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The Chat tab is hidden by default. Continuum ships focused on the Code workbench, and since 2026-07-30 Chat is not in the tab bar on any client — Mac, iPhone, web, Windows, Linux, or Android.Nothing was removed. The surface, your chat history, and the daemon routes behind them are all still in the build; only the tab is hidden. On the Mac you can bring it back yourself:
Relaunch Continuum and Chat rejoins the tab bar as ⌘1, pushing Code to ⌘2, Usage to ⌘3, and Settings to ⌘4. There is no equivalent switch on the other clients — on web, desktop, and mobile, hidden is hidden.This page documents Chat as it behaves when it is on.
Chat is the conversational surface. It is separate from the Code workbench: Code spawns and controls agent sessions tied to a repo; Chat is for prompt-driven work where you want the focus on the conversation. Both run on the same daemon and the same chat store, but Chat has its own UI and its own multi-provider compare path.
Cowork is a second hidden surface, and it is not Chat. Where Chat is scoped to a conversation and Code to a repository, Cowork is scoped to a folder — durable memory, scheduled recurring runs, approval gating, and connected apps against a working directory that need not be a git repo. It is hidden on the same 2026-07-30 decision, behind its own clawdmeter.cowork.enabled default rather than the Chat one, and it is not documented here.

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Modes

The provider picker — Ask or compare — holds a Solo / Compare / Synthesize toggle above a checklist of your providers, each row carrying its own model and effort. Mode and selection move together: tick one provider and you’re in Solo, tick two or three and you’re comparing. The toggle is the shortcut in the other direction, adding or dropping providers to get you into the mode you clicked.
One provider, one thread. Any provider you have configured can start a conversation:Custom OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible providers you have added yourself appear here too. The history sidebar on the left lists past sessions; the search field narrows it. Click any past session to continue it.

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Per-provider model, effort, and account

Each provider row carries its own pickers, so a comparison can mix model and effort across providers:
  • Model — the menu lists that provider’s catalog entries.
  • Effort — a reasoning-effort menu appears for providers that support it. Claude and Codex default to High.
  • Account — when a provider has two or more accounts configured on the host, an account menu appears in the row. Pick which subscription runs the chat; the menu shows each account’s label, with Default for the primary. The picker is hidden when a provider has only one account.
Account pins persist per provider and are re-checked against the host’s account list before each send, so an account you removed in Settings falls back to Default instead of failing the send. See Multi-account for how accounts are added and kept isolated.

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Turn lifecycle

Every turn has an authoritative state — idle, streaming, completed, or interrupted — reported by the host rather than guessed from a gap in the event stream. While a turn is streaming, the Send button becomes a Stop button and the status strip runs a stopwatch. When the turn completes or is interrupted, Send comes back.

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Stopping a turn

Stop is dispatched differently per provider, because each backend cancels differently:
Stop is honest about failing. Continuum only reports a turn as stopped once the provider confirms the turn actually ended. If the provider doesn’t confirm in time you get an explicit “the provider did not confirm that the current turn ended” error and your follow-up is not sent, rather than a green checkmark over a turn that is still running and still billing.
The opencode-backed providers are the exception in the other direction: Stop unblocks the composer so you can move on, but the turn upstream keeps going. A user Stop also cancels any pending auto-retry for that session.

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Deep Research

Deep Research is a creation-time toggle in the composer’s + menu, next to Attach. It applies to every provider in the chat, and the composer’s status word changes from ready to research while it’s on. It is a real behavior change, not a prompt suffix: Claude, Codex, and Antigravity are each held to a release gate that runs a live research prompt and fails the build unless the transcript shows actual web searches and a citations footer in the final answer.

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Permission prompts

When an agent needs explicit approval — a file write, a shell command, a network call — the prompt appears inline in the thread. Approve or deny without leaving the chat. The card is the same shape on Mac and iPhone. The left sidebar lists your chat sessions. The search field filters by title and content across all of them. Opening a hit reopens that chat — including a broadcast that has since resolved to a single winner, which reopens as the winning Solo thread so your history stays navigable after the columns collapse.

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Surfaces

Mac

History sidebar, provider start panel, and — when comparing — a horizontally scrollable column per provider.

iPhone

A compact layout: provider pills above the selected reply, tap a pill to switch providers, and the account picker inside the model-selector sheet.
  • Broadcast — comparing two or three providers on one prompt.
  • Multi-account — running more than one subscription per provider.