Skip to content

Ask questions about a project

Get an answer drawn from what a project holds, with citations, instead of reading every contribution yourself. In the console you ask Alis; from the CLI you or a coding agent read the context directly.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the project. Viewer access is enough to ask; adding what you learn back needs Editor.

Ask in the console

  1. Open the project.
  2. Click the box at the foot of any project screen, What should Alis work on in this project? To continue an earlier conversation instead, open it under Chats in the rail.
  3. Type your question and press Enter. Use Add files and more to attach a file if the question is about it.

A new chat with Alis opens inside the project. Alis answers from what the project holds, and anything on the project that an answer refers to shows as a tile you can open. The chat is listed under Chats in the project's rail so you can continue it later; New chat there starts another.

Chats with the earlier Ideate agent are listed there too, kept to read. Replying to one carries it into a new chat with Alis.

Ask outside a project

On Projects, Interviews and Artifacts, the box at the foot, What should Alis work on?, starts a chat with Alis that is not tied to one project; so does New chat under Chats in the rail. Use it to think out loud. To ask about one project, ask from inside it so the chat belongs to it.

Read the context from the CLI

The CLI does not answer questions. It gives you, or a coding agent, the material to answer them:

  1. Map the project:

    alis ideate context <project>

  2. Open only the parts that matter, by the ids the map prints:

    Shell
    alis ideate artifacts read <artifact> --project <project>
alis ideate contribution <contribution> --project <project>

  3. Search a long file rather than reading it whole:

    alis ideate contribution <contribution> --project <project> --file 2 --lines 300-420

See Read project context from the CLI for the full loop.

Find a project by what it is about

When you do not know which project holds the answer:

alis ideate find "reducing drop-off during customer onboarding"

Describe the topic in a sentence; the search matches on meaning. --dimension pain-points (or stakeholders, technology, current-process, intent) narrows the facet it matches against. It searches your active account only, and a project created minutes ago may not be findable yet.

alis ask is different: it answers questions about your own platform activity (coding sessions, specialist conversations and skills), not about Ideate projects.