How it did it

Every chat keeps its steps: what you asked, what your assistant read, ran and changed, where it waited for you, and what each reply cost. How it did it puts them on one timeline you can scrub through and replay. Routine runs and tasks have one too, so you can see what happened while you weren't watching.

Open it

• In a chat, press the How it did it button at the top, next to Find in chat.
• On a phone, press More (the three dots), then How it did it.
• Or press CtrlK and type "replay" or "timeline".

A routine's run and a task open as their own chat, so the same button works there.

Scrub and replay

The bar across the top is the run, from your first message to the last reply. Each mark is a step. Its colour shows the kind of work, like reading, changing files or running tests. A diamond is a question it asked you, and red means something didn't work. Long waits, like the time between your messages, fold into a short break so the work itself stays readable.

• Drag along the bar, or use the arrow keys to go one step at a time. Page Up and Page Down jump a whole message at a time.
• Replay plays it back one step at a time, with the pearl riding along the bar.
• Below the bar is the step you're on: what it did, how long it took, and what it found. An edit shows the lines it changed, and a browser step shows the page as it was.
• Show in chat closes the timeline and opens the chat right at that step.

The line above the bar adds up the work up to the step you're on: time spent, steps, tokens and money. At the end it says In all. While your assistant is still working, new steps appear as they happen.

Save it as a file

Press Save it at the bottom of the timeline to save that chat. To save many chats at once, press Save as a file on the Activity page (in the sidebar), or CtrlK and Save chats as a file. Then choose how far back to go and, if you have more than one, which agent or provider. Routine runs and tasks are included unless you turn off Routines and tasks too.

Choose what to save it as:

• A page to read: every step with what it found, as a web page that opens in any browser. It runs nothing and loads nothing from the internet.
• Markdown: the same, as plain text for notes and documents.
• OpenAI chat, for training: the messages and tool calls, one chat per line. This is the format OpenAI's fine-tuning and many other training tools take.
• ShareGPT, as Hermes writes it: the format Hermes Agent saves for training, with each tool call and its result written into the conversation.
• ATIF, for agent research: Harbor's trajectory format, with numbered steps, tool calls and their results, and tokens and cost for each step.

Press Save. The file goes into your Downloads folder, or press Change to choose another folder. It never replaces a file that's already there: a second copy gets " 2" at the end of its name. It stays on this computer, because Conch never sends your chats anywhere.

Keys and personal details come out

Take out keys and personal details is on whenever you save. Before you save, Conch shows what it will take out, like "2 keys and tokens, 1 email address and 3 folder names". Press that line to see where each one was, written as it will be saved (OPENAI_API_KEY=[key]). The values themselves aren't shown there.

It takes out:

• the passwords and keys Conch keeps
• anything shaped like a key or token
• email addresses, phone numbers and card numbers
• addresses of computers on the internet
• your home folder's name
• your name and the names of the people in About you

Turn the switch off only for a file you keep for yourself. The next time you save, it's on again.