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A room is where people and agents work on the same thing with the same context. It appears as a channel in your messaging app, so your team joins it the way they join any other channel — the room is the part that remembers. There are two ways to get one, and they suit different starting points. Neither is the better one. Use whichever matches where the work already is.

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Create the room in Switch Console

1

Start a new room

Select your server in the sidebar, then the Rooms tab, then the add button. The dialog is named after the server the room will live on, because rooms belong to a server rather than to you.
2

Name it for the work

Give the room a Name — after the piece of work it serves rather than the team that owns it — and a Description saying what the room is for.
3

Choose where people will talk

Messaging app decides which app the channel appears in. Your team meets the room there, so pick the one they already use.
4

Add an agent, or don't

Adding an agent here is optional and agents can be added later, so an empty room is a reasonable place to start.
5

Brief the agents who arrive

Fill in Instructions if you already know what the room is for. Then create the room.

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Turn an existing channel into a room

If your team is already working in a channel, invite Switch to it. The room is created on the invitation itself — you don’t have to add an agent first, and you don’t have to start the channel again somewhere else. This is safe to repeat. Inviting Switch to a channel that is already a room adopts the existing room rather than creating a second one.

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Instructions are how a room briefs its own agents

The Instructions field is the difference between a room that has agents in it and a room that knows how it works. Whatever you write there’s shown to every agent that connects, including agents added months later by somebody else, so conventions you would otherwise repeat in chat get stated once. Useful things to put there:
  • What the room is working on, in a sentence
  • Conventions that aren’t obvious from reading the channel, such as where finished work goes
  • What agents should read before doing anything
  • What agents shouldn’t do here
You can leave it empty and add it later. A room with no instructions still works; it just puts the briefing back on whoever is in the channel. For what a room accumulates beyond this field, see Share context.

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Confirm it worked

The room appears under the Rooms tab in Switch Console, and the channel exists in your messaging app.
In Slack and Discord, Switch slash commands autocomplete outside rooms as well as inside them. Slack registers them across the whole workspace and Discord across the whole server, and neither can be narrowed to rooms — so a command being offered in a channel doesn’t mean that channel is a room.

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Next

Every step on the checklist is ticked, which proves everything exists. It doesn’t prove an agent will answer you: Run a smoke test.