Helpers, other conversations and receipts

Some jobs are too big for one conversation, and some go wrong halfway. This page covers the helpers Rally calls in, the other conversations it can reach, and the records it keeps so that a dropped connection never turns into a duplicate email.

Helpers: background agents#

Some jobs split naturally into pieces. "Compare these eight suppliers" is eight pieces of research and one comparison. Rather than doing the pieces one after another, Rally can start background agents: helpers that each take one piece and work on it at the same time. Rally hands out the work, waits for the answers, and pulls them together.

This has two benefits. Big jobs finish sooner, and the conversation stays tidy, because each helper does its digging out of sight and reports back only what Rally needs.

You do not have to ask for helpers. Rally decides when a job is worth splitting, usually when the pieces need a lot of reading but only a short answer each. If you want it to, you can nudge it: "Research each of these companies in parallel."

Seeing them work#

While helpers are running, a quiet, shimmering line above the message box counts them, such as 2 background agents running. It disappears when they are all done. (You met this line in While Rally works.)

In the conversation you see rows such as Delegating to a background agent, Messaging a teammate and Stopping a background agent. "Teammate" here means another agent, not one of your colleagues. Helpers do not get their own rows in the sidebar.

What a helper knows and can do#

• It acts with your authority. A helper can do what Rally could do for you in that conversation, with the same tools and connections. No more, no less.
• It starts with a blank page. A helper does not read the whole conversation. It knows only the instructions and files Rally gives it. If a helper's work misses something you said earlier, that detail probably did not make it into its brief. Tell Rally, and it passes it on.
• It shares the conversation's computer. Helpers use the same sandbox as the conversation that started them (see Code, data and the Terminal). If two want to write to it at once, one waits a moment.
• It has no memory. Helpers cannot read or save the memories from Memory and coming back later.

Stopping a helper#

Rally can stop a helper, and you can ask it to: "Stop the helper working on the Acme research." Stopping a helper also stops any helpers that it started itself. Anything a helper had already done stays done. Stopping does not undo. A stopped helper can be picked up again later if Rally sends it another message.

Reaching other conversations#

Rally in a Channel works in that Channel. It does not go reading your other Channels. Two kinds of conversation can reach a little further, because their job needs it:

• A Breakout can read the main conversation of the Channel it branched from. That way, Rally in a Breakout knows what the main thread decided without you copying it across. It can read, but not post there. (Breakouts are explained in Breakouts.)
• A Sidekick can read and post to its home Channel or Breakout and to any conversation attached to it. This is how a Sidekick reports its results where the team will see them. See Where a Sidekick's results go.

You see this as rows that say Reading a conversation and Posting to a conversation.

A few rules hold this in place:

• Rally can only reach conversations that the person it is working for can open. It cannot use this to see something you are not allowed to see.
• Archived conversations are skipped.
• Which conversations are in reach is decided by Rally's setup, not by the agent. Rally cannot widen it, however nicely you ask.
• A post from a Sidekick into another conversation does not set Rally off in that conversation. It is a message for the people there to read.

Receipts: never doing the same thing twice#

Things go wrong on the internet. A connection drops halfway through sending an email. A service is slow to answer. A run fails and you press Retry. The question is always: did that email go out, or not?

Rally keeps a receipt for every action that changes something, whether that is sending an email, posting a message, updating an issue or editing a file. It writes the receipt down before the action and again after it. When a run is retried, Rally checks its receipts and skips anything it already did, so a retry does not send the same email twice.

Click any activity row in the conversation to see what Rally sent to the tool (Input) and what came back (Result), as described in While Rally works.

When Rally cannot tell#

Sometimes Rally asks another app to do something and never hears back. The email may have gone, or it may not. In that case Rally does not guess, and it does not try again in case it sends a second copy. Instead, the tool's card shows a warning icon and says:

Rally could not confirm whether this external action completed. It will not retry automatically.

Rally fixes its own small mistakes#

Most of the time when a tool says no, it also says why, in words Rally can act on: a file changed since Rally last read it, an edit matched more than one place, or a connection needs renewing. So you will often see a row fail and the next one succeed, as Rally reads the file again, narrows its edit or asks you to reconnect. A failed row followed by a working one is Rally correcting itself, not a problem for you to chase.

These messages never contain passwords or the other app's internal details.

What comes next#

So far Rally has worked on the web, on its own computer and inside Rally. The next chapter connects it to the apps your team already uses, so it can read your email, update your issues and file things in your Drive.

Next: Connecting your other tools.