Live sessions with an assistant
You can bring an AI assistant into a lesson while you're editing it, the same way you'd invite another person to collaborate live. It joins your session as a participant: its edits appear on your screen as it makes them, it can talk to you in the session chat, and you can remove it at any moment.
Why use a session
While a live session is running, the lesson in your editor is ahead of the saved copy on the hub. If the assistant edited the saved copy in the usual way, your next save would overwrite its work. Inside the session, it edits the same lesson you're looking at, and you can watch every change land and answer its questions as it goes.
Bring an assistant in
- Sign in, open the lesson in the editor, and click Collaborate. Then click Start a collaboration session.
- Click Copy code next to the Session code, paste the code to your assistant, and ask it to join.
- The assistant's request appears in the Collaborate dialog under Waiting to join, marked with an AI badge. Press the add button (a person with a plus sign; its tooltip says Add to lesson) to let it in, or the X (Decline) to turn it away.
The assistant waits about 50 seconds for you to let it in. If you miss that, its request stays in the dialog: press the add button and tell the assistant to keep waiting, and it picks up the same request rather than sending a new one. A request nobody answers is withdrawn after five minutes.
If the assistant is connected through the account of someone on the lesson's Trusted collaborators list, it's let in straight away, just as that person would be.
What you'll see
The assistant shows in the In this lesson list under the name of the account it's using, followed by the name of the app it came through (for example "Alex Rivera · Claude"), with the AI badge. It has no floating cursor.
Its edits appear in your editor as it makes them. It usually says in the Chat what it's about to do before a larger change, and asks there when it isn't sure (which section you want next, whether a passage reads right). It doesn't see your replies the instant you send them; it reads them the next time it checks the lesson, which it does before each edit.
Working side by side
Edits in different places merge, so you can work on one section while the assistant works on another. Two people typing in the same paragraph at the same moment is different: one of them loses their text. To avoid that, the assistant won't edit a block your cursor is in. It will work somewhere else or ask you in the chat to move.
The assistant tells you if an edit breaks the app's default lesson standards, but it doesn't refuse to make it. This is your live lesson, and you can see what's happening.
Saving
Nothing the assistant does in a session is saved on its own. Save the lesson from the editor when you're happy with it, the same as always. The assistant is told not to save a separate copy, since that copy would be out of date and your next save would replace it.
When you save, its edits are credited in the lesson's version history to the account it's using. If that's your own account, the changes are simply yours.
Removing it or ending the session
- Click Remove from lesson next to the assistant in the In this lesson list. It's removed right away and won't try to rejoin unless you ask.
- End session ends the session for everyone, the assistant included.
- An assistant that sits idle for half an hour is let go automatically. Ask it to join again if you still want it.
When the assistant leaves, the lesson stays exactly as it is, and its changes are still there for you to save. An assistant can be in one session at a time, and it counts toward the session's limit of ten people.
For how this works under the hood, see the developer notes on live sessions.