the way you would write to a capable colleague: say what you want and what it is for. If you are stuck for a first request, try something like this:

Find out what the three most popular project management apps charge for a team of ten, and write me a one-page comparison as a document.

That sends Rally to the web, has it read and compare, and ends with a document you can open, which shows off a good deal of what it does in one go. None of it needs a connection to your other tools. Once you have connected some, try asking about your own calendar, issues or documents instead.

Watch Rally work#

While Rally works, a row with a small animated orb shows what it is doing and for how long:

• Thinking for 4s while it works out its approach.
• Using Slack for 8s, or the name of whichever tool it is using, with that tool's logo.
• Working for 1m 12s on longer stretches.

When each step finishes, the row switches to the past tense: Thought for 4s, Used Slack for 12s. Once the answer is in, all of that folds into one line, such as Worked for 2m 05s. Click the line, or its arrow, to open it and see each step Rally took.

The answer itself appears as Rally writes it, a few words at a time, with a small pulsing caret at the end. You can start reading straight away. The conversation follows the newest text as it arrives. If you scroll up to read something earlier, it stops following and a round Jump to latest arrow appears above the message box to take you back down.

Some jobs take a few seconds and some take much longer. You do not have to watch. Go and do something else, and the Channel's status dot in the sidebar will tell you when it is done or needs you. While Rally works covers following along, steering, stopping and what to do if a run fails.

Names and icons#

The Channel you just started keeps the name you gave it. Rally does not rename a Channel that someone has named.

Some conversations start without a name, though: a Breakout you branch off from a message, a Channel started from Slack, or a conversation you import. For those, Rally names them itself.

• At first, a shimmering grey bar sits where the name will go. That is Rally reading the opening request.
• A few seconds later, a short name of two to four words replaces it, in the language of your request, and Rally picks an icon to suit the subject.
• After the conversation has had more than five messages, Rally takes one more look and may improve the name, now that the real subject has had time to show up. It does this once, and then the name stays put.
• If no name arrives within about a minute, Rally gives up waiting and uses the first line of the opening message as the name.

Renaming a conversation yourself settles the matter: Rally never overwrites a name a person chose. The same goes for an icon you pick yourself.

Every Channel gets an icon and colour, even if nobody chooses one. To change them, click the icon at the left of the Channel's title pill, pick a colour, then an icon. Names, icons and colours covers renaming and everything else about how a Channel looks. A Channel with a nice icon is not more productive, but it is easier to find, which is nearly the same thing.

An empty Channel#

If you open a Channel that has no messages in it yet, it says Ready to begin and Send a message to start work in this stream. That is the old word "stream" again, meaning this Channel. Type in the box at the bottom and Rally gets going.

Where to go from here#

That is the whole loop: start a Channel, say what you need, and work on it together.

The next chapter, Working in a Channel, is about doing that well: writing messages, attaching files, steering Rally while it works, and bringing your teammates into the conversation.