Chat & sessions

Everything you do in Harriet Desktop happens in a chat session inside a workspace. This page covers starting sessions, reading streaming responses and the execution plan, and how workspaces and templates keep different jobs separate.

Workspaces come first

A workspace is a folder you choose and share with the app: an existing project or notes folder works fine. The AI reads and writes inside that folder, which is what lets it do real work — summarize a quarter's invoices for finance, draft vendor emails from a notes file for operations, assemble a renewal brief for sales — instead of only answering questions.

When you create a local workspace, the app may offer team templates shared by your organization: choose a starting point, or leave blank to create an empty workspace. Keep unrelated jobs in separate workspaces so files, sessions, and context stay tidy.

Sessions

A session is one conversation with its own history. Use Create new session to start a fresh task in the current workspace rather than piling unrelated requests into one thread. Old sessions stay in the workspace, so you can come back to yesterday's analysis without re-explaining it.

  1. Pick or create a workspace. Choose the folder that holds the files this job needs.
  2. Create a new session. Each distinct task gets its own session.
  3. Describe the job. Be concrete: name the file, the output you want, and any constraints. Your assigned skills apply automatically when they match.

Streaming responses and the execution plan

Responses stream in live, so you see the AI's answer as it is produced rather than waiting for a finished block. On longer tasks the app also shows an execution plan: the AI's todo list, rendered as a timeline you can watch. While the AI is working out its approach the session shows a Planning status; as it works through the list, the app reports progress in the form "2 out of 5 tasks completed".

The plan is your early-warning system. If an IT admin asks for a device report and the plan shows the AI heading toward the wrong data, stop it and redirect before it finishes, not after.

💡

When the AI wants to use a tool or touch something privileged mid-task, the session pauses on a permission prompt until you respond. See Tool permissions.

Templates for repeated work

If you run the same workflow often — a weekly pipeline summary, a monthly close checklist — save it as a template and re-run it instead of retyping the prompt. Templates are stored locally on your machine. For workflows the whole team should share, ask your admin about team templates or a proper skill, which travels with your profile to every device.