The path is /workbench/text/chat. AI Chat is where conversations on x-rush happen: you pick a Character, you talk, and both sides of the exchange stay saved. Two habits from other chat tools don't transfer here. There is no new-conversation button, because one Character carries exactly one ongoing history. And the list you see belongs to the Project selected in the top navigation; switch Project and the Character list switches with it.
Underneath the plain surface (list on the left, transcript and input on the right) sit a few rules worth knowing before you rely on the page: where Characters live, how history persists, what goes into a custom Character, and where saved output ends up.
Projects Own Characters
A Character is a business object a Project owns. Every account starts with a protected Default Project, and anything you create elsewhere lives in the Project you created it in. Switch to another Project and you see that Project's Characters; switch back and everything returns as you left it, histories included. Nothing copies or migrates behind your back.
A new Project starts with an empty list and three ways to fill it: create a custom Character here, copy one from your Default Project, or browse Explore and Remix a published Character into this Project. Copies and Remixes are independent from the moment they land — no live link to the source, and the source's chat history never comes along.
Built-in Characters and the Default Project
The Characters the platform provides live in the Default Project and appear while that Project is the selected one. Protection covers their setup: you cannot delete them or edit their role configuration, background material, or ability rules. Using them has no restrictions — chat, per-message attachments, web search, message sharing, Markdown export, and clearing your own history all work the same as for any custom Character.
When a built-in Character is close but not quite right, use Duplicate as custom agent and pick a target Project. The duplicate is fully editable and starts from an empty chat. Built-in Characters cannot be moved between Projects; duplication is the only way they travel. Characters you own can move outright: a move keeps the Character's identity and carries the full chat history, compression progress and files into the target Project, and the original list no longer shows it. When an Automation is bound, the plain move is off — the Automations page moves the Character and its schedule as one atomic unit.
One Character, One Persistent History
The first message you send a Character starts its history in that Project. From then on, every message and every reply saves automatically and stays saved. Come back tomorrow, select the same Character, and the thread is where you left it. A refresh doesn't touch it, because the history belongs to the Character rather than to the browser tab. Switch to another Character mid-conversation and the first one keeps its state; nothing clears, and no messages or summaries leak between threads. Each history also compresses its own context in the background after every 10 successful replies, which keeps long threads usable without rewriting any message you can see. Compression spends nothing extra.
Regeneration works on the most recent reply only, and editing a message already sent isn't supported; to correct an earlier instruction, send a follow-up. Clear chat history is the explicit reset. It wipes the visible messages and that history's compression progress, keeps every part of the Character's configuration, and leaves the billing counter untouched.
One Character generates one reply at a time. Different Characters can generate in parallel, up to the running cap your plan sets, and a generation keeps running while you go read something else.
Creating a Custom Character
Creation happens inside the current Project and takes one of two shapes. Fill the structured form yourself, or describe what you want in plain language, attach background material, and let the creation assistant draft the configuration for you to edit. The assistant exists only inside this flow; it never joins your Character list and never reads your chats. Each successful set of suggestions it returns counts as one ordinary chat reply. There is no test-chat step — save and you land directly in the conversation.
Seven sections make up the form: Basic information (name and role goal are the only required fields), Role setup, Behavior rules (default language, tone, answer length, output format, how readily it follows up), Background material (pasted text or an uploaded file, distilled into an editable background note), Abilities (web search and attachment handling), Conversation appearance (chat background, theme color, message bubble style), and Opening configuration (welcome message, suggested questions, and how the Character steers when you haven't asked anything yet). All user-editable text across these sections shares a 5,000-character budget, and the background note takes at most 3,000 of it. When I built my first one, I typed two sentences for the role goal and let the assistant draft the rest, then overwrote its tone suggestion; the drafting is the slow part otherwise.
Unsent input is not saved automatically. Leave a Character with an unsent message and the page asks; only a draft you explicitly keep survives, one per Character.
A finished custom Character can be published to Explore for others to browse and Remix. Publishing takes a public preview and an automatic safety review. The Character's configuration itself is what publishes; chat history never travels, and background material stays home unless you free specific items one at a time. Later edits to the Character never rewrite the published snapshot; you decide when to push an update.
Deleting a custom Character is permanent and takes its history, drafts, and files with it. If an Automation is bound to it, the confirmation asks twice, because the delete takes the schedule down too. Built-in Characters cannot be deleted, and people who already Remixed your Character keep their independent copies either way.
Attachments, Web Search, and Billing
A message carries one attachment, up to 1 MB: common images plus PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, TXT, Markdown, and code files. Archives, executables, audio, and video attachments don't work in this version. An attachment belongs to the message it arrived with. Material you want available every session belongs in the Character's background settings instead, which hold one permanent file of up to 1 MB. Everything a Character stores, avatar and chat background included, caps at 10 MB.
Web search is a per-Character ability, with a per-message control in the input area for the times you want to force it on a single answer. Answers that searched show the sources they used as links.
Every ordinary reply draws on one shared assist pool per account: 10 successful replies, accumulated across all your Characters and every creation assistant on the site, consume 0.5 credits. Failed replies never advance the counter, and the internal work inside one reply — a search, a file parse, a system retry — never splits it into several. A reply that fails leaves your message in place, keeps whatever fragments appeared, and offers a retry on the original message. Stopping a generation after any text has appeared still counts as one.
Shares and Project Documents
Two mechanisms move content out of a chat, and they solve different problems.
Share publishes a fixed snapshot. You tick the question-and-answer pairs you want, preview everything, and get a read-only link that stays out of search engines and sitemaps. The snapshot never includes system prompts or background material, it survives deleting the Character, and revoking it ends public access immediately.
Save as document and Organize into document create Project Documents: private text artifacts owned by the current Project. Saving one finished reply carries its Markdown over verbatim, with no AI call and no credits. Selecting several messages for an AI pass to merge into one draft costs one ordinary assist reply. Either way, you confirm the name, the tags (up to 10), and the body before anything is created. A document keeps one continuously edited draft, takes an immutable version when you say so, caps at 50,000 characters, and exports to .md, .docx, or PDF for free. Other workflows pick documents up from their Project results selector by choosing a saved version; chat has no send-to-workflow button by design. Clearing the chat or deleting the Character afterward changes nothing already saved.
Automations and the Quick Bubble
Scheduled pushes from Automations deliver into the Character's history here, tagged as automatic runs so they read differently from your own turns. Opening a delivery from Automations jumps to that exact message in the thread; your follow-up continues it, and nothing is re-inserted or regenerated.
The floating bubble on other pages is the quick view of all this. It lists Characters with an enabled Automation across all your Projects, counts unread deliveries, and writes your replies into the same Character history at ordinary chat rates. For catching up on a morning briefing it is the faster surface. For working anything out, open the full page.
Rule of thumb for keeping things: histories persist, but other workbenches can only pick up documents, so a conversation worth reusing ends at Save as document.