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When you open a Worker in the Traversal web app, you can expect a common set of features regardless of the use case. Reach a Worker from the Workers console, or from the link it posts in the channel it’s working in.

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Scratchpad

The scratchpad is the Worker’s up-to-date synthesis of its channel. It is designed to help engineers easily catch up on key context, without having to read dozens or hundreds of Slack threads. For an Incident Worker, that’s a synthesis of the incident: current impact, the conclusions so far, mitigation status, remaining risk, and the evidence behind each. It keeps evolving until it becomes the post-mortem. For an Alert Worker, it’s a synthesis of the channel: what needs action now, what’s recurring and why, known causes and prior fixes, and where the alerts themselves are worth improving. The Worker keeps its scratchpad current as it works and tells you when there’s an update — click Refresh to pull it in. Everything in it carries citations you can check, and you can highlight any line to ask about it in private chat without touching the channel.

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Activity feed

The activity feed is everything the Worker is seeing and doing. For a Slack or Microsoft Teams Worker, that means every message arriving in the channel alongside the tool calls the Worker makes as it investigates — a mirrored, searchable view of the channel. Slack and Teams feeds are read-only here; use View in Slack or View in Teams to reply at the source. For a shared web Worker, the feed is also where you talk to it.

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Private chat

A personal conversation with the Worker, using the same channel context and evidence, that never appears in the shared channel. Use it to catch up after joining an incident late, test a theory, work through alerts on call, or ask for a summary aimed at your role — without adding a word of noise for the people responding. Select any text in the scratchpad and pull it straight into the chat as context, so you can ask “what’s the current state here, and what should I be watching?” about one specific line rather than re-explaining it.

Select a line from the scratchpad, drop it into private chat, and ask the Worker to expand on it — none of which the response channel ever sees.

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Schedules

A schedule sends a Worker back to a task at a specific time or on a recurring cadence, waking it even when it’s otherwise dormant. It runs with the Worker’s full channel context, so a handoff covers what actually happened and what’s still open — not a list of subject lines. Ask for one in plain English, in the channel or in private chat:
The Worker can create, list, update, and delete its own schedules — just ask. If a time or timezone is ambiguous it asks rather than guessing. Or open Schedules from the Worker’s detail view to see what’s queued and what’s already run, edit or delete anything active, and create a schedule without going through chat — a one-time date and time, or a recurring cadence in minutes, hours, or days. Each schedule shows who created it, so a shared Worker’s queue stays legible to the team.

Creating a schedule in the web app: describe the task in plain language, then set it to run once or on a recurring cadence — here, every day at 9:00 AM.

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Custom instructions

Custom instructions are how you tailor the way a Worker behaves. If you want to adjust its default behavior — where it looks first, what it prioritizes, when it engages, who it notifies, how it formats what it writes — this is how. A Worker works without them. Add them when you have a standing preference you’d otherwise repeat. Set them in three places:
Use custom instructions for durable behavior, a schedule for work that should happen later, and a plain message for something you want now.
See Customization for how Worker instructions relate to personal and channel-level instructions.

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Stop a Worker

Stopping a Worker halts new proactive work and clears its active schedules. Its activity and scratchpad stay available to read. Use Edit Worker in the web app, or the stop control on the Worker’s arrival message in the channel. Traversal stays available in the channel either way — mention @Traversal whenever you have a question and it answers. Stopping only ends the acting-on-its-own part.