What she can do

Four things, really. Everything else is a variation on one of them.

Talk with you

The main event. Waffle holds a conversation in your terminal, remembers what you said earlier in it, and can pick a session back up days later.

She is good at the things a knowledgeable colleague is good at: explaining something confusing, drafting a first version, talking through a decision, noticing what you forgot. She is not an oracle, and she will occasionally be confidently wrong — the same as any other assistant of this kind.

Do things with tools

This is the part that separates her from a chat window. When you allow it, she can:

• Read and write files — open a file, explain it, edit it, create one.
• Run commands — anything you would type at a shell, subject to the rules you have set.
• Search — across your files, or the web.
• Fetch a page — pull something down and work with it.

Each of those is a permission you grant. She starts with none of them enabled by default, and Keeping her safe covers how to decide what to switch on.

Remember

Three different kinds of remembering, which sound similar and are not:

• The conversation — everything said in the current session, searchable later.
• The working set — goals and constraints she is holding for this task. Temporary by design; it disappears with the session.
• Durable notes — things worth keeping. These survive everything and are the only kind she carries into a new conversation.

Only that last kind is permanent, and there is a review setting that makes you approve every durable note before it is written. Teaching her covers all three.

Work while you are not there

Waffle can run a job on a schedule — every weekday at nine, every night at three — and message you with the result:

waffle cron add standup 0 9 * * 1-5 "Summarize my starred repos" \
  --deliver telegram:900

Scheduled jobs only run while the background service (waffle serve) is running. They also run under a more restricted profile than your interactive chat, because nobody is watching them.

What she cannot do

• Act without being asked. She responds to your messages and to schedules you created. She does not decide on her own to go and do something.
• Reach the internet from a sandbox unless you allowed specific hosts.
• Serve anyone but you. Someone else messaging her gets a pairing code and nothing more.
• Remember what you deleted. waffle forget <query> previews matches and removes the ones you confirm.

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Nerd corner: How it fits together — the tool registry, the three memory layers, and how scheduled work is isolated.