Sidekick
Sidekick is your private place to work with AI. It uses your personal context, connections, skills, and threads.
What Sidekick is for
Section titled “What Sidekick is for”Use Sidekick for:
- Personal email, calendar, and document work.
- Private drafts and planning.
- Questions that should not go into a shared Space.
- Personal assistant workflows.
- A user-hosted OpenClaw runtime.
Sidekick versus a Space
Section titled “Sidekick versus a Space”| Sidekick | Space |
|---|---|
| Private to you | Shared with selected people or the workspace |
| Uses your personal context | Uses shared Space context |
| Good for individual work | Good for team workflows |
| Has personal conversations | Organizes work with Threads and channels |
Setup choices
Section titled “Setup choices”New Sidekicks use a Type-hosted Claude runtime by default. During setup, choose a name and avatar, connect the work apps you want Sidekick to learn from, and select any starter automations. You can also connect your own OpenClaw.
When you connect an app such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, GitHub, Linear, or Notion, Sidekick samples recent work using read-only actions. For example, a connected Slack account lets it search and read relevant messages; setup does not send messages or change data in those apps.
Sidekick saves the useful context it finds as a small set of editable documents. It chooses the document titles and organization based on what it learns rather than forcing every user into the same template. It also adds @ mentions for those documents to Instructions, which acts as the index that future chats and automations read.
Choose or change a model
Section titled “Choose or change a model”- Open a new or existing Type-hosted Sidekick conversation.
- Select the model control in the composer. Choose a model and, where supported, reasoning effort and Fast mode.
- Send your message. In an existing conversation, an explicit change becomes the choice for that conversation’s subsequent messages.
The selector is not shown for a user-hosted OpenClaw Sidekick; configure that runtime through OpenClaw instead. Available models and options depend on the runtime.
Instructions
Section titled “Instructions”Use the artifact button in a Sidekick thread to open Instructions in the artifact sidebar. After personalized setup finishes, Type opens that document automatically. Follow its @ mentions to review the supporting work-context documents, and edit any of them whenever your role, priorities, or preferences change.
Type includes the current instructions with every message you send to Sidekick, including messages in existing conversations—not only the first message in a new conversation.
Sidekick instructions are private to you and your Sidekick. They are separate from instructions in shared Spaces and cannot be shared, published, renamed, moved to a Space, or archived.
If your workspace has the Type Slack app with Slack Agents enabled, you can message Type in Slack to talk with Sidekick. Those conversations appear in your Sidekick history.
If Sidekick is not set up yet, Type sends you to setup first. The Type app also sends a welcome message the first time you open it in Slack.
Notifications
Section titled “Notifications”Use Settings → Notifications to choose which activity can interrupt you. Sidekick does not have a separate set of notification-delivery controls. For the distinction between delivery preferences, following, and thread subscriptions, see Notification preferences.