Using the AI agent

Aquilla’s AI agent works inside a project the way a fast, tireless teammate would, but it never edits in place. The empty-state message it opens with says it plainly:

Ask the agent to draft, check, or explain — it proposes changes you review and apply.

Every draft, every imported changeset, every note it wants to remember about your project shows up first as something you decide on. This page covers starting a conversation, what a run looks like while it’s working, and how to review what comes out of it.

Note

The agent differs from the AI copilot. The copilot suggests a draft or back-translation for the cell you’re editing; the agent is a conversation that can work across the whole project: searching, drafting whole scopes, and checking, with everything landing as proposals.

Opening the agent

The agent lives in the left dock, under the Agent tab (look for the Bot icon). It opens as a panel alongside your editor, headed AI Agent.

The Agent dock: the conversation lives beside your cells, and everything it produces waits for your review.

For more room, click Open agent in editor tab: the agent opens as an Agent tab in the editor’s tab strip, alongside your files. This workbench has two tabs: Chat for your conversation, and Project knowledge for what the agent has learned about the project (see Agent memory & the project brief). Its header adds live progress while a run is in flight, a Stop button, and icon buttons for New session and Minimize to sidebar. The dock panel and the editor tab share the same conversation, so you can pop between them without losing anything.

The agent as an editor tab: more room for long sessions, with Chat and Project knowledge tabs.

Starting a conversation

Type into the composer. Placeholder text reminds you of the shortcuts: “Ask the agent… (/draft, /check, /find, /status)”. Enter sends your message; Shift+Enter adds a newline instead.

If you type while the agent is mid-run, your message doesn’t interrupt it: it queues, with a note like “1 message queued — sends when the current run finishes.”

A few slash commands give the agent a clear, scoped job:

• /draft [MRK 4]: draft the untranslated cells in a scope, like a chapter or a range.
• /check [MRK 4]: review translated cells against the source and flag anything worth a second look.
• /find <text>: search the project and summarize where and how something is used.
• /status: a progress summary for the file you have open.

The composer can also start from the text itself. Selecting source text and choosing Ask AI drops a context chip into the composer so the agent knows exactly what you mean. On scripture files, Summarize book and Summarize chapter are one-tap shortcuts for a quick overview.

What a run shows

While the agent is working, the conversation streams in pieces so you can follow along:

• Prose: the agent’s running commentary, streamed as it thinks.
• Tool chips: collapsed by default, expandable if you want to see exactly what the agent did (searched the project, read a file, and so on).
• Code-activity blocks: the agent can run code in a sandbox to check its own work (for example, counting occurrences); expand a block to see its stdout/stderr.
• Proposal cards and changeset cards: see below.
• Memory and brief notices: when the agent wants to remember something about the project. See Agent memory & the project brief.
• A budget meter: every run has a spending cap, shown in credits (not dollars), and stops gracefully when it’s reached. A run that hits its limit ends capped: “Run hit its step/token cap — results may be partial.” You can ask the agent to continue if it stopped short.

Reviewing drafts in the working set

When the agent drafts translations, it doesn’t write them straight into your cells. It stages them as proposals, and the chat shows a receipt (“N drafts staged”) with each cell tagged accepted, edited & accepted, rejected, undone, or to review.

The working set: every draft waits for your Accept or Reject; nothing lands in a cell until you say so.

Most proposals edit a cell that already exists, but the agent can also propose a brand-new row: a New source row or New target row card, marked (new row) ahead of the proposed text. Applying a new source row needs Project lead access or above; a new target row needs Contributor access or above, the same roles the regular add-row controls require.

Click Review in working set to jump straight to the first undecided row. From there:

• Edit a proposed draft in place if it’s close but not quite right, then Accept it.
• Accept a draft as-is.
• Reject anything you don’t want.
• If you change your mind after accepting, Undo applied restores the cell’s pre-draft text, as a new, audited edit, not a deletion. Nothing the agent (or you) does is ever silently erased.

Approving staged imports

Some agent work (a bulk import from an external source, or a settings change, for instance) comes back as a changeset rather than individual cell drafts. These show up as changeset cards right in the chat, with Approve & apply and Reject buttons: approving one both confirms and commits it on the spot, no separate page to visit. Some items in a changeset (like validating a cell) need their own confirmation checkbox ticked before Approve & apply turns on.

Once you approve, the card reports back what happened: how many changes applied, and how many were skipped as stale because the project moved on underneath them. A card’s status reads Pending review, Approved, Committed, Discarded, Stale, Expired, or Already done (someone made the same change by hand first, so there was nothing left to apply). A changeset can also be routed to a specific teammate to look at; routing only flags it for them; it still waits on a person to decide. When several changesets are queued, only a few show at once and a “N more held” note marks the rest, revealed as you clear the ones on screen.

Changesets that come from an external agent using the Agent API (rather than Aquilla’s in-app assistant) work differently: see Approving agent changes for that separate approval page.

Attaching files

Click the paperclip (Attach file) in the composer to give the agent a file to work from. It uploads as a project artifact and rides along with the next run, handy for handing the agent a reference document or a list to work through.

Stopping and starting over

Click Stop at any point to halt a run early. New session drops the current conversation and starts fresh, useful when you want the agent to approach something without the context of an earlier, unrelated task.

Tracking AI credit spend

If you’re a maintainer or owner, a small ring gauge next to the agent panel’s header, the agent credits dial, shows today’s AI-agent spend at a glance, shifting from blue to amber to red as you approach your org’s daily cap. Click it to open Agent credits, which breaks spend down by Today and This week for the agent specifically, plus an All AI usage (every rail) section covering AI spend elsewhere in the project. Contributors and reviewers don’t see this dial: see the org-wide Credits panel in Organizations & members for the full picture.

Who can use it

Any signed-in project member can start a conversation with the agent: what it’s able to change for you follows your own role, the same as if you made the edit yourself. Reviewing what the agent remembers about the project is more restricted; see Agent memory & the project brief for those roles.