How Does the AI Agent in Rideful Work?

Rideful has an AI agent built into the app — a composer on your dashboard and a chat panel in the editor. Describe what you want and it plans, builds and checks the deck, then edits the slide you point at rather than rebuilding everything.

It is one agent you meet in two places. On the dashboard it settles what a new deck is born with and hands the build over; inside a deck it does the work and keeps working with you. This page is what you see while it runs, and what you can do to it.

Two Places You'll Meet It

On the dashboard

A composer sits above your deck grid at rideful.io/slides, on Home and inside any folder. Describe the deck you want and it settles only what a deck cannot be created without: it derives the name from your request, puts the deck in the folder you're in, and uses 16:9 unless you say otherwise. The one thing it asks about — and only if you have any — is which of your own brand templates to build on. It designs nothing and holds no slide tools.

It writes what you agreed to brief.md, creates the deck, and opens it with the build already running. If you leave a conversation half-answered, it's still there when you come back the same day.

In the deck

The chat panel on the right of the editor picks up from that brief and starts building. It's also where every later change goes: describe what you want different and it changes that.

The dashboard composer is desktop only. The deck page has no chat panel on mobile, so a handoff would land somewhere that can't show the run.

The Chat Panel

Open by default, on the right of the editor. Drag its left edge to resize it — anywhere between 320 and 600 pixels, and it remembers the width. The × in the header closes it; a chat button brings it back.

The composer reads Ask anything…. Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a line, Esc clears what you typed. Below it the panel shows what the agent can see: the slide you're on, and how many elements you have selected. That context goes with your message, so “make this bigger” means the thing you selected.

The Plan

Anything bigger than a one-line change starts with a plan. It appears above the composer as Agent Plan with a completed-of-total count, each step pending, in progress, or completed and struck through. It's a read-out, not a form — there is nothing on it to approve, and it hides itself a couple of seconds after the last step finishes.

The agent does wait for a go-ahead before it builds a whole deck. Say yes, or say what you want different first.

The Subagents

The agent delegates the work. Each delegation is a collapsed card in the transcript with an elapsed time and a summary of what it called; open it to read the whole thing.

• Designer — puts elements on a slide: text, shapes, lines and charts, styled to the palette and fonts the plan settled. This is the one whose changes stop for your approval.
• Evaluator — read-only. It screenshots a slide and reports what's wrong with it, and on a deck of more than one slide it makes a final pass across all of them together, looking for titles that drifted, colors that stopped matching, margins that moved.
• Researcher — searches the web when the deck needs facts, then writes a report to research.md with numbered citations and a sources list. Its card carries a Research Report button.

Approvals

Before the designer changes anything on a slide, the run stops and asks. The card says what it wants to do, and Show details reveals the exact call. Three buttons: Approve, Reject, and Auto-approve, which approves this and every remaining call in the run. Enter approves, Esc rejects, Shift+Enter auto-approves. While a card is waiting the composer is disabled and reads Approve or reject pending tools… — that's the run waiting for you, not a hang.

To stop being asked, turn on Auto-approve tools in the composer's + menu. It's a browser setting rather than a deck one, so it stays on for every deck until you turn it off; clicking Auto-approve on a card turns it on too.

Files and Reasoning

What the agent writes shows up as a narrow rail of file icons beside the transcript — brief.md from the dashboard, research.md from the researcher. Click one to read it. The plan is not one of these files; it lives in the Agent Plan strip.

Where the model reasons before it answers, that reasoning is folded into a collapsed Reasoning block. Open it to see how it got there.

Stopping a Run, and Runs That Outlive the Tab

Stop generating — the square button where Send was — ends the run. It changes to Stopping… and finishes the step already in flight before it halts, so nothing is left half-written.

You don't have to sit and watch. The run continues on the server after you close the tab, and the panel rejoins it when you reopen the deck. Two things follow from that:

• A run is already in progress… in the composer means another tab or device is holding this deck's run. Finish or stop it there. A run whose browser died stops blocking on its own after about 16 minutes.
• If a banner says the run hit its time limit, everything it finished is saved and Continue where it left off picks it back up. Run length is capped while Rideful is in early access.

History, Clearing the Chat, and the Daily Limit

Chat history is per deck. Opening another deck opens its own conversation, and clearing one leaves the others alone. Clear chat in the + menu starts a fresh conversation — your slides are untouched, and the old messages are kept, they just stop being shown.

There is a daily allowance. Check usage in the same menu shows how much of today's you have spent before you reach it; if you do reach it the composer is disabled and a banner gives the reset time.

Undoing What the Agent Did

Agent edits go on the same undo stack as your own, so Cmd/Ctrl+Z undoes them exactly the way it undoes something you did by hand, and redo works the same. Nothing the agent does is outside your reach.

What It Can't Do

• Add images. Paste one with Cmd/Ctrl+V, drag the file onto the slide, or use Insert Image in the toolbar — or add one from a public URL over MCP. Once an image is on the slide the agent will move, resize, layer, crop and alt-text it like any other element. See Add Images.
• Design from the dashboard. The composer above your decks only creates the deck. How many slides, the narrative, the visual style — all of that is settled in the deck, by the agent in the chat panel.

Related

• Create with AI — What to say to get the deck you want
• Troubleshooting — A stuck approval, the daily limit, a run that seems to have stopped
• Add Images — The one thing the agent can't add for you
• Agent Workflow — The workflow an agent follows, over MCP or in the app