Ask an aside

Ask a side question about a session without touching it. An aside is a copy of the session that knows everything up to now. It answers in a floating popup while the session stays usable behind it.

How to use

1. In a session, type /btw and your question in the prompt box, then press Enter. Or run Ask aside in the command palette. While a permission or question panel replaces the prompt box, Ask aside shows a one-line input.
2. The popup opens at once and starts to answer. It has its own timeline, a prompt box for follow-ups, and its own permission and question panels.
3. Drag the popup by its header, resize it by its corner, or click Minimize aside to fold it into a chip at the bottom right.
4. Close aside deletes the aside.
5. Keep as session turns it into a normal session: it gets a title in the sidebar and opens as a tab, and the popup closes.

Good to know

• It works while Claude runs a turn. The turn goes on undisturbed. The aside sees the session up to the last complete reply, not what Claude is writing now. A session with no reply yet cannot be asked.
• An aside is read-only: Edit, Write and NotebookEdit are off, and it starts no workers. Other tools run in the default mode, so Bash and others ask. Changing its permission mode lifts the read-only limit.
• Its requests show in its popup only, never in the session's panels. Focus lists them as "Aside: title"; Open brings the popup forward.
• Several popups can be open. A popup shows only while its session's tab shows. Open popups are not restored after a page reload.
• On a phone the popup fills the screen.
• /btw and /clear do not work inside an aside. Images in the question are not sent.
• An aside that is not kept is not listed and is deleted when it is not needed any more, also after a browser close or a restart, so it does not show in claude --resume.