AI Chat Sidebar

What it does

The AI Chat Sidebar is a context-aware AI assistant that's available throughout Specky. Unlike a standalone chatbot, it knows exactly what you're looking at — the current document, the current view, the current workspace — and uses that context to give you relevant, grounded responses.

The AI Chat Sidebar can:

• Answer questions about your product data, documents, and signals
• Generate content for the document or view you're currently working in
• Take actions like creating a decision log entry, adding a node to the Product Graph, or pushing a ticket to Jira
• Explain what a feature does, what a signal means, or why a recommendation was made
• Summarize long documents, signal lists, or meeting transcripts

The sidebar maintains conversation history within a session, so you can ask follow-up questions and build on previous responses without repeating context.

When to use it

• While writing a PRD — ask "Generate acceptance criteria for this requirement" or "What signals support this section?"
• While reviewing the Opportunity Tree — ask "What evidence supports this opportunity?" or "What solutions have we tried for this problem before?"
• While looking at the Product Graph — ask "Why is this node connected to that one?" or "What decisions affected this feature?"
• While planning a roadmap — ask "What's the estimated effort for this initiative based on similar past work?"
• For quick lookups — ask "When did we last update the checkout PRD?" or "Who owns the mobile app initiative?"
• For content generation — ask "Write a one-paragraph summary of this document for a stakeholder email"

How to use it

1. Click the chat icon in the top-right corner of any view, or press Cmd+K
2. The sidebar opens with context about your current view already loaded
3. Type your question or request in natural language
4. The AI responds — if it references specific data, citations appear as clickable badges
5. Use the Insert button on any AI response to add it directly to the current document
6. Use New conversation to start fresh without the current context
7. Access Conversation history to revisit past sessions

Context modes:

• Document mode (when a PRD is open): AI has full access to the document content and can generate, edit, or explain sections
• View mode (when a dashboard is open): AI has access to the data in the current view
• Global mode (from the home screen): AI has access to your entire workspace

Example

You're writing a PRD for a new search feature. You have the PRD Editor open with a rough outline. You open the AI Chat Sidebar and ask:

"Based on the signals in our workspace, what are the most important search use cases I should cover in this PRD?"

The AI responds:

• "Based on 34 signals from the last 60 days, the top search use cases are: (1) searching for past decisions by topic [12 mentions], (2) finding PRDs by feature name [9 mentions], (3) searching within a document [8 mentions], and (4) searching across all integrations at once [5 mentions]."

You click Insert and the four use cases are added directly to your PRD as a bulleted list with citations. You've just saved 45 minutes of manual signal review.