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Programs & Rooms ​

A Program is a recurring business function — RFP tracking, inbox triage, customer care, or one you define yourself. Each Program gives you a room: a Slack-style conversation with the AI teammate that owns that work.

What a Program is ​

Pencel organizes your business into Programs instead of a blank chat window. Open Programs in the sidebar and you'll see the ones installed — built-in ones like RFP (government/enterprise opportunity tracking) and Email Chief of Staff (inbox triage), plus any custom Program you've set up for a process specific to your business.

A Program isn't just a saved prompt. It carries its own persona, its own bound data sources (a connected inbox, a set of RFP portals, whatever the work needs), its own saved knowledge and standing rules, and a running history of what it has done — all scoped to that one function, so an RFP room never sees your inbox and vice versa.

What a room feels like ​

Every Program has a room, named and used like a Slack channel dedicated to that work — #grant-watch, #rfp-tracking, #inbox. The message box literally reads "Message #grant-watch — '@' to point at a file or teammate":

  • Talk to it. Type what you want, the way you'd message a colleague. The room's agent reads, reasons, and responds inline.
  • Drop in a file. Attach a document to the room composer and choose whether it's a one-turn attachment or something to keep as standing material for that Program.
  • Tell it a rule. "Always flag anything over $50K" sticks as a standing rule for that room going forward — no separate configuration screen.
  • Watch results post back. When the room finishes something actionable, it publishes a result card right there in the room — a draft, a finding, a recommendation — with the source it drew on and whatever needs your review before it goes further (see Approval Workflows).

You don't need to know what's running underneath to use a room. That's the point.

The Results and Knowledge tabs ​

Every room has two tabs alongside the conversation:

  • Results — saved work from this room: past outputs you can reopen without scrolling back through the conversation that produced them.
  • Knowledge — two things, stacked: Instructions & preferences (the standing rules you've told the room, plus a free-text box to add more — "Instructions do not grant permission to send or change data," they only shape judgment) and Saved knowledge (specific facts explicitly saved from a result, each showing its source, who saved it, and when — reading a source doesn't automatically add it here; you choose what's worth keeping).

On a narrow window, the tabs take over the whole view with a Back to room control instead of splitting the screen.

Built-in Programs vs. your own ​

  • RFP and Email Chief of Staff ship as ready-to-use Programs with their own tailored room experience — the RFP room tracks opportunities and can route into Tailor to draft a proposal; the Inbox room reviews your connected inbox and drafts replies.
  • A custom Program is one you set up yourself for a process that's specific to your business. See Setting Up a Program for the full walkthrough. Installing a solution pack is another way to get a working Program in one step, with its crew and connections configured to work together.

Crew and responsibilities ​

A room's work is done by its crew — the named teammates assigned to that Program, one of them the lead. Each teammate carries one or more responsibilities: standing jobs they run on their own, without you asking each time.

  • Operational responsibilities are the room's actual work — scanning a connected inbox every morning, watching a set of grant portals weekly, whatever the Program exists to do. Each runs on a schedule or in response to an event.
  • Every room also gets one built-in stewardship responsibility, "Keep this room healthy," owned by the lead. It checks in after meaningful activity and once each weekday morning — but it only ever flags a problem for you to look at. It can't add tools, sources, teammates, or budget on its own.

When a responsibility runs and finds nothing worth reporting, it stays quiet — no message, just a clean record. When it finds something, it posts the result in the room.

Setting one up ​

Getting a Program from an idea to running work is a describe → review → activate flow:

  1. Describe what you want in the room, the way you'd brief a new hire.
  2. Review the proposal — Pencel drafts a crew and a set of responsibilities with cadences. This is an editable draft: changing it creates a new revision rather than losing your history.
  3. Resolve readiness — a checklist shows exactly which required account or source (which inbox, which QuickBooks company, and so on) still needs your attention. Pencel never guesses between two candidate accounts; it asks.
  4. Activate — once everything is ready, activating locks the plan in and starts each responsibility running on its own cadence.

See Setting Up a Program for the step-by-step guide.

Putting it together: a grant-watching Program ​

Say you set up #grant-watch to track new grant programs relevant to your business:

  1. You describe it: "Watch for new small-business grants and flag ones over $50K."
  2. Pencel proposes a crew (a lead, "Grant Scout") and a responsibility: scan a set of grant portals weekly. You accept it as proposed.
  3. Readiness shows one item — a web-search source — already available, so there's nothing to connect.
  4. You activate. #grant-watch now scans on its own schedule.
  5. The next Monday, Grant Scout finds three matching grants, posts a result card summarizing them in the room, and — because you'd earlier told it "always flag anything over $50K" as a standing rule — flags the largest one at the top.
  6. You save that rule's context to Knowledge so future scans keep applying the same bar.

No workflow editor, no agent config screen — the whole thing happened inside one room.

What a room can do ​

  • Publish actionable results — findings, drafts, and recommendations post as cards you can act on without leaving the room.
  • Hold for approval — anything that sends externally or touches a financial or destructive action pauses for your explicit review first; standing approvals can be granted for a specific room/tool/account combination once you trust the pattern.
  • Save a reply as a recurring workflow — if a one-off room response is something you'd want done the same way every week, save it and Pencel turns that conversation into a scheduled, governed workflow — verified with a dry rehearsal before its schedule is switched on. You never have to open a workflow editor to get there; the room is the entry point.
  • Stay inside a budget — every room has an owner-set monthly credit cap (a sensible default to start), visible and adjustable in the room's details. A room can't spend past what it's allotted.

Staying reliable ​

A room's identity — its conversation, history, saved knowledge, and pending questions — survives renaming it, restarting the app, or the process dying mid-turn. If a turn is interrupted, Pencel either resumes it cleanly or leaves one plain note explaining what happened; it never silently loses your place or merges two rooms' histories together.

Approvals follow the same care: a one-time approval is bound to the exact action you saw, so it can't be silently reused for something different, and financial or destructive actions always ask again rather than relying on a standing grant. Saving a reply as a recurring workflow goes through the same discipline — Pencel runs one unattended rehearsal first (reads happen for real, writes and sends are simulated) and only turns the schedule on if that rehearsal comes back clean.

Where Studio fits ​

Every room runs on the same underlying machinery as everything else in Pencel: an agent with a role, a workflow with steps and guardrails, scheduled or on-demand jobs. You can inspect and configure all of that directly in Studio (Agents, Workflows, Jobs in the sidebar) if you want fine-grained control — but most people never need to. The room is the product; Studio is what it's built on.

Current limits ​

A Program room runs locally on this installation. There's no shared or remote room, no human collaborator inside a room alongside you, and no cloud-hosted execution — a room only does work while Pencel is running on your machine. If you close your laptop mid-task, the room picks back up cleanly the next time you open Pencel; it doesn't run in the background while you're away.

Learn more ​