Chat

What it shows

A thread is one conversation with pi. The reply streams in as pi writes it. Each tool call pi makes is a row you can open, and pi’s thinking is a block you can expand. You can attach images to a prompt, and run commands from a palette.

The thread’s id is in the page URL, so a reload shows the same thread, and the browser’s back and forward buttons move between the threads you opened.

How to open it

• Start the web app with bun run dev and open http://127.0.0.1:5178.
• New Thread in the rail starts a thread. A thread you opened before is listed under its project. Click it to open it again.
• The Chat tab shows the conversation. Context and Stats are the other two views of the same thread.
• The URL names the thread as ?thread=<id>.
• To add an image, use the attach an image button, paste the image, or drop it on the composer.
• The commands button (the / icon in the composer) opens the command palette.

What it looks like

To see it: open a thread from the rail.

1. The thread in the rail. Its title is its first prompt.
2. pi’s thinking, folded. Thought opens it.
3. A tool call as one row: the tool, what it was given, and a check when it finished. Click the row to see in and out.
4. fork from here starts a new thread with everything before this prompt, and puts the prompt back in the composer. See Forks and lineage.
5. attach an image.
6. The status bar: whether pi is working, then prompts, tool calls, refusals, failures, and the thread’s cost.

To see it: open a thread from the rail, then choose commands.

1. filter commands… narrows the list as you type. The settings group comes first (/model, /thinking, /login, /compact, /context, /fork, and /logout once a login is stored), then extensions, prompts and skills.

What to look for

In the thread above, the first reply shows pi working: it thinks, runs grep in the shell, tries to read .env, and is refused. The refusal is a card of its own, not a failed row (see Guards and receipts). pi then reads src/config.ts instead, and its answer says what it could not check.

Most rows stay folded, and that is the point of the layout. A call that finished shows a check and nothing else. A call that failed opens itself, with a red border, so a failure is never behind a click. The status bar counts both kinds: this thread has 2 refused and 1 failed, and they are different things.

In the palette, a command runs at once, but a prompt or a skill is only inserted into the composer as /name , for you to finish and send.

While /login waits for the provider (a device code to enter, a browser page to finish), the composer shows the stop button, labelled cancel the login to <provider>. It cancels the login, and nothing is stored. After /compact, or a compaction pi runs on its own when the context fills, the transcript is re-read once the thread is idle, so it shows the compacted history without a reload.

What it doesn’t do

• An image in pi’s reply that lives on another host is not loaded until you click it. The button names the host first. A reply is untrusted text, and loading an image is a request to whoever wrote its URL.
• An attached image can be at most 5 MB, and a prompt can carry at most 20. A file that is not an image is refused with a notice, never dropped silently.
• The thread URL is for you, on this machine. The server listens on 127.0.0.1 only, so the link does not work from another computer.

Go deeper

• Prompt, run, settle: what happens between Send and the settled reply.
• Follow, snapshot and frames: how the page stays in step with the thread.
• Presentation seam and Tool result seam: how a tool call becomes a row.
• HTTP routes: every route the page calls.