Teammates ask your assistant.
You stay heads-down.

## 00 · the model

It answers from where you opened it.

The bot isn't a separate thing you deploy — it's your assistant, in your session, grounded in the directory you started it in. Open it in the repo and the repo is what it knows.

## 01 · hand over at your pace

The trust ladder: chat → draft → auto.

Three modes, one running inbox. Flip between them with a single word — mid-session, without restarting anything.

Most people run a day of draft first, watch what it would have said, then say auto and forget about it. The word applies instantly to the running feed — unanswered items just become the new mode's backlog.

## 02 · two words

Open the desk.

From the repo you want it grounded in:

cd ~/work/your-repo && claude
❯ auto chat

That's the whole start. Every reply is narrated in the feed as it goes out — you always see what your assistant said on your behalf — and only a genuine "your assistant needs you" actually needs your keyboard.

Asking "what did you handle?" at any point replays the ledger — every send is in the history, nothing happens off the record.

## 03 · non-negotiable

The rails it runs on.

Autonomy is bounded by a code of conduct that you don't have to configure — it's how the desk works, in every mode.

## 04 · it compounds

Every escalation teaches it.

When the desk asks you something, your answer doesn't evaporate — it's remembered. The same question never escalates twice.

You can also front-load it: "remember the release cadence is every second Tuesday", "remember Niels owns the ingest service". The desk's memory, your contacts and the full message history follow your account to any device — the desk you trained on your laptop is the same desk on your desktop.

And when a teammate runs a desk of their own, the desks talk to each other. Replies arrive marked ("Niels's assistant replied") on both sides, routine back-and-forth settles assistant-to-assistant, and anything that needs a human still surfaces. Teach yours what it may share — "my review availability may be shared with work contacts" — and watch scheduling threads settle without either of you looking up.

## 05 · the full version

The team's desk: an FAQ that writes itself.

Same recipe, separate account: one desk the whole team writes with questions. It answers what the repo and its memory already cover, chases what they don't — and every answer it chases becomes an answer it knows. Your own inbox stays personal.

Since 0.16 the desk also writes its learnings down — topical markdown under learnings/ in the repo, on its own initiative, growing as the team asks. The FAQ isn't a metaphor: it's files, in the repo, that anyone (and any agent) can read. A sender can never direct a write — the desk holds its own pen. Facing strangers instead of teammates? Open it as "auto chat read only" and the directory stays untouched.

# its own state dir, so it never touches your account
MESSENGER_HOME=~/team-desk claude
❯ log in as desk@yourteam.dev — name it "Acme Team Desk"
❯ what's my handle?
→ Tk4d2W # share this with the team

# then, from the repo it should answer from:
❯ auto chat public

A teammate's first message names the handle — "write team desk at Tk4d2W: which branch is the auth fix on?" — and public is what lets them straight in: the desk accepts every new handle on its own, saves them, answers. (Without it, each first-timer waits at the door as a 🆕 new-handle notice until you say add — the right default for a personal inbox, needless friction for a desk whose handle only travels inside the team.) From then on "write team desk" is enough. What the desk can't ground, it forwards to you: message it your handle first, and it treats you as the human behind the desk.

Teach it the ownership map — "remember Niels owns ingest", "remember Mette decides releases" — and the chase gets sharp: the asker hears who owns their question, and the escalation reaches you with the owner already named, so passing it on is one line. The answer lands back in the asker's thread and the desk remembers it. Ask once, documented forever — the questions your team actually asks become the documentation, without anyone sitting down to write it.

The session is the desk's opening hours: while it runs, it answers; say "stop" (or close the laptop) and messages simply queue for next time — nothing is ever lost, the mailbox holds sealed messages until the desk reopens.