Kenny Research

Overview

The full-page Kenny workspace. Gives you a persistent conversation view with recent topic history, suggested starter prompts, and every tool Kenny knows how to run. Use this when you want a longer, more focused session with Kenny — research across multiple projects, multi-step work, or anything that would crowd the side drawer.

Use it for: catch-up briefings, cross-project summaries, research with citations, bulk task operations, drafting documents from scratch, planning sessions.

How it works

  1. You land on the assistant page. A new topic opens as a clean, chrome-less screen — a heading, a grid of suggestion cards, and the composer — with a history button in the top-right corner for jumping back to a past topic.
  2. Kenny operates at the workspace level: it can see every project, task, document, and channel you have access to. Each topic’s header shows a Workspace context label to make this scope explicit.
  3. You type a request or pick a suggestion card. Kenny plans the steps, runs any tools it needs, and streams the answer back with a live cursor. Once the reply finishes, a footer under the answer lets you copy it, redo it, or expand the Steps timeline to see how Kenny got there.
  4. As soon as a conversation is open, a Topics rail appears on the left with all your saved topics, so you can switch between them without leaving the page.

Triggers & shortcuts

Action How
Open Kenny Research AI Assistant entry in the left sidebar
Jump from the drawer Full Screen button inside the Kenny Chat Drawer
Open a past topic Select it in the Topics rail, or use the history button (top-right on the new-topic screen) and search
Start a new topic New button in the header, or the + at the top of the Topics rail
Rename or delete a topic ⋯ menu in the topic header

Setup

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

Workspace owners can also customise how Kenny appears across the workspace — pick one of several preset avatars or upload a custom image — from the Kenny section of Workspace settings. The selected avatar replaces the default sparkle icon wherever Kenny shows up, including the research workspace, chat messages, task comments, mentions, and thread indicators.

Usage

Start from a suggestion card. The new-topic screen offers a grid of starter prompts such as Summarize this week across projects and What needs my attention today?. Click a card to send it as-is, or type your own request in the composer below the grid.

Work across projects. Kenny Research is not scoped to a single project. You can ask things like “list every overdue task assigned to me across all projects” or “summarise this week’s activity in Marketing and Sales”.

Let Kenny take actions. In a research session, Kenny can:

  • Create and update tasks, including status, assignee, tags, milestone, and description
  • Update project settings — change the project name or icon, edit memory notes, manage tags, add or reorder board columns, add or remove members, and manage milestones
  • Reorder tasks within a board column — move them to the top or bottom so the board reflects your priority
  • Add comments to existing tasks
  • Create knowledge documents, at the workspace root or inside a folder
  • Read the contents of any document or task you have access to
  • Search the web and include citations in the answer
  • Browse, search, and read files in your connected GitHub repositories — automatically scoped to the repositories linked to the project you are working in
  • Read pull request diffs and compare branches or commits to understand what changed
  • View file history and individual commits to trace how code evolved
  • List branches in a repository
  • Update project settings — rename the project, change its emoji, edit memory notes, manage tags, and reorder or rename columns
  • Summarise recent team activity over the last few days
  • Summarise video call Sync Notes into decisions and action items

Review how Kenny got there. Every finished answer has a footer with three actions: copy the response, redo it, and a Steps toggle that expands a timeline of everything Kenny did — searches run, documents read, tools called — with per-step details like sub-step progress, files touched, and web results with sources. Answers that involved extended thinking also include a Thought for N seconds disclosure you can open to read Kenny’s reasoning.

Resume past conversations. The Topics rail lists every topic; each row shows its context label (currently always Workspace) and when it was last active. From the new-topic screen, the history button opens a popover with the same list grouped by day (Recent, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Older) plus a search box that filters topics by title. Selecting a topic reopens it with its full history.

Use memory to steer Kenny. Three layers of memory automatically flow into Kenny’s context on every Kenny surface — the chat drawer, research, the document assistant, and comment replies:

  • Your personal About you memory in Settings
  • Your workspace’s About this workspace memory, which workspace owners edit from Workspace settings and which applies to every member
  • Each project’s About project memory

Use them to pin preferences (“I prefer bullet-point summaries”), workspace-wide conventions that everyone should follow, project rules (“new tasks go to Backlog at the bottom”), or links to the documents Kenny should always consult.

Ask about Kanvas features. When you ask how a Kanvas feature works, Kenny grounds the answer in the official Kanvas documentation and cites the page it used. Research sessions about your own workspace, tasks, or projects skip this step so they stay fast.

Edge cases & limits

  • Ambiguous requests. If you ask Kenny to “create a task” without naming a project, Kenny asks which project to put it in rather than guessing.
  • Web fetches. When Kenny reads 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. Long research sessions may hit workspace-level rate limits. Kenny reports this clearly and lets you retry.
  • Provider not configured. If your workspace admin has not enabled an AI provider, Kenny Research loads in a disabled state.
  • Long conversations. Kenny keeps enough recent history in context to follow a thread; very long conversations may drop the earliest messages.
  • Attachments. Images you attach to a message appear in the conversation thread alongside your text. PDFs attached to a task Kenny is reading are truncated to a conservative text-extraction cap per file.
  • Activity attribution. When Kenny creates or updates a task during a research session, 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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