Team Chats

Each workspace has one durable Team Channel in PostgreSQL, shared with every active member. Private Alshival conversations remain separate. Open conversation history in the compact Alshival widget to select the Team Channel or a private conversation.

New task comments appear in this channel and task-message replies become task comments. Ordinary channel messages remain chats. Historical comments stay on their tasks without being backfilled into the fresh channel. See Workspace task graph for the one-time legacy channel reset and upgrade requirements.

Using the Team Channel

• Use @handle to mention a channel member. Each user can edit their unique handle in Settings → Personalization.
• Type $ to open the same enabled-skill picker used in a private Alshival chat. Sending a $skill-name command asks Alshival to run that skill. Use @Alshival for a general request; $Alshival is not an agent mention. An administrator selects a dedicated Team connection and model under Settings → Model Provider → Advanced connections before Team Chat can run Alshival. See AI accounts. An ordinary mention such as @teammate does not invoke the agent.
• Images appear as embedded previews, while other attachments appear as download cards. User attachments are uploaded into the shared workspace under team-uploads/, and Alshival can attach files it generated in the workspace. The channel message stores a reference to the file. The shared Files app can therefore also see these files; channel membership is not a file ACL in V1.
• Use the wave control to record a voice memo. Tap it again to stop and send. Neural Labs stores a playable audio attachment, transcribes the memo through the server-side OpenAI provider, and posts the transcript as an @Alshival turn so spoken instructions are included in agent context.
• Use the collapsed terminal rail on the right to see whether the channel has active terminals. Expand it to see session status, channel-member bubbles, and currently connected terminal participants. The plus action starts another channel terminal; selecting a card joins that exact session. Channel terminals follow the active-user audience. The browser never supplies or widens the terminal member list.

Messages, typing indicators, membership changes, agent status, unread counts, and mentions update live over the authenticated Team Chat WebSocket. A lost connection is retried automatically. Draft text remains in the composer while the socket reconnects, and sending is disabled until live delivery is restored. When a Alshival turn is queued, the transcript immediately shows a starting row; it changes to a working row when execution begins. The run is owned by the server, continues if the author switches channels, closes the browser, or is inactive, and is restored in the channel snapshot after reconnecting. A single turn may work for up to 10 minutes, exceeding the five-minute inactivity window, before the execution timeout ends it.

Membership

The Team Channel includes current active workspace members. Restricted channels and channel creation/deletion are retired. Administrators can manage the channel’s supported settings. Member removal immediately removes channel access; private conversations and their histories are not imported into the channel. Channel terminals follow the same active workspace membership checks.

Alshival execution path

@Alshival or a $skill-name command queues a durable agent-run record and issues a random, short-lived capability. Only a hash of that capability is stored in PostgreSQL. The control plane sends the recent channel transcript and the run capability to the workspace's authenticated internal runner. The native runtime launches Codex app-server or Claude Code using the administrator's saved Team connection and model. Before launch and during execution, the control plane checks the run capability, channel membership, Team connection generation, and managed portal membership when applicable. Missing or paused Team credentials fail the turn without choosing a personal account.

For that turn only, the CLI receives a local MCP token. The trusted workspace service forwards Team MCP requests with the run capability after revalidating execution authority. The built-in MCP surface can inspect channel metadata, read the current channel, and post as Alshival with shared-workspace file references. It cannot select or access another channel. Alshival receives up to 250 recent messages plus bounded, redacted plans, commands, file operations, and tool results from earlier Alshival turns as handoff context. Raw model reasoning is not included. The complete orchestration prompt remains capped at 1 MiB. The capability expires when the run finishes or after 20 minutes. Turns in one channel execute in order; independent channels can run concurrently.

Native CLI command and file permission requests appear in Team Chat for administrators only. An administrator chooses Allow once or Decline; the message author cannot approve the CLI action. Pending approvals stay with the active run across browser reconnects. Revoking membership or the Team connection stops native execution on its next authority check.

The dedicated-appliance defaults allow 128 KiB messages, 100 attachments per message, 500 messages per history page, 2,000 members or imported messages per channel operation, and up to 16 MiB of copied private-chat text. These remain finite so a malformed client cannot allocate memory without bound.

Workspace tools and public MCP

Team Chat's internal tools use a short-lived capability scoped to the current channel. They do not require public MCP ingress. The public /mcp and OAuth routes return 404, including when Microsoft web login is enabled. The future public MCP reference describes retained development code, not a supported connection for this deployment.

Operations and recovery

Team Chat channel, message, membership, read, mention, and run state lives in the normal PostgreSQL database and is covered by the standard Neural Labs backup procedure. Workspace attachments are covered by the shared workspace volume backup. Live socket tickets are intentionally short-lived and are not useful backup data.

After upgrading an existing instance, update the control-plane and workspace images, including their bundled desktop and local MCP builds so database migrations and the agent bridge are installed. The repository does not make host changes during validation. An operator applies the deployment with the normal deployment command after reviewing the diff.