Zide Assist
Zide Assist is an AI agent built into Zide. Zide Assist can read your repository, edit files, and run scripts without leaving Zide.
Navigate the Zide Assist tab
To open a Zide Assist tab, click Assist > New Session. You can open multiple Zide Assist instances.
The Zide Assist toolbar includes the following actions.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| MCP Connections | View MCP connections. Click the Manage in Settings icon to add an MCP connection. |
| Background Process | View background processes in Zide. |
| Edit session title | Edit the Zide Assist session title. |
| Crosscheck | Turn On or Off automatic second-model review of commits, and choose the reviewer model. See Crosscheck. |
| Plan mode | Turn On or Off the Plan mode for the Zide Assist session. |
| Security settings | View the safety and permissions of the Zide Assist session. |
Choose a model
Select the Model dropdown to browse AI models and curated Zide tiers. Zide sends requests to the selection you make; it does not dynamically route each request to a different model.
Ordinary models are grouped by provider and alphabetized by display name. All Models lets you filter the catalog and sort it by name, Intelligence, context size, or representative cost. Curated Zide tiers keep their intentional tier order. Your plan sets which models you can select: the Free and Zide Solo plans run on Zide Economy, while the Assist tiers unlock the full catalog. Models outside your plan remain visible with a lock; selecting one opens the upgrade options instead.
Select a model to open its detail pane:
- Ratings & specs shows the independent Intelligence and Behavior indices, first-answer-token and output-speed measurements, context and output limits, and image-analysis support.
- Pricing shows current credit rates, representative task estimates, pricing versions and modes, context bands, recurring windows, prompt-cache behavior, and the cost of rebuilding context after a model switch when those details apply.
Zide does not combine ratings into an overall score. Intelligence describes solution quality, including performance on large or complex problems. Behavior describes instruction-following and staying on task through a long agent session. Each is an index from 0 to 100 with a Basic, Limited, Capable, Strong, or Exceptional label. An unavailable rating appears as Not rated, not zero.
Speed is shown as rough raw measurements rather than a rating. First answer token is the delay before a model starts answering; Output speed is how quickly it produces tokens after it starts. An unavailable speed measurement appears as Not measured.
Pricing uses credits as the billed unit. Representative Typical, Large, and Very large tasks are fixed examples rather than forecasts, so your actual usage will differ. Local models and models reached with your own key are outside Zide’s managed evaluation and billing catalog; the picker does not invent ratings or Zide prices for them.
Zide Assist conversation
Enter a message into the Zide Assist tab message box and click Send to send a request to Zide. Click Cancel to stop the request to Zide.
You can also dictate your message: click the microphone icon in the bottom-right corner of the message box. As it works, the mic shows an inline label so you can see the state without hovering: Starting… while it warms up, Recording… while it captures your voice, and Transcribing… while it converts your speech to text. While recording, the label counts up against the limit (for example Recording… 0:42 / 2:00) so you can see how much time is left. Click the mic again to stop; the transcript drops into the message box for you to review before you send. Recording stops on its own after two minutes and transcribes what it captured, and you can stop sooner at any time. Dictation is sent to Zide’s speech service and uses AI credits; longer recordings use more credits. If a recording reaches the size limit, dictation stops and transcribes what it captured so far; if none of it could be kept, it asks you to try a shorter prompt.
Click New Conversation to start a new conversation in the Zide Assist tab.
The conversation view displays the conversation topic, your messages, and responses from Zide Assist.
Redirect Zide while it is working
You do not have to wait for a turn to finish before saying something. While Zide is working, type your message and click Send (or press Enter) as usual. It appears in the conversation right away and Zide picks it up at its next safe point, between tool calls or before its next step, and adjusts what it is doing.
Send whatever you would normally send: text, images, files, tab references, and @file references all work the same way mid-turn.
Send more than one and Zide reads them in the order you sent them. The model and settings for the running turn are already fixed, so a message you send during a turn continues with that turn’s model; a model or setting you change while Zide is working applies to your next turn.
To stop Zide instead of redirecting it, click Cancel. To ask a question in parallel without touching the current work, use /sidebar.
Press the up arrow in an empty message box to bring back something you sent earlier. That is a shortcut for retyping, so an edited message you send this way is a new message like any other: while Zide is working it redirects the current turn. To replace a message you already sent, use Edit & Resend from the message’s own menu, which removes that message and everything after it first.
Queue a message for the next turn
When you would rather your message wait its turn, click the caret beside Send and choose Queue for next turn. Zide sends it once it finishes what it is doing. You can queue several messages: they appear as an editable list just above the message box, and each one runs in turn.
To change a queued message before it sends, edit it in place in the list. To drop one, click its ×. Queuing works the same way during a multi-step run: your message is simply added as another step at the end of the run.
Two kinds of message always queue rather than redirect the current turn, because they only make sense at a turn boundary:
- Commands (anything starting with
/, apart from/sidebar) run as commands on the next turn. - Multi-step prompts (text split by a
---line) stay an ordered run and are queued behind the current turn. To hand the whole text to Zide as one piece of guidance instead, choose Send as One Message from the caret menu.
Messages
Your messages to Zide appear as right-aligned bubbles, and Zide’s replies run full width down the left so prose, code, and diffs read naturally. In your message, click the Message options icon to open the following actions for the message.
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Copy | Copy the message. |
| Edit & Resend | Edit and resend the message to Zide |
| Save as command | Save the message as a command. |
| Fork from here | Create a new Zide Assist tab from the message. |
| Fork to worktree | Create a new Zide Assist tab in a worktree from the message. |
| Rollback to here | Reverts the conversation back to the message. |
| Delete Message | Delete the message. |
Zide responses
Zide’s tool calls are collapsed by default into a single chip on the right edge of each response, showing a wrench and the number of tool calls in that turn. The wrench is green when every call succeeded and red if one failed. Click the chip to expand the turn’s tool calls inline; hover it for a one-line breakdown of which tools ran. Each response header also shows the turn’s credit cost (for example, cr 2.3); click it to open the full breakdown of time, credits, and tokens Zide used to generate the response. Click the Copy as Markdown icon to copy the Zide response as Markdown.
When a turn ends with an active task list, a Task list banner is recorded in the scrollback showing each task and the state it had when that turn finished.
Crosscheck
Crosscheck has every commit Zide Assist makes reviewed by a second model of your choosing, so you can work with one model while another independently second-guesses its commits. Each review is a second-model pass over the commit, so normal AI credit charges apply. Crosscheck is available on any plan that includes AI access and is off by default.
To set up Crosscheck, click Crosscheck in the toolbar, choose a reviewer model, and turn it On. The toolbar button is tinted while Crosscheck is on.
Crosscheck is most useful when the reviewer is a different model than your working one. A different model family catches mistakes yours can miss, and you can drive with a fast, inexpensive model while a stronger one reviews only the commits.
When Zide Assist authors a commit (whether through its commit tool or by running git commit itself), Crosscheck starts a review:
- A banner appears above the message box naming the commit being reviewed, with a Cancel button. Reviews run in the background, so you can keep working; if several reviews are in flight, their banners stack.
- The reviewer runs read-only and cannot change your files.
- When the review finishes, it is posted into the conversation like a normal Zide response. Findings are grouped by severity (High, Medium, Low), and the header shows how many findings fall into each level. The header also shows the review’s credit cost (click it for the full breakdown of time, credits, and tokens), and the cost appears in the credits dropdown.
- Click Submit on a review to send its findings to Zide Assist as a new request, so it can address the feedback.
You can also use your own CLI agent that is already configured and active on your local machine with Zide. For more information, see Chat with CLI Agents. To understand how Zide Assist and CLI agents compare and how they can work side by side, see Zide Assist vs. your own AI tools.
Ask Zide in the docs panel
The docs panel has its own small Ask Zide box, pinned to the bottom of the panel. It is a read-only docs helper, separate from the Zide Assist tab, that answers questions about Zide and about the guide page you are currently reading, so you can ask “what does this button do?” without leaving the page.
Type a question into the Ask about this page box and press Enter or click Send. Click the microphone icon to dictate a question instead: the mic shows a Starting… label while it warms up, Recording… (with a running timer against the two-minute limit, for example Recording… 0:42 / 2:00) while it captures your voice, and Transcribing… while it converts your speech to text, so you can see the state at a glance without hovering. Recording stops on its own after two minutes, and you can stop sooner at any time. Like all dictation, it is sent to Zide’s speech service and uses AI credits; longer recordings use more credits. Sending a message expands the box into a conversation area above the entry box; drag the colored divider on the box’s top edge to resize it. The chevron on the Ask Zide bar collapses the box back to the one-line entry field and expands it again; the eraser clears the conversation.
The docs helper is intentionally limited compared to the Zide Assist tab:
- It only reads. It cannot edit files, run commands, or touch your repository or settings.
- It always knows which guide page you have open, and it can look up other bundled guides when you ask about a feature that is not on the current page.
- It can see the screen you are looking at. When you ask about something in front of you (“what happens if I click Rebuild?”, “what is the third item in that list?”), it reads the text and labels of the visible window, including a dropdown or menu that closed when you clicked into the Ask Zide box, to identify the control you mean before looking up what it does. This reads on-screen text only; it is not a screenshot, and nothing is captured until you ask.
- When an answer mentions another guide, it appears as a link. Click it to open that page in the docs panel.
- The conversation is ephemeral. It keeps only the last few exchanges for follow-up questions and nothing is saved when you close Zide.
- It runs on the economy model tier, so questions are inexpensive. Normal AI credit charges apply.
Ask Zide is available on every plan that includes AI access. If AI is turned off for your account, the box is still visible, and the send and dictation buttons are disabled with a tooltip explaining what they need.