watchfire chat

Start an interactive chat session with the coding agent.

Usage

watchfire chat

Description

watchfire chat opens a terminal-attached agent session for free-form conversation. The agent has full access to your project directory but is not assigned a specific task — it runs in the project root rather than an isolated worktree.

This is useful for exploring your codebase, asking questions, making quick edits, or prototyping changes without creating a formal task.

Flags

Flag	Description
--sandbox <backend>	Override the sandbox backend. Valid values: auto, seatbelt, landlock, bubblewrap, none.
--no-sandbox	Shorthand for --sandbox none — disables sandboxing entirely.

Sandbox priority: CLI flag → project setting (project.yaml) → global default (settings.yaml).

Agent Selection

Chat sessions use the project's default agent, falling back to the global default and finally to claude-code. To chat with a different backend, change project.default_agent in project settings or the global default in Watchfire settings before launching.

See Supported Agents for the available backends.

Notes

• The agent runs in the project root directory (not a worktree)
• No task context is injected — the agent operates in free-form mode
• The daemon starts automatically if it's not already running
• watchfire run (with no arguments) provides equivalent functionality

Examples

# Start a chat session
watchfire chat

# Equivalent using the run command
watchfire run