Chats: from idea to project
The ideation partner, and how a conversation becomes a project.
You've met Spec, the agent that sharpens ideas. Chats is the surface you work with it on: where conversations live, how they become projects, and everything around them.
Most chats stay chats. That's the point: ideas are cheap to explore here, and only the ones that hold together become projects.
Working with chats
- Start one from the home screen: type and send. The chat names itself from your opening message; rename it anytime from the title menu.
- Skip the chat entirely: the home composer has a Research / Build switch. Research opens the ideation conversation this page describes; Build goes straight to a project — Modus names it from your prompt and drops you in the hub, no chat, no naming modal.
- Star the ones you care about, and filter the chats list by starred, promoted, or drafts.
- Search covers titles and message contents, from the sidebar or Cmd-K.
- Attach files in the composer: text files fold into the conversation (PDFs and Word documents have their text pulled out too); images and other binaries ride along to the project when you create one.
- Import a repo: the composer's GitHub action starts a chat around an existing codebase. Paste any public repo URL, no GitHub connection needed, or connect GitHub in Integrations to pick from your own repos; either way you choose the branch. The partner opens with a summary of what the repo appears to be, and the code itself imports when you create the project, with progress shown on the project's page.
- Export your notes: the title menu's Export notes (.md) downloads the brief (if one was generated) and the settled decisions as a Markdown file. Useful when a chat was worth thinking through but not worth a project.
- Don't wait for a reply to finish: keep typing while Modus is answering. Your messages stack in a queue above the composer — reorder them, cancel one, or hit send-now to cut the current reply short and run yours next. When it can, Modus folds your note into the reply it's already writing (you'll see a "You steered" marker where it landed).
Brand, captured as you talk
Mention a name, colors, a font, or a tone of voice, and Modus quietly captures it on the chat as your brand: no form to fill. When the chat becomes a project, that brand seeds the design chapter's Brand kit, where you round it out with logos, fonts, and assets.
Creating the project
Create project sits in the composer once the conversation has substance. It distills the chat into a brief and asks for three things:
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Project name | The dashboard label: projects list, sidebar, breadcrumbs. |
| Product name | What the product is called. It leads the brief and is used in the PRD and design. Defaults to the project name. |
| Brief | The distilled conversation, editable. The build pipeline starts from exactly this text. |
Distilling the brief is a paid model call, billed like a chat turn, and it's cached: reopening the dialog on an unchanged conversation reuses the same brief for free; after new messages the dialog offers a Refresh brief button instead of silently re-billing.
Confirm and the project is created; you land in its hub with the brief already in place.
After promotion: the navigator
The chat doesn't end when the project is born; it flips into navigator mode. Ask it where to do something ("where do I change the hero?", "how do I ship this?") and it points you to the right chapter, usually with a concrete prompt to use there. It advises; it never edits the project itself.
Promotion is one-way and one-shot: a chat creates at most one project. A promoted chat shows a View project shortcut, and deleting a chat never touches the project it created.