A meeting with your agents.

What a meeting is for.

Use the Circle when you want several points of view before you decide something: a design choice, a plan for the week, a tricky bug, or a question where you expect your agents to disagree.

Open it from the The Circle tab in the rail on the left of the office. The Circle is its own 3D room: a ring of seats around a table, with a lantern in the middle and a plan hanging above. Until you convene a meeting, the room plays a short demonstration so you can see what one looks like.

A table can seat:

• You, always, as the host.
• Your agents from this building, both the ones at their desks and hired employees who are offline. An offline employee is woken up for the meeting.
• Summoned guests: seats you invent for this one meeting, such as "The sceptic". They are gone when the meeting ends.

Up to 12 seats, and at least two.

Convening a meeting.

At the foot of the Circle room is a panel called Convene a circle. It asks two questions, one at a time. The strip at the top, 1 What is it about · 2 Who sits, shows which step you are on.

Step 1: what it is about

1. Type a title in What is this circle for? The title is required. It hangs over the table, names the meeting in History, and is the first thing every seat is told.
2. Optionally, fill in the brief: What should the room know before it starts? Context, the decision you need, what is out of scope…
3. Press Next · who sits, or press Enter in the title box.

Step 2: who sits

Your title stays at the top with an ‹ Edit button if you want to change it. Under it is the list of people, headed Who sits with a live N invited count.

• You are always first, marked The host’s chair.
• Online lists agents at their desks, with what they are doing, or At their desk. · busy is added if they are in the middle of work.
• Offline lists hired employees who are not running, marked Gone home — woken when the circle opens.
• Click a row to invite or uninvite someone. With more than eight agents, a Find somebody… search box appears.

To add a guest who is not one of your agents, type a name in Summon somebody for this hour alone…, or click one of the six ready-made guests: The builder, The sceptic, The user's advocate, The operator, The historian and The simplifier. They are chosen to disagree with each other in useful ways.

When the table looks right, press Open the circle.

Settings, tone and habits.

Before or after a meeting, a small strip above the panel reads Convene · History · Settings. Settings opens a sheet over the whole view. What you set here applies to every circle, and to a meeting in progress from its next turn.

There is no Save button: every change is kept as you make it. Reset to defaults is in the footer.

Tones

A tone sets what kind of meeting this is. Pick one at a time:

Habits

Habits are small rules that apply whatever the tone. Turn on as many as you like: Keep it brief, Name the trade-off, Plain words, Point at evidence, Ask the room and Close with a commitment.

Preparation.

When you open the circle, your real agents do not walk straight to the table. First they read your project and write notes on what they found, so their first turn is as good as their last.

While they prepare, a large line crosses the middle of the room: The agents are preparing and taking notes for the meeting. In the room, the agents who are preparing stay at their desks, typing. Each one walks to the table when it marks itself ready, so the ring fills as the reading finishes.

On the right, a board titled Preparing shows N/M ready and a Pending or Ready badge for each seat. Guests and you do not need to prepare, so they are marked as not being waited on.

The work never stops

Each agent prepares on its own hidden Circle screen, separate from its usual three screens. Whatever the agent was doing before the meeting carries on, untouched, while it prepares and while the meeting runs.

You can watch an agent prepare. Select it and open the Circle tab in its agent panel. The tab's status reads, for example, Preparing · 4:19 left, then Ready — waiting for the others. See the hidden Circle screen.

Starting the meeting

At the foot of the room, the panel shows who you are still waiting on and how long is left.

• When everyone is ready, you hear "The circle is ready to start." Press Start the meeting.
• If someone is taking too long, Start anyway unlocks once the preparation time is up (five minutes unless you changed it). A seat that did not finish its notes still takes part, from the title and what is said at the table.
• Call it off cancels the meeting.

Taking turns.

There is one lantern. Whoever holds it has the floor, and only they may speak. It moves around the ring one seat at a time.

• The panel tells you where it is: It is your turn, The lantern is with someone, or The lantern is on the table. Nobody has the floor.
• A bar on the speaker's seat shows how much of the turn is left. A turn is 150 seconds by default. A seat that finishes early passes the lantern straight on.
• While the lantern is on the table, you can click a seat to give it the turn.

Your turn

When the lantern reaches you, your microphone opens by itself. Speak, or type in the box, then press Say it (or Enter) to say it and pass the lantern on. You can also:

• Pass it on without saying anything.
• Set it down to put the lantern back on the table.

Other controls: Running/Paused pauses the meeting, and Voice/Muted turns the seats' spoken voices on or off.

Raising a hand

When it is not your turn, press Raise a hand. A ✋ appears on your seat so the room can see you want to speak, and the button reads Hand up until you lower it. Your hand goes down when you get the floor.

The plan, proposals and votes

Above the table hangs The plan, with room for seven lines. It is what the meeting decides.

• As host, type in Write a line onto the plan… and press Enter to write it straight onto the plan.
• Or press Put it to the room to make it a proposal that everyone votes on.

One proposal is On the table at a time. Everyone votes Yes, No or Abstain, and the AI seats vote straight away without waiting for their turn. After the vote window (45 seconds by default), anyone who has not voted counts as abstaining. A proposal carries if it has at least one yes and no no, and is then written onto the plan. As host you can decide it yourself at any moment with Carry it now or Drop it.

Discussion or debate

While the room gathers, the Circle decides whether your topic suits an open discussion or a debate with two sides. In a debate, seats are given a side, turns alternate between the sides, and the host scores each turn for evidence, reasoning and response. Who the host is, an AI or you, is set under Settings → Seats.

Closing, recap and history.

When the meeting ends, the panel says The circle is closed. A moment later a short recap appears under it: what the meeting was about, what was decided, what was left open.

While the recap is being written you see Writing the recap…. If no one spoke, no recap is written.

History

Open History from the strip above the panel to see Past meetings for this project, newest first, with who was there, when, how long, and how many plan lines came out of it. Click one to see its recap, the plan, who sat, what was said, and the files, with an Open folder button.

• A meeting that was interrupted (the app quit, or the page reloaded) is still listed, marked did not finish, with whatever it had saved.
• History is read-only. A record of a meeting cannot be edited from here.

Where records are saved.

Every meeting leaves a folder inside your project folder, in a hidden folder called .the-circle. You can open, read, share or commit these files like any others.

your-project/
  .the-circle/
    <meeting>/
      ada-initial-meeting-notes.md    each agent's notes, written while preparing
      turns/001-ada.json              one file per turn, saved as the turn ends
      plan.md                         the plan, every proposal and its votes
      meeting-transcription.md        everything said, in order
      recap.md                        the short recap
      meeting.json                    a summary of the meeting

A strip at the top of the Circle panel tells you where the current meeting is being saved, with an Open folder button. As the meeting runs it shows progress such as Saving turn 3 · Ada…, 17 turns saved, and during preparation Notes: Ada ✓ · Bo — waiting.

Common questions.