Chat effectively

Chatting effectively in Tale is not about clever prompts; it is about giving the chat enough context for the model to read your intent the first time. Five small habits — picking the right agent, picking the right model, attaching only what matters, asking inside a scope, reading the citations — turn the average reply from "thanks for the wall of text" into "exactly what I needed". This page walks the habits in order on a fresh chat.

You need a Member role (the floor for chat) and one published agent on the org you can address. The conceptual side lives in Chat basics; this walk is the daily-driver mechanic.

Habit 1 — Pick the agent before the first message

The agent is the lever with the highest payoff per click. The default Assistant is a blank canvas; an agent with knowledge bound, tools enabled, and a tuned voice will out-answer it for any non-generic question. Open the agent picker in the composer and pick the agent whose scope matches your question — Support, Sales, Research — before typing.

If no agent fits, leave the Assistant on; do not pick a wrong-fit agent for "close enough". A wrong-fit agent often refuses or veers off the bound knowledge.

Habit 2 — Pick the model to match the message

The model picker beside the agent picker lists the agent's allowed models. Auto is fine most of the time; switch when the message changes shape. A long reasoning question wants a larger model; a quick lookup wants a smaller, faster one. A message with an image needs a vision-capable model — without that, the image is silently dropped.

The model picker shows the tag (Chat, Vision, Image, Embedding) next to each name; match the tag to the message.

Habit 3 — Attach only what the agent needs

Attachments are tempting to overuse. A 200-page PDF as a single attachment fills the context budget and dilutes the answer; the relevant pages excerpted into the prompt outperform the whole file. If you do attach a long document, ask a specific question against it ("what does page 12 say about refunds?") rather than an open one ("tell me everything").

For files you will reference often — a price list, a policy document — upload them into the Knowledge section and bind them to an agent. Once bound, every chat with that agent has them on tap without re-uploading.

Habit 4 — Ask inside the agent's scope

Every agent has an implicit scope from its instructions and bound knowledge. Asking a billing agent about marketing strategy gets you a polite refusal at best, a hallucination at worst. The cheap fix: read the agent's bio at the top of the picker before you ask — it names the scope. If your question is outside the scope, switch agents.

Habit 5 — Read the citations and follow them

When the reply includes citations (the small inline links), open one. The citation points to the chunk of the source the agent quoted from; reading it confirms the agent did not paraphrase past what the source actually says. The two-minute habit of opening one citation per reply catches the small subset of replies where the agent overreached.

Where this fits

Five habits, one chat, the same loop every time you open the Chat tab. The habits compound — picking the right agent makes the right model obvious; the right model makes the citations trustworthy; the citations close the loop.

For the surface these habits live on, see Chat basics. For the file side — what gets pasted verbatim, what gets indexed — see Attachments.