Feature guides
Precursor keeps a small, opinionated core — topics, chat, GitHub — and layers the rest of a follow-up assistant around it. This section is a tour of everything it can do.
The sections
Precursor's sidebar is organized into color-coded sections, each a different mode of working:
| Section | What it's for |
|---|---|
| 🧵 Topics | Long-lived, tree-organized threads, each optionally linked to a GitHub issue used as live context. |
| 💬 Chats | Quick, throwaway conversations for fast answers. |
| 🎙️ Live sessions | Record & transcribe a meeting with live insights, Q&A, and a summary. |
| 🤖 Agents | Autonomous Copilot SDK agents for long-running tasks (opt-in). |
| 🗂️ Workspaces & files | Git clones / local dirs the assistant can browse and edit. |
| 📋 Kanban | A board over the GitHub issues linked to your topics. |
Rearrange them to taste. Drag any section in the sidebar — whether you use the vertical icon rail or the horizontal tab switcher — to reorder it. The arrangement is remembered across reloads and shared between both navigation styles.
Cross-cutting capabilities
These work across the sections above:
- Skills & memory — reusable
/slashprompt presets (stored asSKILL.mdfiles) and long-term memory injected into every conversation. - Scheduler & reminders — put a topic or agent on a cadence, gate runs behind cheap MCP probes with
/guard, or set one-shot reminders. - MCP (both ways) — Precursor is an MCP server and an MCP client, with built-in tool servers and support for your own.
- Command runner — execute bash / python / node inside a throwaway Docker jail.
- Attachments — images as vision input; PDF / DOCX / PPTX text-extracted; content-addressed on disk, deduped.
- Plugins — extend the backend and frontend without forking core.
What's under the hood
The whole thing runs as a single uvicorn process in production (FastAPI + the pre-built React SPA), backed by async SQLAlchemy and Alembic migrations. For the full picture see the architecture reference and technical stack.