The Assistant on a phone and on a wide screen
The Assistant is one panel with three arrangements, decided by the width you give it. Below 600px it fills the screen and its sections live behind a More menu. At 600px and above those sections become a sidebar. On a wide screen the panel sits beside the app instead of over it. Nothing is removed between layouts; things move.
The three arrangements#
Chat, Needs You, Standing, Memory and Files all draw into a single scroller. That one decision is what makes the layouts cheap: switching section swaps what the scroller renders rather than mounting a different screen, so the 38px header, the tabs and the composer never move when you change section.
| Width | Sections reached by | The panel is |
|---|---|---|
| Below 600px | The More menu in the header | The whole viewport; the app is behind it |
| 600px and above | A sidebar beside the scroller | A panel over the app, resizable |
| A wide window | The same sidebar | A column alongside the app, so the record you are asking about stays visible |
The header stays 38px tall in all three. It carries browser-style tabs, and each tab keeps its own conversation, follow-up chain, record, draft, files and scroll position — so a narrow screen does not cost you the second line of enquiry you had open. On a phone the tab strip scrolls sideways rather than shrinking the tabs to illegibility.
The keyboard-height rule#
On a phone, the panel is sized against the part of the viewport you can actually see, not against the window. When the on-screen keyboard opens, the conversation area gets shorter and the composer stays directly above the keyboard. The alternative — sizing to the window — pushes the composer under the keyboard, which is the single most common way a chat panel becomes unusable on a phone while looking correct in a desktop browser at the same pixel width.
One consequence is worth knowing: the visible conversation shrinks while you type, and the message you are replying to may scroll out of view. The scroller keeps its position rather than jumping to the bottom, so dismissing the keyboard puts you back where you were.
What does not change#
- The tool set. All 66 tools are available in every layout; nothing is withheld on a small screen.
- The authority. The Assistant's rights are the same on a phone as on a desktop — no pricing, and it cannot clear a do-not-contact entry.
- Proposals. A writing tool still produces a card you confirm; it is never auto-run because the screen is small.
- Citations. An answer carries where it came from at every width; on the narrow layout the sources fold rather than disappear.
This matters because the two audiences use different widths habitually, and a capability that quietly vanished below 600px would be a one-audience feature by accident. The same panel, the same tools and the same refusals at every size is the reason the Assistant behaves the same for an operator on a desktop and a customer on a phone.
When the layout is the problem#
- The panel opens with nothing in it
- The scroller has rendered before content arrived. Wait a moment; if it stays empty the session, not the layout, is the cause.
- The launcher is not where you expect
- Something is drawn over it, or a remembered size has put it off the visible area. The Assistant is not on screen covers both.
- The composer is under the keyboard
- The visible viewport is not being reported correctly by the browser. Rotating the device or dismissing and reopening the keyboard re-measures it.
- Tabs are unreadable
- Too many tabs open on a narrow screen. Close the ones you have finished with; each tab holds its own state and closing it discards only that state.
Questions#
Is 600px a device size or a panel size?
A panel size. What decides the arrangement is how wide the Assistant itself is, not what kind of device you are on, so narrowing a docked panel on a desktop gives you the More menu in exactly the way a phone does.
Do my tabs survive rotating the phone?
Yes. Rotation changes the arrangement, not the state. Each tab keeps its conversation, its pinned record, its draft and its scroll position across the change, because the layout swap re-renders one scroller rather than remounting the panel.
Can I make the panel wider?
At 600px and above the panel is resizable and the size is remembered. Below that it is the viewport, because a resizable panel on a phone is a panel you can lose.