Designing with the assistant
Plan and Act
A toggle in the composer decides whether the assistant is allowed to change anything. It is the most consequential control in the product.
The toggle
The pill sits next to the message box and reads either Plan or Act. Act is the default.
| Mode | What the product says it does |
|---|---|
| Plan | “AI analyzes and recommends without making edits.” |
| Act | “AI can make changes with your approval.” |
Plan mode
In Plan mode the assistant can read everything and change nothing. This is not a promise it is asked to keep — the operations that write to files are not available to it at all in this mode. It cannot use them incorrectly because it does not have them.
What it does instead:
- Reads your construct
- Opens the sequence, translates regions, checks reading frames, looks at what is actually there rather than what the labels claim.
- Gathers evidence
- Searches repositories and literature for the parts your design needs, and brings back records with their accessions.
- Runs the analyses
- Cut sites, digests, primer feasibility — everything needed to decide whether a strategy will work before committing to it.
- Writes a plan
- A document you read: what it intends to build, from which parts, in what order, and what it expects to be true afterwards.
Approving a plan
When the plan is ready it appears in the conversation with three choices:
| Choice | What happens |
|---|---|
| Execute | You accept the plan. Work begins against what you just read. |
| Refine | You send it back with comments. Use this rather than cancelling — the evidence it gathered is kept. |
| Cancel | The plan is dropped and nothing is built. |
Act mode
In Act mode the assistant has the operations that change files. It can import a backbone, build a construct, edit a sequence and save the result.
What needs your approval sets out exactly which operations stop regardless of mode.
Which one to use
| Situation | Mode |
|---|---|
| “What is on this plasmid?” | Either — reading is the same in both |
| “Will these primers amplify what I want?” | Either |
| “Design me an expression construct” | Plan |
| Anything multi-step, or anything you will pay to synthesise | Plan |
| A construct you cannot easily rebuild | Plan |
| “Fix the annotation on this feature” | Act |
| A change you already understand and want done | Act |
The rough rule: if you would want to see the strategy before someone at your bench started cutting, use Plan.
After a plan is approved
Approving a plan moves the work into building. From there the assistant is expected to finish the job rather than stopping at the first obstacle — if a chosen enzyme turns out not to cut, it is supposed to re-check the sequence and correct the approach rather than handing the problem back to you.
What it will not do is quietly change the design you approved. If the strategy has to change substantially, that is a new plan, and you get to read it.