Ask, Do and Plan

Choose Ask to discuss or draft using the conversation and content you supplied. Ask does not take external actions. Choose Do when you want CoWork to work on a task; it selects an execution strategy and follows the active access profile and approval rules.

These are two ways to start work, not permission levels. Ask for approval, Approve for me, Full access, and Custom are access profiles that independently govern what a task may do.

Plan

Choose Plan when the next message should produce a plan instead of changes: the task runs without mutating tools and can ask structured questions before anything runs. Selecting Do again clears the pin and lets CoWork choose an approach for the request, including read-only analysis, a verification gate after risky steps, or an evidence-first debugging loop when the request calls for one. Those strategies are no longer pinned by hand.

Autonomy, collaboration, and parallel lanes are separate task controls. They do not replace Ask/Do. Use /multitask [N] <task> when you want bounded parallel lanes.

Release labels

Since CoWork OS 0.5.60 the UI calls the stored chat choice Ask and the stored smart choice Do. Releases up to 0.5.54 label those choices Chat and Smart, respectively. The release-specific surface reference lists labels and Mission Control navigation for each stable release and the current development UI. These are UI-label changes only: stored and IPC InteractionModeSelection values remain chat and smart.

Behavior and compatibility

Changing Ask/Do affects the next submitted message and keeps the conversation and history. While a turn is running, a change waits for the next turn boundary; queued changes remain ordered and survive runtime snapshots. Do clears previous inferred routing before deriving a new strategy. A pinned Plan remains explicit, while access profiles and approval rules continue to apply.

Ask supports conversation text, images, and attachment previews already supplied to the model. A partial preview is not represented as a full document read. Ask rejects action and skill shortcuts such as /goal; switch to Do to use them. Local /clear remains available. Ask is unavailable for external ACP runtimes that cannot enforce the no-external-action contract.

Legacy clients and saved sessions retain the existing runtime values (chat, execute, plan, analyze, debug, and verified). Do not rename those values as part of a UI vocabulary change. Explicit legacy chat and plan values continue to display as Ask and Plan; saved analyze, debug, verified and execute pins display as Do and the runtime chooses the strategy on the next turn; ambiguous legacy configuration is not rewritten merely by opening or submitting an existing session. CLI and automation execution-mode values remain supported.

Focused regression coverage exercises local and remote validation, strategy clearing, proposal-only behavior, the Plan pin and folded legacy pins, queued selection ordering and recovery, attachment handling, daemon permission timing, and the shared picker. Manual checks should cover Ask → Do → Ask in one session, a queued switch during execution, task navigation, and app restart. Applicable approvals must still appear for Do; Ask must not take external actions.