Guided, Companion, and Go: Three Ways to Work With a Capsule

When you open a capsule in the Capxule workspace, you are not locked into one way of using it. The same knowledge can be experienced as a step-by-step journey, a quiet everyday helper, or a full working environment with files and team sharing. These are the three workspace modes: guided, companion, and go. You switch between them live from a switcher in the top bar, and the capsule underneath stays exactly the same. What changes is how much structure the workspace gives you.

Understanding the three modes is the fastest way to get real value out of a capsule, because each one is built for a different moment in your relationship with the topic.

Guided: learn the topic as a journey

Guided mode is for when the topic is new to you and you want to be led through it rather than dropped into a blank chat box. Instead of guessing what to ask, you are offered suggested prompt pills, an ordered table of contents, and a sense of progress as you move through the material.

The experience is a genuine conversation. A short statement sets up an idea, you pick a prompt that interests you, and the assistant answers from the capsule's grounded knowledge. Then the next set of prompts appears, teasing the threads you have not pulled yet. You are never staring at an empty input wondering what this capsule even knows.

Use guided mode when you want to:

1. Understand a topic you have never explored before, at your own pace.
2. See the shape of what a capsule covers without reading a wall of text.
3. Follow a coherent path instead of a scatter of disconnected questions.

Because the journey remembers where you have been, it keeps steering you toward the parts you have not seen yet. When you finish exploring, the capsule naturally graduates into a calmer relationship, which is where companion mode comes in. If the idea of a topic-as-journey is new to you, our piece on what an AI Context Capsule is sets the foundation.

Companion: the calm everyday helper

Once you have explored a topic, you rarely want to be walked through it again. You want a helper that already knows the context and stays out of the way until you need it. That is companion mode.

Companion mode drops the journey chrome, the progress bar, the table of contents, the step-by-step pills, and replaces it with a quieter surface: a proactive check-in line and one to three action cards suggesting the next useful thing you might do. It feels less like a lesson and more like an assistant who has been briefed on the topic and is ready to work alongside you day to day.

This is the mode for ongoing use. A capsule that holds your team's positioning, a personal decision you are living with, or a project's accumulated knowledge is most useful as a companion you return to, not a course you retake. Companion mode also keeps the add-to-capsule button available, so anything valuable that surfaces in conversation can be saved back into the capsule with one click. We explain that flow in capturing knowledge as you chat.

Go: the full workspace

Go mode is the complete working environment. It is what you use when you are not just consuming a capsule but building and running it. In go mode you get:

• File attachments. Upload documents and let the capsule extract and use their content.
• Knowledge editing. Add, update, and remove the knowledge a capsule holds.
• Team sharing. Give teammates viewer or editor access, covered in sharing a capsule with your team.
• Group chat. Work in the capsule alongside colleagues instead of alone.

Go is the home base for owners and editors. If guided is for learning and companion is for living with a topic, go is for shaping it. Most capsules you own will spend real time in go mode as you feed them documents, refine their knowledge, and decide who else gets access.

Switching live, without losing your place

The important thing is that these are not three separate products. They are three views of one capsule, and you move between them instantly using the top-bar switcher. Start a topic in guided mode to learn it, drop into go mode to add a document you just found, then settle into companion mode for daily use. Your conversation and your place in the journey carry across the switch. Nothing resets.

Not every mode is available on every capsule, and that is by design. Guided mode appears when a capsule has a structured journey built for it. Companion mode becomes available once a capsule is set up as a companion and you have explored it. Go mode is always there for the full workspace. The switcher only shows you the modes that make sense for the capsule in front of you.

Which mode should you start in?

A simple rule of thumb:

1. New to the topic? Start in guided mode and let the journey lead.
2. Already know it and using it daily? Live in companion mode.
3. Building, editing, or sharing the capsule? Work in go mode.

You will likely use all three over a capsule's life, often in the same week. The point of Capxule is that the knowledge is captured once and stays consistent no matter which way you choose to work with it, which is the whole reason a capsule beats re-explaining yourself to a generic chatbot every time. We make that broader case in why teams need shared AI context.

To see capsules in action across these modes, browse our examples, check the pricing to start building your own, or explore the marketplace at capxulehub.com to find capsules others have already packaged.