Core concepts

Everything in cmdk is built from a small set of ideas. Once these are clear, every page in the app reads the same way.

Organisation and workspace

An organisation is your company in cmdk. It owns workspaces and their members, and can hold organisation-wide secrets. A workspace is where a team works: chats, agents, channels, automations, skills, tools, knowledge, connected apps and credits all belong to a workspace. Most teams have one workspace; larger organisations use one per department or client. See Organisations and workspaces.

Chat

A chat is a conversation with the AI. It can use any model, take attachments, and pull in agents, skills, tools and automations through @ mentions. A chat can be scoped to a project, which adds its own instructions, skills and connections on top of the workspace set. See Working in chat.

Agent

An agent is a colleague with a role, its own instructions, a model, tools, connections and context files. Agents work in channels and take steps in automations. Talking to an agent one-to-one opens a direct channel. See Agents.

Channel

A channel is a team of agents with a playbook. It has a purpose, a playbook that describes how the team collaborates, a team of agents and a lead who receives requests, hands out work and replies. Posting a request in a channel starts a task. See Channels.

Automation, plan and run

An automation is a named job. You describe it in a brief, in your words; cmdk compiles the brief into a plan of numbered steps, each carried out by an agent or by code. A trigger decides when it runs: manually, on a schedule, or on an event. Every execution is a run. Channels are automations under the hood: the playbook is the plan, and the channel's tasks are its runs. See How automations work.

Task

A task is one run seen from the person's side: something the team is doing for you. Tasks show up in the channel timeline, under Recent in the sidebar, and on the Activity page. A task can be Queued, Running, Needs input, Done, Failed or Cancelled. See Tasks and activity.

Skill

A skill is reusable knowledge you teach once: a folder of files with a SKILL.md that explains when and how to use it. Skills apply to every chat, agent and automation. See Skills.

Tool

A tool is something the AI can do. Three kinds exist: actions from a connected app (send an email, create a deal), custom tools you define, and script tools, which are code-and-data bundles with a description the AI reads to decide when to call them. Each tool has an approval mode. See Tools.

Connected app

A connected app is an account your workspace has authorised, such as Gmail, Slack or HubSpot. Connections belong to the workspace, and each agent or automation is told which connections and which actions it may use. See Connected apps.

Knowledge

Knowledge is everything the workspace has taught its agents: files you uploaded, pages they read, meeting transcripts, and what their own runs wrote down. It is searchable from every chat and run. See Knowledge.

Memory

Alongside knowledge, agents keep short memory notes at organisation, workspace and automation level. After each run they reflect on what was durable and store it. You see the effect, not the mechanism.

Artifact and document

An artifact is a reusable visual component the agent can render with live data: a carousel, a report, a card. A document is long-form writing built section by section with the doc builder. Both open in the chat side panel. See Artifacts and projects.

Meeting

A meeting is a recording with a transcript, summary, key points and action items, recorded on your device or by the notetaker joining a call. See Meetings.

Credits

Credits measure usage. One credit is one cent of model cost. AI chat, automations and media generation share one monthly pool per user, and the counter resets on the first of the month. See Credits and usage.