Starting a broadcast
1
Open Chat
On Mac, Broadcast is the multi-column chat surface; on iPhone it is the same Chat tab with
a provider pill strip.
2
Select two or three providers
In the Ask or compare picker, tick the providers you want. One keeps you in Solo; two
or three gives you a column each. Three is the cap. The picker’s Solo / Compare /
Synthesize toggle is the shortcut in the other direction — click Compare and it adds a
provider for you.
3
Check availability
Providers that aren’t enabled or aren’t currently reachable show a reason line and can’t be
ticked. Continuum probes each one for a working binary, valid auth, and a parseable
transcript before offering it.
4
Write your prompt and send
The same prompt goes to every column at once.
One column per provider. A provider can appear at most once in a broadcast. Even with
multiple accounts configured for the same provider, you can’t run
that provider in two columns of the same group — each column picks one account.
While streaming
Each column streams its own reply independently. On Mac the columns sit side by side; on iPhone a horizontal pill strip switches which column you’re reading. Each column header shows the provider’s glyph, its name, and the model id, plus three actions: Retry this model with the same prompt, Mark this answer as winner, and Continue from this answer.Token and dollar totals are not shown per column. Per-provider cost and token analytics roll
up in the Usage tab across all your sessions.
Deep Research
Toggle Deep Research in the composer’s + menu before you send. It’s a single broadcast-level switch: turn it on and every column is created with it. The composer’s status word changes fromready to research while it’s on.
Deciding between answers
Three actions let you act on the comparison, layered from a light note to a permanent fork.- Star (non-destructive)
- Prefer this response (reversible)
- Continue from this answer (destructive)
The bookmark button marks a column’s latest turn as the winner. It’s pure metadata —
nothing is archived, and every provider keeps answering follow-ups. Use it to track who is
winning turn by turn. It’s disabled on the very first turn, until there’s an answer to
star.
Synthesize
Instead of choosing between the answers, you can merge them — added in 0.62.0. Synthesize is armed up front, as the third segment of the Ask or compare toggle (it needs at least two providers, and turns one on for you if you have fewer). Arming it puts a Synthesize · <provider> chip in the composer. Once at least two columns have finished replying, a Synthesize N replies with <provider> button appears below them; one click reads every live column’s answer for that turn, hands them to the summarizer, and streams a single combined response into a Synthesis from panel above the columns. Every claim in the synthesis is traceable: the summarizer cites its sources inline, and each citation renders as a chip naming the column it came from. The summarizer chip defaults to the first provider in the comparison, and its menu offers both the providers in this broadcast and, under Not in this broadcast, everything else you have configured. That makes “have Claude reconcile what Codex and Grok said” a one-click move. Continue from synthesis → promotes the merged answer the way Continue from this answer promotes a column: the source columns are archived, and the synthesis becomes a normal Solo chat holding your question and the combined answer.Synthesize needs at least two live sources, and waits for a finished, non-empty answer before
it will promote one — it never quietly compiles a partial set of replies. Hosts on an older
release don’t offer the toggle segment, the chip, or the button at all.
Attachments in broadcast
Attach a file once and it covers the whole broadcast — you don’t upload per provider. Under the hood the composer reads the bytes once, then stages a private copy for each column, and each column’s prompt mentions only its own path (a file staged for one column isn’t readable by another). Staged files land under~/Library/Application Support/Clawdmeter/attachments/
for local sessions, or in a .clawdmeter-attachments/ directory inside the worktree when the
session runs in a worktree sandbox. (Clawdmeter is Continuum’s internal codename and still
names its on-disk paths.)
Continuum re-checks each column right before issuing its prompt, so a concurrent promote can’t
leak the prompt to a column that was just archived.