Core concepts
Chats, turns and runs
How work is organised, what a run costs, and how follow-ups build on each other.
Work is organised as chats. A chat holds a sequence of turns, and most turns dispatch a run. Understanding the difference is worth two minutes, because runs are the unit you are billed in.
The three words
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Chat | One thread of work, listed in the sidebar. It has a title, a status, and everything produced inside it. |
| Turn | One exchange: what you asked, and what came back. Turns are numbered and stacked in the conversation column. |
| Run | The work a turn dispatched: writing a module, editing a project, verifying something. This is what your allowance and credit are spent on. |
Not every turn is a full run. Asking a question about a module you already generated is answered as a cheap conversational call; it needs credit but it does not burn a slot from a monthly allowance.
Follow-ups build on what came before
The composer stays at the bottom of a chat after a run finishes. Anything you type there is a follow-up, and the next run starts from the state the last one left:
Add a terminal-count output that pulses high on 255
- From scratch chats re-seed each run from the conversation, so a follow-up rewrites the module with your change applied.
- Project chats edit the files in place, so changes accumulate in the workspace across turns.
Tip
Keep one chat per module. A chat that has drifted across three unrelated blocks gives every follow-up more context to misread; starting fresh is usually cheaper than correcting it.
Your half-written message is kept
Text you have typed but not sent is saved per chat. Open another thread, check your billing page, come back, and the message is still there. It is cleared once the run it belongs to is dispatched.
Chat statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| in progress | A run is live. The step indicator shows where it is. |
| completed | The last run finished and its files are attached. |
| answered | The last turn was a question rather than a generation. |
| failed | The last run stopped. The chat says on which step. |
Deleting a chat
The ... menu on a chat row offers Delete chat. It removes the chat, its turns and the files generated in it, and it cannot be undone.
- A chat with a run still in progress refuses to delete. Wait for the run to finish or fail, then try again.
- Billing records are not deleted with the chat; your ledger stays complete.
- An uploaded project workspace is detached rather than destroyed, and is cleaned up on its own schedule.