> Rally Help Center. Index of every page: https://rallywith.ai/help/llms.txt
> This chapter's pages: https://rallywith.ai/help/sidekicks/llms.txt

# Sidekicks

> Save a helper once and let it run on a schedule, when something happens, or whenever you call on it.

Everything in this book so far has had one thing in common: you were there.
You typed a message, Rally got to work, and you watched it happen. That is a
fine arrangement for most jobs and a poor one for the Monday report, the
morning inbox sweep, or the support channel that needs watching while you are
asleep. Rally is willing to work nights. Somebody has to tell it what to do
when nobody is looking.

Telling it is the hard part. Handing a job to anyone, person or program, goes
wrong in the explaining, and a form with a frequency drop-down and a row of
weekday checkboxes makes the explaining worse: it does exactly what you
clicked, which is rarely all of what you meant. So Sidekicks have no form. A
Sidekick is a named helper that you describe once, in plain words, and then
stop describing. You talk to it the way you talk to Rally in a Channel, and it
writes its own instructions down: a name, a short description, the
instructions themselves and, if you want it to act on its own, one or more
triggers that say when to start.

## Two kinds of helper

Sidekicks come in two kinds, and a trigger is the whole difference.

- **Instructions only.** A Sidekick with no trigger never starts anything by
  itself. It is a page of know-how that Rally can pick up in any conversation
  where it is relevant: your brand voice, the way your team writes release
  notes, the checklist for a new client. Write it once and every conversation
  can borrow it.
- **Delegated work.** A Sidekick with a trigger runs on its own. Every Monday
  at 9, every hour, whenever a new meeting note lands, whenever someone emails
  it. Each time, it does its job and reports back where you told it to.

The second idea is ownership. A Sidekick belongs to you alone, to the whole
Organization, or to one Channel, and that decides who can see it, who can
change it, and whose connected tools it uses when it runs.

## A word about the old name

Sidekicks used to be called Automations. The app has nearly finished the
move, but a few corners still use the old word: Rally's Home tab in Slack
talks about creating an automation, some descriptions in **Settings** say
"automations" where they mean Sidekicks, and some link addresses still
contain `automations`. They are all the same thing.

## Where this chapter goes

The pages ahead start with what a Sidekick is and who it belongs to, then
show you how to make one by describing it. After that come the triggers that
start a Sidekick, the window where you manage them, and where a Sidekick's
results end up. The last page brings a Sidekick into a Channel so the whole
room can use it.