Feature guides

Precursor is a work follow-up assistant built from several distinct surfaces — long-lived topics, throwaway chats, recorded meetings, autonomous agents and the pipelines that chain them — sharing one set of tools, personas and memory. 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, monitored from a control-tower dashboard (opt-in).
🔗 Workflows	Chain those agents into a reusable pipeline the coordinator runs unattended, with gates and approval checkpoints (opt-in).
🗂️ Workspaces & files	Git clones / local dirs the assistant can browse and edit. Shown as Files in the sidebar.
📋 Kanban	A board over the GitHub issues linked to your topics. Ships as a plugin — routes, tools and UI in one package.

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. When you pick the vertical rail, it also stays on the home launcher so you're never more than a click from any section; Home and the ⌘K search launcher sit together at the top of the rail, above the sections.

Cross-cutting capabilities

These work across the sections above:

• Skills, roles & memory — reusable /slash prompt presets (stored as SKILL.md files), named assistant personas, 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 or your local machine.
• Attachments — images as vision input; PDF / DOCX / PPTX and text/code files text-extracted; content-addressed on disk, deduped.
• Import & export — share an agent or a workflow as a plain YAML file, and choose what happens to anything that already exists on import.
• Storage & retention — per-feature sweeps that bound database growth, plus an on-demand cleanup cockpit and database compaction.
• Phone & tablet layout — below 768px the sidebar becomes an overlay drawer and the content takes the whole screen, with touch-reachable actions and safe-area padding.
• Background app — install with one command, run it at login, drive it from a menu-bar icon, and update in place.
• Plugins — install a package and it brings a whole section, MCP tools, settings and API routes. Browse the catalogue for the ones we know about.

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.