Tips on talking to Neo

Neo is workflow based rather than an agentic chat. Neo is designed to respond to you in as deterministic and secure a way as possible. It doesn’t act as an agent, instead it uses optimised workflows. Don’t try to give complicated chains of instructions, or get Neo to go off and do sequences of work - instead directly ask for what you want.

Neo is in your tools, so you can just press the button in the tool. While you can ask Neo to merge its PRs, or delete a branch (see Git operations), a key advantage of Neo is that it works in your normal tools. Lots of things can be done with a button press in the tool (like GitLab or Jira or Notion).

Tickets need to be written as tickets, not prompts. Trying to mix with agentic instructions can confuse Neo as it is told it is seeing a ticket in a ticket system. Sometimes it may think additional chat-like instructions are code change instructions. See Assign a ticket.

Reverting Neo’s work is best done positively. You can ask Neo to revert one or more commits (see Git operations). However, it usually works best to proactively ask Neo to code the changes you want to fix the PR. For example, “Put back all of the changes in this file”, “Make it so this PR only changes this file, get rid of other changes”. That way, you can describe exactly what you want to keep or not.

Waiting for Neo in your browser isn’t the best use of time. We recommend finding a workflow where Neo do things in the background. For example, assign tickets to Neo as soon as they’re ready in refinement sessions so the PR is ready when a developer gets to the ticket. Leave several comments on a PR all at once, and come back to it later when it has responded to them all. It usually isn’t worth it if you get into a cycle of leaving a comment, waiting for Neo immediately, then leaving another comment - instead make your own commits to the PR. See Workflows for coding with Neo.

Talking to Neo in non-English languages is good. Generally right now Neo will respond in English, however you can use any human language to speak to Neo.