Using GATE
Sharing your bot with others
Sometimes the person who needs your bot isn't you. Your accountant needs to ask it a question. A client wants a quick answer without waiting on you to relay it. A cofounder wants to watch it log into a site on your behalf. None of them need — or should get — a GATE account. Two features cover this: guest channels, a dedicated chat link for an outsider, and the bot's browser, which someone can watch (and even steer) over a shared-screen link.
Inviting a guest to chat
Ask your bot to open a channel for the person you want to include — "open a guest channel for our accountant, call it 'Accounting Q3'". Your bot hands back two things: a link and a two-word passphrase. Send both to your guest however you'd normally reach them — email, text, whatever.
Your guest opens the link, types in the passphrase, and starts chatting — no GATE account, no sign-up. If you've opened the channel for a group rather than one person, each new arrival is asked to pick a display name the first time they show up, so everyone in the room can tell who said what; coming back later with the same name picks up where they left off.
Guest input is treated as untrusted
Nothing a guest types is ever trusted the way your own messages are. Your bot keeps guest messages clearly boxed off as external, unverified content — which makes it much harder for a guest (or anyone who guesses their way past the passphrase) to slip in something that reads like an instruction and have your bot act on it. This is what makes it reasonable to hand the link to someone you don't fully vet, or to leave a channel open for a while.
What you see
Every message your guest sends — and everything your bot replies — shows up in your own chat too, styled so you can tell it's a channel conversation at a glance. You're not locked out of it: type in that same conversation and your words land in the guest's window as a message from you, so you can jump in, correct the bot, or just say hello.
Closing and reopening
A channel stays open until you close it — there's no automatic expiry, so a channel you opened months ago for a repeat guest is still exactly where you left it. Ask your bot to close one when you're done with it; the guest is disconnected immediately and the link stops working. Change your mind later and ask your bot to reopen it — the same link and passphrase come back to life, and anyone who'd already joined a shared channel doesn't have to re-introduce themselves.
If you ever lose the passphrase, there's no way to look it up again — your bot shows it to you once, when the channel is created. Just ask for a fresh channel instead.
Watching your bot's browser
Some tasks need a real browser — signing into a site that wants two-factor confirmation, for instance. When your bot needs you for that, ask it to share its browser (or it may offer on its own): a small card shows up right in your chat with a live preview and an Open button.
Click Open and a real, live view of your bot's browser opens — you can watch it work, and you can click and type in it yourself, exactly as if it were your own screen. That's how the 2FA handoff works in practice: your bot gets to a login screen, hands you the wheel through this link, you approve the sign-in, and your bot picks back up once you're done.
The link is yours alone — only someone who can already access that bot can open it — and it expires after a short while, so an old card sitting in your scrollback from weeks ago won't quietly let anyone in.
Ask: "share your browser so I can help you log in."