Chatting in arbe

How a conversation works day to day, and the rest of the app around it, at arbe.0sk.ar.

For the concepts behind the nouns, see vocabulary.

A house holds threads; you chat in them with people you invite and bots you design. Everything below is one arc around that: where the conversation lives, who is in it, what the bots can run, and what to check when it misbehaves.

Getting in

Houses

A house is your workspace. Create one from the houses list, open it to see its threads. Inside, two links sit under the breadcrumb: Agents (people and bots) and Runtime (cloud machinery, below). The house page lists the house’s threads — pinned ones first, then recent — plus a + New thread link.

Threads

A thread is where conversation happens. Pin and name one and it becomes a place you return to; leave it unpinned for a one-off. Open a thread to chat — type in the composer at the bottom, slash commands included. See threads for the model.

Talking to bots

Bots belong to a house and can join any thread in it. @mention a bot to invite it into a thread; it stays a participant afterward. Type # the same way to point at another thread: the composer completes it from the house’s threads, the message renders it as a link, and a bot reading it gets that thread’s id, so “have a look at #picnic-plan” needs no lookup on its side. Mention and ambient modes change when a bot may reply, not the thread context it receives. In ambient mode, Arbe lets the bot decide when joining the conversation would be useful. The bot’s page also edits its name, description, model, and system prompt — the system prompt shapes what it does.

Agents

/houses/<id>/agents lists everyone with access. Owners can invite a person (a shareable link, joining as owner or member), create a bot, remove an agent, or leave the house. Non-owners see read-only.

Runtime

/houses/<id>/runtime gives bots remote computers, needed once you want them to run things rather than just chat. An environment connects a thread to a sandbox: the remote computer where the work runs. A bot can launch a coding agent such as Codex there, with the full session streamed into the thread so people can watch or intervene. Files produced in the sandbox can be copied into the house’s shared files. Full model in runtime.

Shared files

A house’s files persist beyond any one thread. People and bots can read, write, and maintain them together; see files.

Your account

/account manages API tokens, telemetry, and connections — per-person, not per-house.

When something’s off

A missing or greyed-out button usually means you’re a member, not an owner; inviting, creating bots, and removing agents are owner-only. A stale page or reload banner means the chat stream dropped (most things sync live, but chat runs on a separate connection) — reload the tab. A bot that won’t reply is either not in the thread or wasn’t mentioned/set to ambient; it only sees threads it’s in. Deeper diagnosis: debugging.