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Web chat

An always-on, in-app chat surface in the web UI. It is a full-page console at /chat — the first nav tab, before Feeds — with Discord/Slack-style rooms in a sidebar. It complements Nextcloud Talk rather than replacing it: an in-app companion for talking to the bot without leaving the dashboard.

Rooms

Each room is a persistent conversation backed by its own per-surface channel token, stored in the web_chat_rooms table. A room gets its own CHANNEL.md and its own channel sleep-cycle handling, exactly like a Talk channel.

  • Create / select — rooms live in the sidebar; selecting one loads its history.
  • Per-room settings — a kebab (⋮) on each room opens a settings modal that renames the room (the token stays the same), copies its token (to paste into a web:<token> output route), and hard-deletes the room behind a GitHub-style type-the-name confirm. A room with a task still running can't be deleted until it finishes.
  • Deep link — /chat?room=<token> selects a room on load, silently falling back if the token is unknown or belongs to another user.

Deleting a room is a hard, token-scoped cascade across task_events, tasks, web_chat_messages, and channel_sleep_cycle_state, plus a best-effort removal of the Channels/<token>/ workspace folder. (Channel memory_chunks are a documented residual.)

Sending a message

A sent message becomes a source_type="web" task with output_target="web". It is an interactive task — it loads conversation context, the room's CHANNEL.md, and the guidelines/web.md channel guidelines. Because web is a stream surface, the result and progress are not pushed anywhere; they live in the task_events log, which the /api/chat/tasks/{id}/stream SSE endpoint tails.

The live view streams:

  • Tool use — a single activity chip showing the active tool while it runs and a "✓ N tool calls" summary when done; expand it for the full list.
  • Real reasoning — the model's thinking surfaces as its own activity-chip segment.
  • Answer text — streamed token-by-token (both the native brain and, as of the latest release, the Claude Code brain via --include-partial-messages). Short lead-in narration ("Let me check…") is held back by the narration gate (scheduler.stream_text_gate_chars) so it can't leak into the answer area.

If the SSE stream falls back to polling, the client recovers without flashing an error; a terminally-failed task surfaces a terminal frame instead of hanging on "Working…".

Commands and model override

!commands and the !model <alias> <prompt> prefix work identically in web chat and in Nextcloud Talk — both route through commands.dispatch(..., surface=...). On a stream surface like web the handler result is returned inline (inline_result) and rendered as a text card, rather than delivered as a separate push message. The per-user rate limit counts source_type='web' rows.

Confirmations and attachments

  • Confirmations — an action that needs approval parks correctly and renders a Confirm/Cancel card; staged side effects wait until you confirm.
  • Attachments — drag-drop or paste files; a message can only reference files the user uploaded.

Web chat as a delivery surface

web is also a routable delivery surface (WebTransport). Alerts, the verbose execution log, and any notification routed to web are appended to a room as unsolicited system messages in the web_chat_messages table (distinct from task-backed turns), merged into room history by time and surfaced live in an open room by an idle poll. Because it is user-routable, web appears automatically in every routing selector (default destination, alert route, briefing output) alongside Talk, email, and ntfy. Route to it with a bare web (the user's general room) or web:<token> for a specific room. See per-user delivery routing.

Configuration

The surface is always enabled when the web UI is on. Tune limits and streaming cadence under [web.chat]:

[web.chat]
max_prompt_chars = 32000
max_attachment_mb = 25
rate_limit_messages = 30
rate_limit_window_seconds = 300
sse_poll_interval_ms = 200
client_poll_interval_ms = 1500

See the configuration reference for the full table.

  • Web interface — auth, pages, deployment.
  • Talk — the other interactive messaging surface.
  • Transport abstraction — .claude/rules/transport.md (WebTransport, the stream surface class, delivery routing).