Sidekick — The In-Product AI Helper

What Sidekick is

Sidekick is the AI helper built into the Macha dashboard — a small chat widget you can open from any page. 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 for you from a description, wire up a custom API tool, list which connectors broke this week, answer questions about how a feature works, or pull up your billing status — without you leaving the page you're on.

You'll see Sidekick as a floating widget in the bottom-right corner of the dashboard. Click it to open the chat. It carries its own conversation history per session.

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.
• 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 — that's the agents you've built for that purpose.

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

What Sidekick can do

Sidekick is a fully tool-using agent under the hood — the same architecture as your own agents — but its toolset is internal to Macha. Five things it's 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 agents, picks the right tools from the connectors you have connected, drafts the instructions, suggests a trigger, and creates the agent. You review before anything saves.

This path 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 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.

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. 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 Agent Evaluation work?" — quick sourced answers with links to the relevant doc page if you want to go deeper.

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

5. Surface workspace status

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."
• "How many agents am I using out of my plan limit?"

It uses internal tools like list_connectors, list_agents, get_workspace_status to answer. No PII passes through — these are platform-level metadata queries.

What Sidekick can NOT do

Two important boundaries:

• Sidekick can't read your customer data. It doesn't have access to your Zendesk tickets, Stripe customers, Front conversations, etc. 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'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, 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. You can scroll back through prior sessions from the Sidekick history view.

Sidekick uses credits like any other agent, but typically a very small number per turn — most answers run on GPT-5.4 Mini, which is 1 credit per response. Building an agent end-to-end usually costs 3-5 credits total. Building a custom tool with multiple test-endpoint iterations is the most expensive Sidekick task at 5-10 credits. (Exception: the post-onboarding welcome conversation with the AI assistant is free — see Billing.)

Privacy

Sidekick conversations are stored on your Macha account, the same way agent conversations are, and follow the same 45-day TTL. Internal Sidekick logs that capture configuration steps (which tools were tested, which agents were created) are kept for 7 days for debugging and then purged automatically.

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 afterward.

Plan availability

Sidekick is available on every plan — trial, starter, professional, and enterprise. The agent-building 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.