A seat is a place at the table. There are four built in — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok — and any of them can be re-pointed at a different model, including one from OpenRouter or your own endpoint. A seat you switch off does not take part and does not cost anything.
The lead
One seat leads. It answers first and, on the desktop app, it is the only seat that writes files or makes commits. That is deliberate: four models editing the same tree at once is a merge conflict, not a collaboration.
The lead is your account's setting, overridable per discussion from the seat panel, and per project if a project names its own. If the lead cannot answer — an outage, a bad key — the chair is handed to another seat under its own name, so the transcript never misattributes work.
The reviewers
Every other seat reviews. A reviewer reads everything said before it in the round, including the other reviewers, so the second one can disagree with the first rather than repeating it.
On the desktop app a reviewer has its own hands. It runs commands to check the lead's claim — your test suite, a type check, a grep for the thing it suspects — and its verdict carries what it ran. It cannot write files; a reviewer that could fix what it found would stop reporting it.
Searching, lookups and files
On the desktop app the lead and the reviewers search the workspace without a shell. search_files returns the lines that match a pattern, with the lines around them; find_files lists files by a name pattern such as **/*.test.ts. Both skip what .gitignore ignores, .git, and files that hold secrets by their name, and both stop at a bounded number of results. code_refs asks a language server where a name is defined and every place that refers to it: TypeScript and JavaScript through the TypeScript language service, Swift through sourcekit-lsp, Python through pyright or pylsp, each when it is on your Mac. Without one, the answer falls back to the project's name index or a text search, and says so. A server starts on the first question and stops after five idle minutes.
The lead can hand you a file with send_file. It shows as a card under the reply on the Mac, and as a download on the web and your iPhone for files up to 8 MB (up to 50 MB on the Mac). A file the room put under artifacts/ goes without a question; any other is asked about per your permission mode and copied under artifacts/sent/. Programs, installers and files that hold secrets by their name are never sent.
A lead running on your CLI subscription reaches the same tools through the app — publishing a page, the project's index, decks, documents, pictures and your Mac's own apps — under the same approvals as a seat on a key. Publishing a page asks in every mode except Bypass, because the page leaves your Mac. A published page is private to you until you switch it to Anyone With the Link on the page itself.
In a cloud run the lead can also change a file by exact replacement, search the workspace and hand you a text file. A discussion on the web gets none of these: the server has no workspace and no sandbox to run them in. A scheduled run on a repository can hand you a file it wrote.
Directed turns
Start a message with a seat's name to ask that one seat only: "@gemini is this regex right?" One pass, one answer, no review — sometimes you want the quick thing.
Guests
Invite a model for a single answer without giving it a seat: type @guest and pick from the OpenRouter catalogue. It answers once, wearing its maker's mark, and is not part of the room after that. Useful when you want a specific model's opinion on one question without rearranging your setup.