Asking the assistant

Signed in, there is an Assistant button in the top bar of every page, beside your account menu (on a phone, a small button at the bottom right). It opens the assistant: a chat panel that hangs down from the bar that answers from these documentation pages and, when you have a project open in either studio, can look at that project and tell you what it sees. It does not change anything, it cannot see anybody else's work, and it costs no credits.

What it is good at

• The question you were about to search for. Type it the way you would say it — "why does my layer 3 have a floating piece", "what does thin_bridge mean", "which file do I open in LightBurn". The answer ends with Sources, the pages it drew on, so you can read further.
• Your open project. With a project or scene open, the panel names it at the top. Ask "what is wrong with my project" or "how many separate pieces are on layer 4" and it reads the project's settings, its layer measurements and its validation report — the same numbers the studio shows — and explains them. In a Landscape scene it reads each sheet as well: what it keeps, the small separate pieces Min feature size dropped from it and how big they were, and which settings it was cut with, so “why did the teeth disappear?” gets an answer with the numbers. When the numbers genuinely need a look, it can ask for the studio's own preview picture of the stack.
• A setting you do not understand. Ask what a control does and it explains the setting in the words of these pages, with the value your project is using.
• A photograph of what came off the cutter. Paste a screenshot straight into the message box (Ctrl+V, or ⌘V on a Mac), drop an image file onto the panel, or use Attach a screenshot beside the message box. It is looked at once, for that answer, and not kept.

• A bug. If, after looking at your project, it concludes that the software has done something other than what these pages say it does — a download with fewer layers than were built, a control that does nothing, an error you did not cause — it files a bug report with the people who run the studio, on the spot. The report carries its description of the problem together with your project file, your cut files if they have been built, the conversation and any screenshot you pasted, so there is nothing for you to send. It tells you when it has done that, and it will not promise a date.

Use the starter prompts in an empty conversation to see the shape of question it does well with.

What it will not do

• Change your project. It tells you which control to move and what to set it to; you make the change in the studio. Nothing in a conversation ever writes to a project.
• See anyone else's work. It can only read projects that belong to your account, and only the one attached to the conversation unless you ask it to switch to another of yours.
• Do anything with money. It cannot buy credits, change your plan or see your card. Ask it about credits and it will explain the rules; the buttons are on the pricing and account pages.
• Answer from outside these pages. If the documentation does not cover something, it says so rather than guessing. That is deliberate — a confident wrong answer about a cut sheet costs you a board — so when it cannot help, write to hello@mandalalayers.com.

Conversations

Each conversation is kept with your account, so you can close the panel, come back tomorrow and carry on where you left off. History lists them; New starts another; delete beside a conversation asks once, then deletes it for good, with any thumbs up or down you gave in it - a bug report it already filed is an email to us, and stays. A long conversation is summarised in the background so the assistant remembers what was agreed without re-reading every message.

Under each answer, a thumbs up or down tells us whether it helped. A thumbs down asks why — wrong, misunderstood the project, too vague, did not answer — and that is what we read to improve these pages. Retry asks the question again in place of the latest answer; Stop halts an answer part-way and keeps what was said so far.

The allowance

The assistant answers once your email address is confirmed — the link we email when you sign up. Until then it says so instead of answering, the footer shows no count of messages left, and Send it again on your account page sends a fresh link.

Every account gets a number of messages a month, larger on the paid plan, and a smaller number a day so a runaway tab cannot spend the month in an afternoon. The panel's footer shows how many are left. Every question counts once. The first Retry of a question is free; retrying the same question again counts as a message, like asking a new one. Deleting a conversation does not give its messages back.

Some answers take much more work than others: a diagnosis that reads a whole project sheet by sheet, or a question with a screenshot, uses more of the month than a quick question about a setting. Somebody who asks almost nothing but those can reach the month's limit before the count does — the footer then reads 0 left, the same as when the count runs out.

Messages are not credits: they are separate from everything on the pricing page and nothing you do in the assistant spends a credit. When the allowance runs out the panel says so and the documentation is still here.

Privacy

The question you type, the documentation passages that match it and the facts about your project that the assistant reads - and any screenshot you paste, or a preview picture of your layers when it asks for one - are sent to Anthropic, whose Claude models write the answer. The text of your question is also sent to OpenAI, which turns it into the numbers the assistant searches these pages with; nothing else about the conversation goes there. Your password, your email address and your card details are not part of that, and your project files never become part of what the assistant knows for anybody else — it learns nothing from one customer that it could repeat to another. The people who run this studio can read conversations, and do, to find the questions these pages should have answered. A bug report the assistant files is an email to them and to nobody else, and it carries the same files you could download yourself. Your conversations are kept until you delete them, or until your account is deleted; the privacy page has the rest.

Questions