Kenny Chat Drawer

Overview

A compact AI chat surface that slides in from the right side of the screen on any page in Kanvas AI. Open it, ask Kenny a question, get an answer without losing your place. Kenny reads the page you’re on and scopes answers to it — the document you’re editing, the project you’re viewing, the task that’s open, the channel you’re in. On a project board the drawer docks below the header and saved-views tab bar, so both stay visible and clickable while you chat; on other pages it spans the full height of the window.

Use it for: quick questions about your workspace, creating tasks from a conversation, summarising a document, looking up a task, drafting a reply.

How it works

  1. You open the drawer from any page.
  2. Kenny detects what you’re looking at and loads the right context automatically.
  3. You type a request (with optional mentions of tasks, projects, documents, folders, or team members).
  4. Kenny streams the reply with a live cursor so you can watch the answer form. Once the reply finishes, each message shows a footer where you can expand the steps Kenny took, copy the response, or ask Kenny to redo it.
  5. If the request asks Kenny to take action — create a task, add a comment, draft a document — the action runs inline and its outcome is shown in the reply.
  6. You can continue the same thread, start a new topic, browse past topics, or promote the conversation to the full-page Kenny view.

Triggers & shortcuts

Action Shortcut
Open or close the drawer Cmd+K (Mac) / Ctrl+K (Windows, Linux)
Start a new topic Cmd+Shift+K / Ctrl+Shift+K
Close the drawer Esc
Browse past topics History button in the drawer header (search popover)
Expand to full width Expand button in the drawer header; Back to drawer restores it

The drawer can also be opened from the AI Assistant entry in the left sidebar.

Setup

The drawer is available to every workspace member once your workspace admin has enabled an AI provider in Workspace settings. No per-user setup is required.

Customising Kenny’s avatar

Workspace owners can change the avatar Kenny uses across the product from Workspace settings → Kenny. Pick one of the built-in photo-style presets or upload a custom image (PNG, JPEG, or WebP). The chosen avatar appears wherever Kenny is shown — chat messages, task comments, mentions, thread indicators, the Kenny drawer, and the Kenny landing page — and applies to everyone in the workspace. New workspaces start with a default preset until an owner changes it.

Usage

Start from a suggestion. On a fresh topic, the drawer greets you with a short intro and one-click suggestion prompts tailored to where you are: on a project board — Summarize the project, What needs attention?, Draft a standup update, Create a task; on a knowledge document — Update what’s stale, Summarize this doc, What changed recently?. Clicking a suggestion sends it as your first message. The header subtitle shows the active context (for example “Website Redesign · project”).

Ask about the page you’re on. Open a document, press Cmd+K, ask “summarise this and flag any open questions”. Kenny reads the document you have open without you having to copy it in.

Create a task from the drawer. While viewing a project, ask “create a task to update the pricing page, assign it to Ada, add the docs tag”. Kenny creates it in the project you’re viewing.

Reference items with mentions. Type @ in the input to bring up the mention picker for team members, projects, documents, and folders. Type # to search for tasks by title or identifier. Mentions pull the referenced item’s content into Kenny’s context for that message.

Keep the same conversation open. Closing and reopening the drawer on the same page keeps your current topic active. Switching pages starts a new topic so Kenny doesn’t carry stale context across unrelated views.

Edit documents live from the drawer. When you ask Kenny to update a knowledge document while that document is open, the edits stream directly into the editor as Kenny writes them — no page refresh needed. You can watch the content appear in real time and continue editing immediately once Kenny finishes.

Explore connected code repositories. When your workspace has connected GitHub repositories, Kenny can read files, search code, view pull request diffs, compare branches, and browse file history right from the drawer. Ask “what changed in the last PR on the API repo” or “find where the login flow is defined” and Kenny fetches the answer without you leaving the page you’re on.

Browse past topics. Click the History button in the drawer header to open a compact search popover of your previous topics. When you are on a task, project, or document page, the list is scoped to conversations you started from that same context; type to filter by title, and select any topic to reload it in the drawer without leaving the page you are on. Conversations started before context scoping existed appear when no page context applies.

Go wide without leaving the page. Click Expand to grow the drawer into a full-width overlay over the content area, with the conversation in a comfortable 720px reading column — handy for long answers and code. Click Back to drawer to return to the side panel. For the dedicated full-page experience, open Kenny Research from the AI Assistant sidebar entry.

Explore linked code. When you are viewing a project that has a connected GitHub repository, Kenny can browse files, search code, read pull request diffs, view commit history, compare branches, and list branches — all scoped to the project’s linked repositories. Ask “what changed in the last PR?” or “find where the login handler is defined” without leaving Kanvas AI.

Update project settings. Ask Kenny to rename a project, change its emoji, update memory notes, add or rename tags, or reorder columns — and the change is applied immediately.

Kenny asks before acting. When a request leaves out a key detail — which project a plan should target, what a new document should be called — Kenny pauses and shows a small question card in the conversation instead of guessing. A card can mix multiple-choice chips (single- or multi-select, always with an Other escape hatch), a yes/no toggle, and free-text fields. The Submit button stays disabled until every required question has an answer; questions marked Optional — and toggles, whose current position always counts — never hold it up. Question cards are saved with the conversation, so if you close the drawer or reload mid-question the card is waiting when you come back. Once you submit, the card collapses into a read-only summary of your answers and Kenny carries on with them.

Shaped by memory. The drawer respects the same memory layers as the rest of Kenny: your personal About you memory, the shared Workspace memory a workspace owner can author from Workspace settings, and the About project memory of the project you’re viewing. Update them in Settings to steer tone, defaults, and conventions without restating them in every message.

Edge cases & limits

  • Page changes reset context. Navigating to a different URL closes the drawer and starts a fresh topic.
  • Opening a task closes the drawer. Clicking a task card — on a board, in a chat link, in a notification, or from a mention preview — automatically closes the Kenny drawer so the task detail panel is not hidden behind it. Reopen the drawer to continue the same conversation.
  • Attachments. You can attach images and PDFs to a message. Images you attach appear in the conversation thread alongside your text so both you and Kenny can reference what was shared. Only the extracted text of a PDF is read; very large PDFs are truncated to a conservative per-file cap.
  • Web fetches. When Kenny is asked to read an external URL, it fetches a single page, strips it to readable text, enforces a short timeout, and caps the response size. Private, loopback, and link-local addresses are refused.
  • Rate limits. Heavy, repeated requests within a short window may hit workspace rate limits. Kenny reports the limit and invites you to retry.
  • Provider not configured. If your workspace admin has not enabled an AI provider, the drawer opens in a disabled state and points to admin settings.
  • Stopping a response. While Kenny is streaming a reply, the send button changes to a Stop button. Click it to cancel the response and keep any partial answer Kenny has already written. The input clears automatically when you send a message.
  • Focus and dismissal. The input takes focus automatically when the drawer opens. Esc is ignored while a response is still streaming.
  • Activity attribution. When Kenny creates or updates a task on your behalf, the task’s activity log entry reads “Your name via Kenny” so your teammates can see who requested the change. Older entries that predate this behavior continue to display “Kenny” on its own.
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