Working in a Channel

In the last chapter you made your first Channel and asked Rally for something. This chapter is about what happens after that, which is most of the time you will spend in Rally.

One room, one piece of work#

A Channel is one conversation about one piece of work. Not a department, and not a place where announcements go to be ignored. "Plan the March offsite" is a good Channel. "Marketing" is a filing cabinet.

Inside that conversation everyone talks in the same room. You write, your teammates write, and Rally, the agent, writes too. Nobody has to summon Rally from a corner with a special command, and nobody has to copy its answer back into the "real" conversation afterwards. Most chat apps treat their bot like the office printer: you walk over to it, you collect what it made, you carry it back to your desk. In Rally the agent sits at the table with everyone else. It reads everything, answers the parts meant for it, and leaves the rest of the chat to the humans.

That has a pleasant side effect. Everything about the piece of work collects in one place. The questions, the decisions, the files you dropped in, the drafts Rally wrote and the people who weighed in are all in the same scroll, in the order they happened. When someone new joins next week, you add them to the Channel and they can read the whole story instead of asking you to catch them up.

Runs, and the dots that report on them#

Rally does real work, and work takes time. When you ask for something, Rally starts a run: a stretch of work where it reads, searches, writes and uses your connected tools until it has an answer. A run might take four seconds or forty minutes. You do not have to sit and watch. You can keep talking, change your mind halfway, or stop it, and the Channel shows you what it is up to the whole time.

The Channel also tells you when it needs you. Small coloured dots say whether Rally is busy, waiting on an answer from you, finished, or stuck. Once you know the colours, you can glance at your list of Channels and know where to look first.

What this chapter covers#

The pages start at the bottom of the window, with the message box, and work up. After the box come attachments, then the page people ask about most: what is going on while Rally works, how to steer it, and what to do when a run fails. Then reading Rally's answers, with their tables, sources and diagrams.

The second half is about people: bringing teammates in, seeing who is around, and when Rally speaks up or stays quiet. Then the status dots, and the title pill at the top of every conversation, whose menu holds the Channel's people, Sidekicks, Breakouts and settings, and where you give a Channel a name, an icon and a colour you will recognise. The last page brings a conversation you started in Claude or ChatGPT into Rally, so that work does not start from scratch.