Folks, tasks and rooms

A folk is a long-lived teammate with its own instructions, model, folder, memory, tools and computer. You give it work as tasks, and you can put several folks in a room when a job needs more than one.

Folks

A folk keeps its conversation, model, instructions, working folder, memory, tools and computer between sessions. Create another folk when the role, access or project should be different.

A coding folk attached to one repository
A research folk with browser and document tools
An operations folk with Gmail, Calendar and Slack
A folk that uses a local model for private work

Tasks

A task is one conversation with a folk. It has its own transcript, engine session, approvals, costs and state, so a new task gives you fresh context without creating a new folk.

If you send a message while a folk is busy, it is queued. Engines that support it can also be steered while a turn is running.

Rooms and handoffs

A room puts several folks and people in one conversation. Each folk keeps its own engine process, and a timeout stops one participant from blocking the others indefinitely.

A folk can hand a bounded subtask to another folk. The delegated run keeps its own activity and reports completion, failure or cancellation back to the parent thread. Give each delegate a narrow outcome, and avoid giving two folks ownership of the same files.

Edits and branches

Editing an earlier message starts a new path. OpenFolks does not resume a stale engine session after a rewind, so the next turn always follows the branch you can see.

Limits

Each folk runs through an engine you set up yourself, such as Claude or Codex. Its capabilities depend on that engine.
Steering a running turn works only on engines that support it.

Documentation

Next: Computers