Topics

A topic is a long-lived conversation that keeps its own history and context. It's the heart of Precursor: each topic is an independent thread of work, and it can be linked to a GitHub issue whose body, comments, and labels become live context on every turn.

A topic linked to a GitHub issue — the issue's labels tag the chat and its comments feed the assistant's context.

Issue-linked context

Link a topic to a GitHub issue (paste a URL/number, or create a new issue from the topic). From then on, every turn rebuilds the system prompt from:

• the issue body,
• its most-recent comments (newer comments outweigh older ones), and
• its labels (which also show up as tags on the chat).

Because the context is rebuilt on every turn, changes to the issue propagate instantly — the assistant always reasons over the current state of the work. The result is cached with a TTL (IssueContextCache) so repeated turns don't hammer the GitHub API.

Precursor can also write back to GitHub — create or update the issue, and post comments — from the composer's GitHub actions and the shared draft panel.

Tree organization

Topics form a self-referencing tree: nest a topic under a parent to group related threads.

Scheduling & reminders

Any topic can carry a schedule so a prompt runs on a cadence — an interval, a weekday mask, and a daily time-of-day in a timezone. A scheduled prompt that begins with a slash command is dispatched to that command's backend action; other prompts run a normal generation turn. See the scheduler for cadences, /guard probes, and Run now.

You can also set a one-shot reminder that resurfaces the topic at a specific time with a posted system message.

Under the composer

Within a topic's chat you get the full composer toolkit:

• Streaming replies over SSE with markdown, mermaid, and code highlighting.
• / slash commands — skills, memory commands, GitHub create/update/close, /notes, and more.
• Attachments — images (vision) and documents (text-extracted).
• MCP tools — enabled tool servers are opened for the turn and their tool calls shown inline.
• Lazy history — long transcripts load the most recent page and fetch older messages as you scroll up.

Data model

Under the hood a topic is a Topic row (a self-referencing tree) with Message children (roles user / assistant / system / tool). A topic becomes "scheduled" simply by having an enabled TopicSchedule. See the architecture reference for the full schema.