Chat Modes

The Chat Modes drop-down menu (located in the bottom header stripe of the AI Positron view) allows you to select various modes for chatting with the AI:

  • Agent - Chat with the AI about your project, set goals, or give instructions. The AI proposes changes, and you decide what to keep.
  • DITA Agent - Chat with the AI about your DITA XML project, set goals, or give instructions. The AI explores your project to complete tasks efficiently, proposes a plan, and can make project-wide changes on your behalf, while you decide what to keep.
  • Dev Agent - Chat with the AI about your XML development project, set goals, or give instructions. The AI can help with XSL/XSLT, Schematron, DTDs, XML Schemas, XPath, validation, and transformations. It explores your project, proposes a plan, and can make efficient project-wide changes on your behalf, while you decide what to keep.
  • Planner - Creates a comprehensive plan by exploring your project, then invokes sub-agents to execute each part of the plan. This chat mode can be used for making lots of project-wide changes without running into LLM context limitations.
    Note:
    When using the Planner chat mode in Oxygen desktop, PDF and Word (.docx) attachments are automatically converted and split into multiple Markdown section files, while embedded images are extracted into a temporary folder, enabling Planner sub-agents to process, transform, or convert document components independently. This allows you to use the Planner to convert user manuals while also extracting and using the images from inside the manuals.
  • Personas - Evaluates your task through multiple audience personas before producing a final recommendation. It identifies 2 to 4 relevant personas, consults each as a separate sub-agent, resolves tensions through a compromise round, and synthesizes a final recommendation that balances their needs. Use it for content, messaging, documentation, tutorials, or any task involving tradeoffs between different user needs.
  • Ask - Find answers, get explanations, and make plans using the AI. This read-only mode has access to various search tools and uses them based on your current task.

While chatting with the AI, you can change between chat modes to access more functionality. All chat modes automatically receive contextual information about your project's location, the location of the current document, its document type, and the location of the context DITA map. Additionally, if there is content selected in the main editor area when a chat is initiated, the selection is passed to the AI along with the document type to be used as context for the conversation.

When chatting with the AI, the following application context information is automatically made available to the LLM:
  • Name and version of the Oxygen application.
  • Operating system locale, name, and version (only available for Positron Desktop and Eclipse).
  • Current date.
  • Project directory (not available for Positron Web Author).
  • Main files information (only available for Positron Desktop).
  • Location of DITA Map currently opened in the DITA Maps Manager view.
  • Location of the current edited document.
  • Information about caret and selection intervals in the current edited document (Oxygen 28.1 or newer).

You can create your own custom chat modes.