How Rally works

You have given Rally a few jobs by now. This page lifts the lid on how it chooses what to do, and how to ask so you get what you meant.

One Rally per conversation#

Each Channel has one agent, called Rally, working in the conversation alongside the people. Each Breakout has its own, and so does each conversation you have with a Sidekick. It is one ongoing thread of work per conversation, not a fresh agent for every message. That is why you can say "now do the same for March" and Rally knows what "the same" was.

When you are alone in a Channel, every message goes to Rally. When other people are there too, Rally decides whether each message is meant for it. Mention @Rally to be sure. The details are in People in the room.

A message you send while Rally is busy does not interrupt it. Rally finishes the step it is on, then reads your message and takes it into account (that is steering, from While Rally works).

How it goes about a job#

Rally has a working style, and it is the same in every conversation.

It gets on with it. Ask Rally to draft a reply, look something up or fix a spreadsheet, and it starts. It does not check whether you are sure.

It says what it is about to do. Before a job with several steps, Rally posts a short plan. While it works, it posts a quick progress note every three or four steps, so you can see where it is and steer if it is heading the wrong way.

It does not guess. Dates, addresses, links and numbers have to come from somewhere real: a tool, you, or a file you attached. That is why you sometimes see a row that says Checking the current time. Rally does not trust its own sense of what day it is, which is more than most of us can say on a Monday. For arithmetic, Rally runs actual code on its own computer instead of doing sums in its head (more in Code, data and the Terminal).

It asks only when it must. If a detail is missing and no tool can find it, Rally asks you. If a decision is yours, it puts a question card in the conversation, as described in While Rally works.

It knows where to look. For public facts, news and documentation, Rally searches the web. For your company's own information (your email, your issues, your documents) it goes to the apps you have connected instead.

Rally never asks you to approve each tool#

This is deliberate. Rally does not pop up "Allow Rally to send this email?" or "Approve this change?" before each action. There is no approval queue and no setting that adds one. When you ask Rally to do something, you have given it the go-ahead.

That does not mean anything goes. Rally can only do what the connection behind it allows. If you connected Gmail with your own account, Rally can do in Gmail what you can do there, and nothing more. And it is careful in the places where care matters: when Rally writes an email, for example, it makes a draft unless you clearly asked it to send, and it tells you which it did.

Where its abilities come from: plugins#

Rally's abilities come in bundles called plugins. There is one for each of these:

Rally does not carry everything at once. It keeps a short catalogue of what is available and loads a plugin when a request needs it. You see this as a row that says Loading a plugin. Loading a plugin never gives Rally more access than it already had.

If a job needs an app you have not connected, or a connection that needs renewing, Rally says why and shows a card in the conversation that lets you connect it there and then. These cards appear only when a person is in the conversation. A Sidekick running on its own cannot stop to ask you to connect something. Connecting your other tools covers connections in full.

Skills: know-how for tricky jobs#

Some jobs have well-known ways to go wrong. An email to the wrong address. A meeting invite in the wrong time zone. A research report that quietly states a guess as a fact. For these, Rally has skills: short guides it reads before starting. They load by themselves when your request matches. You never need to ask for one.

The built-in skills are:

• Deep research. Rally breaks the question into claims it can check, uses your connected apps before the web, cross-checks and dates every fact, and tells you what it could not establish. The first pass of a research job only reads. It will not send or change anything.
• Writing an email. Rally finds real recipients through your account, never invents an address or a link, makes a draft unless told to send, and keeps replies in the right thread.
• Scheduling a calendar event. Rally settles the real time zones, finds the right attendees, and tells you who the invite will notify.
• Watching for events. When you ask Rally to keep an eye on something, it sets up a Sidekick that watches for it. It prefers the other app's own notifications, and otherwise checks no more often than every ten minutes. Sidekicks have their own chapter, starting at What a Sidekick is.
• Building live sites. How to build and host a small web page or app (see Live sites).

A skill is guidance only. It never gives Rally a new tool or permission. There is a limit on how many skills can be loaded at once in a single run. If Rally reaches it, it carries on with the ones it already has.

Long conversations#

Rally reads the conversation before it answers, but there is only so much it can hold in mind at once. When a long run fills about four fifths of that space, Rally writes itself a tidy summary of the job so far: what you asked for, what was decided, what is done, the important facts, the files that matter and what is still open. It then carries on from that summary. You do not have to do anything.

This only affects Rally's working notes. You and your teammates still see the whole conversation, every message of it.

A few things to know:

• A detail that did not make it into the summary is gone from Rally's working memory. If something is critical, say it again, put it in a file, or ask Rally to remember it (see Memory and coming back later).
• Rarely, a conversation is too big for Rally to take in at all. You then see a message that begins This conversation is longer than the selected model will accept. Start a new work stream to continue. "Work stream" is the old name for a Channel. Start a new Channel and tell Rally what it needs to know.
• Rally does not reach into your other Channels to fill gaps. Each conversation stands on its own.

What you will not find#

Two things people often look for:

• A model picker. You cannot choose which AI model Rally uses.
• A meter. There is no price, token count or credit counter in the Channel, the message box or the conversation.

Asking well#

A good request saves a round trip. These habits help:

• Say what done looks like. "A one-page summary I can paste into an email" beats "summarize this".
• Point at the source. "From the Q3 board deck in Drive" saves Rally searching your whole Drive and picking the wrong deck.
• Say draft or send. Rally takes you at your word, so choose the word.
• Give the deadline and time zone when dates matter, for example "by Friday, London time".
• Attach the file rather than describing it. Rally always answers a message with an attachment.
• Steer, don't restart. If the first answer is close, tell Rally what to change in the same Channel. It remembers the rest.

Next: Research and the built-in browser.