Working with the AI Assistant
The App Builder’s AI Assistant is one of ALIGN’s Geo-AI agents: the one that lives inside the IDE and builds your application with you. It reads your project, answers questions, plans changes, and, when you let it, writes the code, styles the layers and wires the widgets.
It is an assistant, not an autopilot. Everything it does, you can do by hand, and you stay in control of when it acts.
The three modes
Section titled “The three modes”You pick how the Assistant behaves with a mode. The mode is shown next to the message box, and Ask is the default.
- Ask (shown as Discuss on the empty chat). Talk it through. The Assistant answers questions about your data, your app and your options, and makes no changes. Use it to explore and decide before you build.
- Plan. The Assistant drafts a step-by-step plan for what you asked, and waits for your approval before touching anything. Use it for larger changes you want to review first.
- Agent. The autonomous mode. The Assistant implements the change end to end: it edits the code, runs the data work, styles the layers and updates the app. Use it once you know what you want.
A good rhythm is to Discuss to frame the problem, Plan to agree on the approach, then switch to Agent to carry it out.
What to expect from each mode
Section titled “What to expect from each mode”- In Ask, expect answers and guidance, never edits. It is safe to explore.
- In Plan, expect a proposal you approve or adjust. Nothing changes until you say so.
- In Agent, expect real work on your project, visible live in the preview, and reversible from your history.
Conversations
Section titled “Conversations”Each project holds several conversations, so you can keep separate threads for separate topics: one to build a widget, another to wrangle a dataset. Conversations can be pinned, archived, renamed and searched, and each shows its live status, so you can tell at a glance which thread is working, which needs your input, and which has a new reply.
Giving it context
Section titled “Giving it context”The more precise the context, the better the result. Type @ in the message box
to point the Assistant at exactly what you mean:
- a file in your project,
- an asset from your Datastore,
- a saved plan,
- or a skill the Assistant can apply.
This keeps the Assistant focused on the right part of your app instead of guessing.
Choosing the model
Section titled “Choosing the model”The Assistant can run on different AI models, and you choose which one, with settings for cost and defaults. See Models and settings.