Chat & AI

The chat panel is how you interact with Qualia. Describe what you want in natural language and Qualia writes code, runs it, and shows you the results.

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Basics

Type a message in the chat input at the bottom of the panel. Qualia will:

1. Read your message and understand what you want
2. Look at the current state of your notebook for context
3. Write and execute code cells to accomplish your goal
4. Show results (plots, tables, text) inline in the notebook

The chat input uses your system spell checker to underline spelling mistakes as you type. You always see the code that runs. Nothing happens behind the scenes — every action appears as a notebook cell you can inspect and edit. Each agent activity group stays expanded while Qualia adds actions to it. When the group is complete, select its summary to collapse or reopen the details. Completed cell changes and runs retain their short status descriptions, so you can scan what each action accomplished. Qualia maintains conversation history, so you can refer back to earlier results, refine approaches, and build on prior work naturally.

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Starting from a path

The new chat screen offers three starting points that ask for a path first and then hand it to an agent:

• Explore a dataset asks for a single data file, then profiles it and reports its grain, its quality problems, and the questions it can actually answer. It adapts to what the data is, so tabular, time series, text, image, geospatial, event-log, multi-table, and graph data each get their own checks.
• Learn an existing workflow asks for a file or a folder, then turns a process you already run into a reusable skill.
• Convert existing work into Qualia knowledge asks for a file or a folder, then turns past results into claims.

On Windows and Linux, the two file-or-folder pickers can only offer folders, because the desktop file dialog on those platforms cannot present files and folders at the same time. In Qualia Cloud, the picker browses your cloud workspace instead of your local disk. Use the Upload button inside the picker to bring a folder (or, for datasets, a file) from your computer into the workspace, then select it. Uploaded files whose names already exist are renamed automatically (report.csv becomes report (1).csv), a folder whose name already exists merges into the existing folder, and common junk folders such as .git and node_modules are skipped.

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Execution mode

Choose the default execution mode for new agents in Settings > General:

• Notebook uses an attached notebook for interactive code, cells, and kernel-backed results.
• Script creates and runs standalone files in the workspace. It is suited to training, scraping, batch jobs, and other work that does not need notebook cells.

The setting applies when an agent is created, so later changes do not affect existing conversations. Agents created from that agent inherit its mode, keeping the whole delegated workflow in notebook mode or script mode.

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Basic things you can ask Qualia to do

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Explore and clean data

• “Load sales_data.csv and show me the first 10 rows”
• “What’s the distribution of the price column? Show me a histogram”
• “Remove duplicates and fill missing values in the age column with the median”
• “Give me summary statistics grouped by region”

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Build visualizations

• “Plot a scatter matrix of all numeric columns”
• “Show me daily revenue as a time series with a 7-day moving average”
• “Create a heatmap of the correlation matrix”
• “Make a bar chart comparing accuracy across the three models”

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Train and evaluate models

• “Train a gradient boosted classifier on this data”
• “Compare random forest vs. logistic regression with 5-fold cross-validation”
• “Show me feature importances and the ROC curve”
• “Tune the learning rate and max depth using grid search”

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Work with files and the shell

• “Install scikit-learn and xgboost”
• “What files are in the data/ directory?”
• “Run the preprocessing script at scripts/clean.py”
• “Search the codebase for where the model is saved”

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Research and look things up

• “Search the web for the latest scikit-learn docs on HistGradientBoosting”
• “What’s the standard approach for handling class imbalance?”

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More autonomous exploration

For open-ended research, give Qualia broader goals and let it explore:

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Dataset investigation

• “Explore this dataset thoroughly — check for anomalies, correlations, and anything interesting”
• “Find the best features for predicting churn and explain why they matter”
• “Investigate why the model performs poorly on certain segments”

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Model development

• “Build the best classifier you can for this data — try multiple approaches and compare them”
• “This model is overfitting. Diagnose the problem and fix it”
• “Optimize this pipeline for inference speed without sacrificing too much accuracy”

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Research questions

• “What’s causing the spike in errors after March 2024? Investigate and report back”
• “Find a good forecasting approach for this time series data”
• “Review this codebase and suggest performance improvements”

These prompts work best with higher curiosity, independence, and parallelism settings, allowing Qualia to explore multiple angles, delegate suitable work, and make decisions without asking at every step.

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Attaching context

You can attach specific context to your messages so Qualia knows exactly what you’re referring to:

• Cells: Select one or more notebook cells to include as context. Qualia sees both the code and its output.
• Files: Attach files and images from your filesystem for Qualia to read.
• Table selections: Select rows or columns from a data table and attach the selection.
• Images and regions: Click any image (a plot output, a chat image, a knowledge-graph figure) to open the image viewer, then attach the whole image — or drag-select a region and attach just that part.

This is useful when you want Qualia to focus on a specific piece of your work rather than the whole notebook. Attachments can also be sent on their own: with a file attached and no message typed, sending will ask Qualia to look at the attachment.

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Model selection

Choose which AI model powers your conversation:

1. Click the model name at the bottom of the chat box.
2. Choose a Frontier model, or select All models to browse the full catalog.
3. Use the search box to find any available model, including models outside the initial Frontier list.
4. To change which model new chats start with, hover a model and choose Set default. The current default is marked Default.

After choosing a model, use the adjacent options menu to set its reasoning or thinking level. The available options depend on the selected model. Some models also offer Fast mode. Fast mode prioritizes lower latency and uses premium provider pricing. With a bring-your-own OpenAI key, priority usage is billed directly by OpenAI. The provider may fall back to standard processing when a request is not eligible for accelerated processing, such as a long-context request.

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Context window

The token usage indicator shows how much of the model’s context window you’re using. As your conversation grows longer, this fills up. If you hit the limit, your chat will be automatically summarized (compacted) and continued. However, the agent may lose access to fully detailed information from earlier in the conversation.

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Account usage limits

If your account reaches its monthly usage limit, Qualia stops the current request and shows a usage-limit message in chat. Use View pricing from that message to open Quadrillion pricing and choose a plan with higher limits.

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Research style

Adjust how Qualia approaches your requests (configurable in chat or as defaults in Settings):

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Curiosity

How much Qualia explores beyond your immediate request:

• Low: Focused on exactly what you asked
• Medium: Explores related areas when relevant
• High: Actively investigates tangential questions

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Independence

How much Qualia assumes versus asks:

• Low: Asks for confirmation frequently
• Medium: Makes routine decisions, asks about significant ones
• High: Assumes most things, asks only about major choices

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Parallelism

How much Qualia splits work across agents:

• Low: Usually keeps work in one agent
• Medium: Delegates independent work when useful
• High: Proactively splits suitable work across multiple agents

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Autonomous Mode

A separate toggle that overrides curiosity, independence, and parallelism. When on, Qualia runs fully autonomously with no confirmation dialogs — see Autonomous Mode.

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Code autocomplete

As you type in code cells, Qualia offers AI-powered autocomplete suggestions. These appear inline and you can accept them with Tab. Turn them on by setting the code completion mode to LM in Settings > Editor. Autocomplete uses the notebook context — nearby cells and their outputs — to make relevant suggestions. It requires a Quadrillion API key and is not available on BYOK deployments.

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Exporting a chat

Right-click a chat tab and choose Export to save the conversation as a Markdown (.md) file. The export contains the visible transcript — your messages and Qualia’s replies — so you can archive a conversation or share it outside the app.

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Customization

Qualia’s behavior can be customized with:

• Rules: Persistent instructions that apply to every conversation (e.g., “Always use polars instead of pandas”)
• Skills: Reusable workflows for specific tasks (e.g., “How to deploy to production”)

See the individual pages for details on creating and using these.