Help Assistant

The Help Assistant is a documentation-aware chat agent built into the terminal UI. It is seeded with the Praxis documentation and answers natural-language questions about how to use Praxis — features, configuration, workflows, and concepts — without leaving the app.

It is deliberately separate from the Orchestrator: the Orchestrator is an operator that plans and executes campaigns by driving nodes and agents, whereas the Help Assistant is a read-only guide. It can only search the documentation bundled with Praxis and never takes actions on your behalf.

Opening the assistant

Press Ctrl+H from any window to summon the Help Assistant overlay. Press Ctrl+H again, or Esc, to dismiss it. Because the overlay floats above the current window, you can ask a question and return to exactly what you were doing. See Terminal UI for the complete shortcut list.

Every question is sent to the model assigned to the Documentation Helper. The model decides whether the available conversation and screen context are enough to answer directly or whether it should search and read the bundled documentation. The overlay shows a neutral thinking indicator while the model is deciding; when it calls a documentation tool, it instead shows a documentation-specific divider and spinner before the final answer. Tool-turn narration is limited to the first acknowledgement, so a multi-step lookup has a helpful initial response without several repeated partial replies. The terminal renders the common Markdown used in answers: headings, bullet lists, bold text, inline code, block quotes, and fenced code blocks. Closing the overlay while a response is streaming cancels it, so nothing keeps running in the background.

Screen context

When you open the assistant, it captures a short, structured description of the window you were looking at (for example, "the Nodes window, 3 nodes connected") and includes it with your question so answers can be specific to what is on screen. The footer shows the current context source and whether it is included; Ctrl+T toggles it off for the next question.

Only low-sensitivity, structural context is ever included — which window you are on and safe counts. Sensitive data such as session output, intercepted request and response bodies, captured credentials, and log rows is never collected or sent to the model provider.

Configuration

The assistant uses the model assigned to the Documentation Helper feature in Settings (Ctrl+S) → LLM. If no model is assigned, it falls back to the model configured for the Orchestrator, so it works out of the box once any conversational model is configured.

Relevant service configuration keys:

The documentation corpus is embedded into the service at build time, so the assistant's answers reflect the documentation shipped with your Praxis version and require no network access to the docs site.