Sessions

Every chat tab in Crew is its own conversation. Conversations are independent — each one has its own context, its own history, and its own tool-approval state. You can have many open at once, each working on different things.

Click + in the tab bar to start a new session. Each one is isolated:

• Its own context window (the agent doesn't see other tabs)
• Its own tool-approval state
• Its own project directory (set via the project picker in the header)

Sessions started from Slack, Telegram, or Discord are also independent — a Slack thread is one session, a dashboard tab is another. They share memory (your preferences, lessons, and history) but not in-session context.

Toggle incognito from the session menu. An incognito session is ephemeral:

• Nothing you say enters preferences, projects, or history
• No lessons are extracted
• No semantic or episodic memory is written
• The conversation still works normally — you just leave no trace in long-term memory

Use incognito for sensitive queries, dry-run explorations, or anything you don't want to influence future sessions. The tab is visually marked so you can tell at a glance.

You can send multiple messages while the agent is still responding. Messages are queued and processed in order once the current turn finishes.

• Messages arrive in the order you sent them
• Deleting a queued message before it runs removes it from the queue
• The ⏹ Stop button interrupts the current turn and moves to the next queued message

You never lose a message by sending too fast.

Sessions survive gateway restarts. If you restart Crew (or it auto-restarts), your open dashboard tabs reconnect automatically. The next message you send continues the session.

From Slack or Telegram, type sessions to see recent conversations with ▶ Resume buttons. You can also link a dashboard conversation to a Slack thread for bidirectional sync (💬 button in the tab header).

Toggle Autopilot per-session from the session menu. When on:

• Tool calls that pass security checks are auto-approved for this session
• No approval prompts interrupt the flow
• Deny rules and sensitive-path blocks still apply (autopilot doesn't bypass security)

Turn it off and you're back to interactive approval for each tool call.

Session close after a period of inactivity (default 30 minutes). When a session times out:

• Its resources are released
• It can be resumed — the next message reopens it
• Memory consolidation may fire during the idle period (writing preferences and history)

Configure the timeout in Settings or via kirocrew config set session.timeout_secs 3600.

Two levels of memory:

A new session starts with your memory injected (preferences, recent history, lessons) but no knowledge of what happened in other open tabs.

For the full model of how memory builds, decays, and gets retrieved, see Memory.

If the gateway launched from a workspace with .kiro/steering/*.md files, every session in that workspace inherits those rules automatically. Steering is the recommended way to give project-specific context (coding standards, deployment rules, team conventions) without repeating yourself.

Want to explore a different direction without losing your current thread?

• Fork — clones the session into a new tab with full context
• Fork tail-only — carries over only the recent messages (lighter start)

The forked tab is fully independent from that point.

Long session eventually fill the context window. Crew auto-compacts at ~90% usage — older turns are summarized to make room for new ones. You can also manually compact:

• Dashboard: session menu → Compact
• Slack: !compact

After compaction, the agent still has your intent and recent work — just with summarized older turns.

The kebab menu on each tab gives you session-level controls:

• Rename — change the tab title (auto-generated but overridable)
• Mark as unread — flag the session for later attention
• Pin — keep the session pinned to the top of the list
• Switch to Autopilot — toggle auto-approval for tool calls in this session
• Tags... — add or manage tags for organization
• Pop out to window — open the session in a separate browser window
• Copy link — copy a shareable link to this session
• Send to Slack — link the session to a Slack thread for bidirectional sync
• Session color — pick a color dot for visual identification
• Close session — end the session and remove it from the tab list