Projects and threads
How Radian organizes repositories, conversations, runtime state, and future project environments.
Projects and threads are the main organizational units in Radian.
Projects today
A project points Radian at a working directory and groups the threads that operate there. Projects can be added, renamed, pinned, reordered, and removed. Those interactions update immediately while the desktop reconciles them with durable state.
Use a project for a repository or a workspace whose files, shell state, and agent conversations belong together.
Threads today
A thread is one line of work inside a project. It owns the visible conversation and binds to the live agent session that performs the task. Threads can retain drafts, attachments, queued messages, shell history, and runtime observations across application restarts.
Branching lets you explore a different approach without flattening both attempts into the same transcript.
Where projects are heading
The following direction is planned, not a claim about the current beta:
- A lightweight chat will be promotable into a named project without losing its history.
- A project will declare its agent, model policy, MCP servers, skills, permissions, and reusable workflows.
- Teams will be able to distribute versioned project environments rather than asking every developer to repeat the same setup.
- Environment updates should be reviewable, reversible, and usable from local, team-hosted, self-hosted, or Radian-managed execution targets.
- Projects will become the unit for sharing, scheduling, deployment, and governance; threads will remain the unit for exploration and iteration.
The goal is a porous boundary: a conversation can gain structure as it becomes important, and a structured project can still open as a fresh conversational session when someone needs to investigate or debug.