Sidekick — The In-Product AI Helper

What Sidekick is

Sidekick is the AI copilot built into the Macha dashboard, a full-screen workspace you can open from anywhere in the app. It's separate from the agents you build for your team: those agents work on your data (Zendesk tickets, Shopify orders, Slack messages); Sidekick works on Macha itself. It can build an agent from a description, wire up a custom API tool, audit how your existing agents are performing on real conversations, debug a tool that isn't behaving, render charts of your usage, search the web for vendor docs, and read files you attach.

You'll find Sidekick in the sidebar footer (look for the rotating mascot). Click it, or hit ⌘K on Mac / Ctrl K on Windows or Linux from any page. The overlay covers most of the dashboard with a backdrop blur, and your session keeps its place if you close and reopen.

When to use Sidekick (and when not to)

The split is mostly about what data the question is about:

• Use Sidekick for questions about Macha: how to set up X, what plan you're on, why a connector is in the wrong state, building a new agent from scratch, hooking up a custom tool, debugging why a trigger isn't firing, auditing how your refund agent did this week.
• Use one of your own agents for questions about your business data: "summarize ticket #12345", "find recent refund requests", "draft a reply to this customer". Sidekick can't read your tickets or your Stripe data directly, that's what the agents you've built are for. (Sidekick can read past conversations your agents have had, which is how it audits performance.)

A useful mental model: Sidekick is the Macha team member sitting next to you, not the customer support rep. Ask it the meta questions about your workspace.

What Sidekick can do

Seven things Sidekick is particularly good at:

1. Build an agent from a description

Describe the agent you want in plain English ("I need an agent that reads new Zendesk tickets, decides if they're about refunds, tags them, and posts an internal note for the support team") and Sidekick walks you through it: confirms the use case, recommends a ranked list of tools from the connectors you have connected (with a picker you can adjust), drafts the instructions, suggests a trigger, and creates the agent. You review before anything saves.

This uses the build-agent playbook internally. Sidekick fetches the playbook step-by-step instructions on demand, so the same agent-creation pattern works whether you start with a one-line description or a long brief. Available on every plan, including trial.

2. Edit an existing agent

Open Sidekick and say "add a refund tool to the triage agent", or "change the support agent's model to GPT-5.4 Mini", or "add a scheduled trigger to the daily-digest agent that runs every morning at 9am". Sidekick looks up the agent, makes the change, and tells you what it did. Available on every plan.

3. Build and debug a custom API tool

If you want your agents to call an HTTP API that isn't a built-in connector (your internal CRM, a logistics provider, a niche SaaS), Sidekick can configure it as a custom tool. Paste the API docs (or a curl command), tell Sidekick what it does, and it builds the tool: URL, method, parameters, auth, body template. It tests the endpoint live before saving so you know it works.

For tools that already exist, ask "is my Postmark template-list tool working?" and Sidekick will run it with sample args, show you the request, response, and timing, and explain what's broken if anything is.

This uses the build-custom-tool playbook. Custom tools are a Professional and Enterprise feature; Sidekick will tell you if you're not on a qualifying plan.

4. Audit how your agents are doing

Sidekick can read past conversations your agents have run and judge them against the agent's own instructions. Ask "how did the refund agent do this week?" or "find any conversations where the support agent tagged a ticket but the customer wasn't actually angry" or "score the last 20 runs of the triage agent for instruction-following", and Sidekick searches the conversation log, opens each one, and gives you a verdict, often with a chart of the result.

This uses the audit-agent-runs playbook (retrospective only, reads existing history). Available on every plan.

5. Test an agent on a fresh scenario

The sibling of audit. Where audit looks backward at past runs, the test flow creates a new run on demand so you can see how an agent behaves before it ever touches a real customer. Ask "test the escalation agent" or "try this agent on a refund-dispute scenario", and Sidekick:

• Reads the agent's instructions and drafts 3–5 realistic scenarios for you to pick from. (You can also describe your own via the freeform option.)
• Confirms the entity it's about to create (subject, body, requester, priority), then on your go creates a real ticket or message on the connected workspace, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Gorgias, or Slack.
• Dispatches the agent autonomously against it. The run streams live into the chat as a TestRunCard: every tool call, every assistant message, the status pill flipping from Running to Completed.
• Reads the full transcript when it's done and writes a tight review in the same turn: what worked, where the agent stumbled with the exact tool call quoted, and 2–3 specific tweaks to its instructions or tools.
• Offers a follow-up: apply the tweaks, run another scenario, or skip.

This uses the test-agent playbook. The cross-connector webhook short-circuit guarantees other triggers in your org won't fan out to the test entity, so it's safe to run even on a busy production connector. Sidekick also proactively offers a test after creating an agent, after a non-cosmetic edit, and after an audit that surfaced a concrete fix, so verification happens at the natural moments without you having to remember. Available on every plan; five connectors covered at launch (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front, Gorgias, Slack).

6. Answer questions about Macha

Anything covered in these docs, Sidekick can answer directly. It has the Macha docs indexed as a knowledge base and searches them on every question. "How do I set up a Zendesk custom webhook?", "What's the difference between a trigger and a schedule?", "How does instruction-following evaluation work?" Quick sourced answers with links to the relevant doc page if you want to go deeper. For things outside Macha's docs (third-party API specs, vendor pricing, current events), Sidekick falls back to a built-in web search with inline citations.

This uses the answer-questions playbook. Available on every plan.

7. Surface workspace status & render charts

Sidekick can read your workspace state and answer questions about it:

• "What plan am I on?"
• "How many credits do I have left?"
• "Which connectors are broken?"
• "List all my inactive agents."
• "Show me a bar chart of credits used per agent this month."
• "Plot conversations per day for the last 14 days."

Bar, line, and donut charts render inline using render_chart, with a View Data table for the underlying numbers. No PII passes through, these are platform-level metadata queries.

How you talk to Sidekick

Sidekick is designed to feel like Claude Code or a senior teammate working at your shoulder, not a one-line chatbot. A few patterns to know:

• Pickers, not "A or B?". When Sidekick needs to clarify something, it shows you a list of options with number-key shortcuts. Hit 1, 2, or 3 to pick, or use ↑/↓ and Enter. There's always a "Chat about this" freeform option if none of the choices fit.
• Confirmation cards before destructive actions. Sidekick won't delete an agent, change a trigger, or commit a configuration write without showing you a card summarizing what it's about to do.
• Reasoning is exposed. Every assistant turn has a Reasoning pill; click it (or any italic narrator line between tool calls) to open the Reasoning drawer with the model's chain-of-thought streaming in. Useful when you want to know why Sidekick made a call.
• Ghost-text suggestions. When Sidekick has a high-confidence guess at what you might want to say next, it shows it as ghost text in the composer. Press Tab to accept.
• History rail. Past sessions are auto-titled and grouped Today / Yesterday / Older. Toggle the rail open from the chat header.

Attaching files and using voice

• Files. Click the paperclip or drag any file onto the panel. Sidekick reads images, PDFs, text, CSV, JSON, Markdown, and DOCX natively, up to 20MB per file and 5 files per message. PDFs are capped at 100 pages. Quote relevant sections back to Sidekick if you want it to focus on a specific part.
• Voice. Tap the microphone to dictate. Sidekick transcribes with Groq Whisper and auto-sends when you stop talking. Useful when you're describing an agent end-to-end and don't want to type a paragraph.

What Sidekick can NOT do

Two important boundaries:

• Sidekick can't read your live customer data. It doesn't connect to Zendesk, Stripe, Front, etc. to fetch tickets or customers in real time. That's by design, Sidekick is the meta-agent for working with Macha, not for working with your customers. Build your own agents for that, and they'll have the appropriate tool access. (Sidekick can read past conversations your agents have already had, which is how the audit flow works.)
• Sidekick can't change billing or invite teammates. Anything that touches money, identity, or your organization's structure stays in the Settings UI on purpose. Sidekick can tell you what your plan is and link you to the billing page, but it won't upgrade or cancel for you.

How Sidekick decides what to do

When you send a message to Sidekick, it doesn't just answer, it picks a playbook. Each playbook is a multi-step script for a major task (build an agent, edit an agent, build a custom tool, audit past runs, test an agent, answer a question) that Sidekick loads on demand. The playbook tells Sidekick: what tools to use, what order to use them in, what to confirm with the user before saving anything.

This is why Sidekick stays consistent. Agent creation always follows the same flow, custom tool creation always tests the endpoint before saving, doc answers always cite the source. You're never surprised by what it does because the patterns are baked in, not improvised per conversation.

Conversations and credits

Each Sidekick session is its own conversation, persisted in your Macha account. The history rail in the chat header lets you scroll back through prior sessions, grouped by Today / Yesterday / Older, with auto-generated titles.

Sidekick runs on a dedicated key with its own usage tracking, separate from the credits your customer-facing agents spend. Long sessions are compacted automatically: once a conversation crosses a token threshold, Sidekick summarizes the middle of the thread (keeping the first user message and the last 12 messages intact) so context stays fresh without you losing the thread.

Privacy

Sidekick conversations are stored on your Macha account, the same way agent conversations are, and follow a 7-day TTL on the internal log. Files you upload are attached to OpenAI's Files API for the duration of the session so the model can read them; they're not used for training. Credentials passed to Sidekick during custom-tool building (e.g., test API keys you paste in the chat) are encrypted at rest using the same key infrastructure as connector credentials. Once a custom tool is saved, the credentials live on the tool record, never visible in the Sidekick conversation history afterwards.

Plan availability

Sidekick is available on every plan: trial, starter, professional, and enterprise. The agent-building, editing, auditing, testing, and Q&A flows are open to all. Custom tool building is gated to Professional and Enterprise because custom tools themselves are a paid feature; Sidekick will tell you if you try to build one on a lower plan.