# Chats

> How AQ chats work: a conversation with full tools and no branch, repositories opened as the chat's own copy, secrets, and handing code changes to work items.

Published October 28, 2026 · by the AQ team · Canonical: https://aq.dev/docs/chat/

A chat in AQ is a thread with no branch of its own. It runs on your machine with a shell, your secrets and your connected accounts, so it can query, read and report, and when code needs to change it proposes work items instead of editing anything itself. Start one from the new page with the Chat switch, from the sidebar's Chats group, or from your phone.

## Starting a chat

Pick Chat on the new page, type your question and press Enter. A chat needs no repository; the page shows one line saying what the chat can read. Pick the model like anywhere else in AQ: one of your own subscriptions or an AQ model.

## Repositories, opened on demand

When a question needs code, the chat opens the repository as its own copy, separate from your work items' worktrees, says which one it opened and why, and records it in the transcript ("Opened acme/web for this chat: its own copy of main"). At the start of each later turn, a copy that is more than a few minutes old is refreshed to the latest default branch, unless the chat has local changes there. Ending the chat removes its copies.

## Tools a chat has

- A shell on your machine, with personal and organization [secrets](https://aq.dev/docs/secrets/) as environment variables. A chat can ask you for a missing secret with a secure card.
- Your connected accounts (Linear, Slack, Gmail, Calendar and more) with their per-tool permissions.
- Visual replies: tables, charts and pages above the text, publishable at a stable link.
- Memory search across your agents' notes (see [memory](https://aq.dev/docs/memory/)).

## From chat to work

Ask the chat to build something and it proposes one or more work items with a title and a brief. Tick the ones you want, pick a repository for each, and Start: each becomes its own work item, nested under the chat in the sidebar, prepared and started with the brief. Ask "where are we?" later and the chat reads their status. If the request should repeat, the chat can propose a [bot](https://aq.dev/docs/bots/) instead.

## Ending a chat

End chat in the item menu closes the thread and removes its repository copies. Product overview: [AQ Chat](https://aq.dev/product/chat/).

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About AQ: AQ is the multiplayer coding harness where teams chat, build and run bots with every AI coding agent, like Claude Code and Codex: shared live terminals, review and merge, app previews and standing jobs, in your own cloud. Start at [aq.dev](https://aq.dev/).