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Partners

Partners are persistent companions with their own identity, soul, model policy, library, memory, and channel configuration. They are not a separate bot engine: every inbound message — from the web or from an IM app — is routed through the same ChatOrchestrator → AgenticChatPipeline loop that powers the main Chat Workspace. A Partner is “a chat that has a personality and a phone number.”

Where it is

Section titled “Where it is”

Open Partners in the left sidebar. The page lists every companion with its avatar, status, description, and connected channels, and a New partner button to create more.

The Partners page: companion cards with channel badges, and a New partner button

Mental model

Section titled “Mental model”

A Partner is a synthetic user workspace under data/partners/<id>/workspace/. That workspace holds the partner’s soul, its copied knowledge bases, copied skills, notebooks, memory, and channel runtime state. Because the layout mirrors a normal chat workspace, every tool — RAG, read_skill, notebooks, memory, MCP-deferred tools — works for a Partner with no separate implementation.

The practical consequences:

  • One brain, many doors. The partner’s reasoning is identical whether you talk to it in the web UI or through WeChat, Telegram, or Slack — channels are just delivery adapters.
  • A copied library, not a live link. Knowledge bases, skills, and notebooks are copied into the partner workspace at assignment time, so the partner keeps working even as you change context elsewhere.
  • Its own memory. A partner reads and writes its own memory and can read its owner’s main memory — but it can only write to its own.

Create a partner

Section titled “Create a partner”

Press New partner and complete the wizard:

  1. Identity — name, avatar, description, and default reply language.
  2. Soul — the partner’s role and communication style. This becomes its SOUL.md.
  3. Mind — model selection, enabled system tools, MCP tools, and delivery preferences.
  4. Library — assign knowledge bases, skills, and notebooks (copied into the partner workspace).
  5. Review — confirm the workspace and channel setup before starting.

Everything chosen here stays editable afterwards from the partner detail page.

Talk to a partner

Section titled “Talk to a partner”

Open a partner to land on its Chat tab — a full conversation view that behaves like the main workspace, but as that companion. The tabs across the top are Chat, Configure, Channels, and Archive.

A partner's Chat tab: it greets in its own voice and recalls memory about you

Because a partner has memory, it builds up a picture of you over time. Ask it “what do you know about me?” and you’ll see a Recalling memory step — the partner reads its own memory layers before answering in its soul. The Configure tab covers identity, soul, mind, and library; Archive preserves old conversations.

Channels

Section titled “Channels”

Channels are delivery adapters around the same partner brain. The Channels tab lists every supported app down the left; pick one to configure its credentials and behavior on the right, then Save and enable it.

The Channels tab: pick an IM app on the left and configure it on the right

Most channel cards share a few switches:

FieldMeaning
EnabledStart this channel for the partner. Leave off while you collect credentials.
Send ProgressDeliver narration/progress for long-running turns. Useful where a silent 60-second wait feels broken.
Send Tool HintsDeliver one-line tool-call hints such as rag(query=…). Turn off for quieter production channels.
Allow FromAllowlist of user ids, group ids, emails, or * (one per line). Empty usually denies all; * opens the channel.

The rest of each card is channel-specific (base URLs, tokens, polling). For the full list of apps and per-channel setup steps, see the Channel Matrix — start with WeChat, WeCom, or QQ / NapCat.

Partners as consultable agents

Section titled “Partners as consultable agents”

A partner can also be connected as a subagent and consulted from a normal chat turn — DeepTutor sends your question into the partner’s own session and folds its answer back. See Subagents.

CLI mirror

Section titled “CLI mirror”
Terminal window
deeptutor partner list
deeptutor partner create math-tutor --soul "Socratic math tutor"
deeptutor partner start math-tutor
deeptutor partner stop math-tutor

The CLI is handy for smoke tests, but the web UI is the recommended place to configure channels — it masks secrets and shows each channel’s schema inline.

See also

Section titled “See also”