Squirrel's memory and background work

Squirrel keeps context between and inside conversations. It remembers corrections and preferences from earlier chats. It attaches the page you’re looking at to your question. It passes long jobs to a background helper while you keep typing, and it compacts a conversation that outgrows its window.

Anatomy

Squirrel keeps a memory, so you don’t have to repeat a correction once you make it. After each exchange, a second agent reads the conversation and decides what’s worth keeping, filing each item at the level it belongs to:

1. Organization. How your company works: the names you use for document types, your conventions, the way you want obligations summarized.
2. Asset. Facts true of one site: the field calls a turbine T6 while the drawings call it T5, or the service provider changed last year.
3. You. Your own preferences, such as the format you want answers in.
4. The conversation. Short-lived context that matters for the thread you are in and nowhere else.

What gets kept is narrow by design: a correction, a preference, a pattern, or an observation. An ordinary question and its answer aren’t memories.

Correct what it remembers

Say the correction in the chat. Squirrel treats a correction as the most valuable kind of memory, and the next conversation starts from your version rather than the document’s. Correcting a memory is the same move as marking an extracted fact inaccurate.

Set the context for a question

Squirrel starts from what’s on your screen. Above the message box, each piece of context it’s holding shows as a small badge you can remove:

1. The page. Whatever you have open attaches automatically. Dismiss page context drops it for a question about something else, and Add page puts it back.
2. Text you selected. Highlight a passage anywhere outside the chat. Squirrel takes it as context, quoted on its own badge, until you remove it with Remove selected text.
3. Anything you name. Press @ to mention something… in the composer to point at an asset, document, system, task, event, finding, contact, company, obligation, suggestion, or a teammate. See mentions for the full list.

Context is per message, and moving to another page resets it to that page.

Run a long job in the background

Some questions are one lookup: “when does this contract expire.” Others are a sweep: “read every preventive maintenance report from the last six months and tell me what happened.” For the second kind, Squirrel passes the work to a background helper and answers you immediately instead of holding the thread open.

While that helper is working, the thread shows Squirrel is researching in the background…. You can keep asking other things, in that chat or another. The results appear in the thread as an ordinary message once the helper finishes. The chat shows them automatically, even if you left the page.

Run several chats at once

Each conversation runs independently, so starting a second chat doesn’t pause the first. Recent chats in the chat panel lists the last few, with View all for the rest. A chat that finishes while you were somewhere else shows a marker for something new to read.

If a conversation starts circling, Squirrel says so and offers Start fresh chat.

Keep a long conversation going

A long chat eventually exceeds what the model can hold. Rather than failing or silently forgetting the beginning, Squirrel summarizes the earlier part and keeps the most recent messages verbatim. Where it can, it does this between your messages, so you don’t wait for it. When a single turn grows too long, it pauses to compact before the next step. You see Compacting conversation… while it happens and Conversation compacted when it’s done, then your question runs as normal.

Limits

One message has a limit of 50,000 characters, with a counter that appears as you approach it. Put the document in your source and mention it with @, and Squirrel reads it with its lineage intact.

Your own memories are in the Squirrel Profile tab of your profile settings, where you can edit, add, or delete them. Organization and asset memories have no screen in the app. If you suspect Squirrel is working from one that is out of date, tell your Aevy contact what it keeps getting wrong, and they can remove it.

Squirrel drafts, and you decide. When you ask it for a record, it writes your draft in the chat, and nothing is created until you press Create. When it reaches a conclusion on its own that should become a record, it writes a suggestion. That could be a task, a finding, an event, a contact, or an update to one of them. The suggestion has its reasoning and its source, and nothing enters your register until you accept it. One action falls outside that loop: asked to report a bug or raise a support request, Squirrel passes the message to the Aevy team.

What’s next

• Squirrel: asking a question in the first place.
• Suggestions: reviewing what a conversation proposes before it becomes a record.
• Mentions: the full list of what you can point at with @.