Editing a config file without you pasting it into chat
Point the employee at a config path and ask for a specific change. It reads the file, makes the edit, and writes it back, no copy-pasting file contents into the conversation first.
Let Your Employee Work with Local Files
Connect the Desktop Companion app and your employee can read, write, list, and search files on your own computer, scoped to your home directory. Ask it to open a config, tidy a folder, or find every CSV in a project, and it works the files directly instead of asking you to paste their contents into chat.
Connect the Desktop Companion app and your employee can read, write, list, and search files on your own computer, scoped to your home directory. Ask it to open a config, tidy a folder, or find every CSV in a project, and it works the files directly instead of asking you to paste their contents into chat.
Under the hood this is one of five actions the same file manager exposes: list a directory, read a file, write a file (create or overwrite), check a file's info, or search by filename. Every path is resolved and checked against your home directory before anything happens, so a request that tries to climb out with ../.. or follow a symlink outside your home is rejected before it touches disk.
The limit that actually matters day to day: this reads and writes text, not arbitrary binaries, and it finds files by name, not by what's inside them. Search matches filenames containing your query, case-insensitive, up to 3 folders deep by default and 100 results, it will not grep the contents of every file in a project the way a codebase-aware tool would. That trade keeps it fast and predictable; for content search across a repo, pair it with a skill built for that instead of expecting this one action to do both jobs.
What Each Action Actually Does
List directory returns names, whether each entry is a file or folder, and file size, capped at 200 entries per call and sorted folders-first then alphabetically. Hidden files and folders (anything starting with a dot) are skipped unless you ask to show them. Read file returns the full text content of one file. Write file creates or overwrites a file, or appends to it if you ask, and creates any missing parent folders along the way. File info checks whether something exists and its size and type without reading the whole thing, useful before deciding whether a file is even worth opening.
Search walks folders under a starting path looking for filenames that contain your query text, skipping hidden folders as it goes. It is a name finder, not a content finder: it will not tell you which files mention a particular string inside them.
Size Limits and What Happens at the Edge
Reads and writes are both capped at 10MB per file. A file over that comes back as an error telling you to check its size first rather than silently truncating it, so nothing gets read or written half-complete. Directory listings stop at 200 entries and searches stop at 100 results; past that, the response tells you it was truncated so you know to narrow the folder or the query rather than assuming you saw everything.
Nothing here silently fails quiet. If a path doesn't exist, sits outside your home directory, or a file is too large, the employee gets a specific error back and can tell you what went wrong and what to try instead, not a blank result.
How This Differs From the Other Desktop Capabilities
This is one of three things the Desktop Companion unlocks, alongside full app control (mouse and keyboard in apps like Figma or Excel) and terminal command execution. They share the same connection and the same plan gate, but they're separate switches: turning on file access for an employee doesn't turn on terminal commands or app control, and each shows up as its own toggle. If a task needs to run a shell command rather than just touch a file, that's the terminal capability, not this one.
It's also distinct from the file uploads you attach directly in chat and from the Drive tab, both of which live in the cloud on our storage. This capability only ever touches files that are already on your own machine, through the companion app, and it never uploads them anywhere unless the employee's task explicitly does that as a separate step.
How It Works
Read, write, and search under your home directory through the companion app.
With the companion app installed, the employee can list, read, write, and search files anywhere under your home directory. You describe the outcome, it works through the files, and the boundary is enforced mechanically: nothing outside home is reachable.
Operations are visible in the work record, and the same safety layer that hard-blocks destructive terminal patterns stands behind every file operation, so cleanup jobs cannot become catastrophes.
Use Cases
Tidying a downloads or project folder
Ask it to list what's in a folder and reorganize by type or date. It reads the directory listing (up to 200 entries at a time) and moves or renames files by writing them to new paths.
Finding every file of a certain kind in a project
Ask it to find every CSV, or every file with 'invoice' in the name, under a given folder. Search matches on filename, so this works best when the files are named meaningfully, not when you need to search what's written inside them.
Checking a file before committing to open it
For a file you're not sure about, the employee can check its size and type first with file info, then decide whether it's small enough to read in full or worth flagging to you instead.
Comparison
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| File cleanup waits for a free weekend. | File cleanup is a sentence you type. |
| Search means remembering filenames. | Search reads content, not just names. |
| Scripts for batch renames and moves. | Plain-language instructions, executed directly. |
| Full disk access or nothing. | Bounded to home, enforced by the companion. |
FAQ
Which folders can it actually reach?
Only your home directory and its subfolders. Every path is resolved and checked before the operation runs, and anything that resolves outside your home, including via a symlink or a ../ traversal, is rejected.
Is there a file size limit?
Yes, 10MB for both reading and writing a single file. A larger file returns an error telling you to check its size first rather than reading or writing part of it.
Does search look inside file contents?
No. Search matches filenames containing your query text, case-insensitive, up to 100 results and 3 folders deep by default. It does not search what's written inside files.
Do I need to approve every file operation?
Not by default. File access ships without a per-action approval gate so the employee can work without interrupting you constantly; you can turn on an approval step for this tool per employee if you want to review actions first.
What plan do I need, and do I have to turn it on?
It requires the Founder plan or higher, plus the free Desktop Companion app paired to your machine. It's off by default per employee even once you're on a qualifying plan; you enable it deliberately for the employees that need it.
Where Let Your Employee Work with Local Files fits
Let Your Employee Work with Local Files is part of Where their work lives.
Your AI agents manage their own workspace. Scheduled tasks run daily, weekly, or on custom cron cadences. A built-in kanban board tracks what is in progress. Every document lands in a personal Drive. A daily work journal logs decisions, outcomes, and next steps automatically.
- Where their work lives: Where your employees organize their work.
Read the guide
More in Workspace
- Move a Team Member to the Bench: Every workspace has one Bench: a holding area for employees who are not currently on a working team. Remove someone from a team, or delete the team itself, and they land back on the Bench automatically, fully intact and ready to be reassigned. Nothing about them is deleted; only their team membership changes.
- Task Board: A kanban board that tracks what every AI employee is working on, in Backlog, To Do, In Progress, and Done columns. Employees create their own task cards when they do real work, and you can create cards to assign work directly. View it per employee, per team, or company-wide, and it updates live as work moves.
- Set Your Employee's Working Hours: Set how often each employee checks its board and acts on its own, from every 5 minutes up to monthly, without you asking each time. New hires start with a default hourly check-in that you can tighten, stretch, or turn into a specific daily time. The employee pauses itself automatically when there is nothing to do, it is onboarding, or credits run out, and picks back up on its own once that clears.
- Work Journal: Every employee keeps a dated journal of what it did, decided, and got stuck on, written as it works, not after the fact. Open it from the employee's, team's, or organization's Drive tab to see a day's entries without reading the chat transcript. Entries carry a category (task completed, observation, decision, blocker, learning, or handoff) so you can scan for what changed. It starts on hire with nothing to configure.
- Task Comments: Comment directly on a task, Drive file, sprint, CRM contact, or notification, and @mention the person, team, or AI employee who should act on it. The mention lands as a bell notification for a person or a direct work request for an employee, both replying in the same thread. Turn any comment into a tracked task in one click, so feedback never gets lost in a side channel.
- CRM: Every business runs on a CRM, the shared book of the people and companies it deals with. Sistava builds one in, and your AI employees run it for you. They add a prospect the moment one comes up, keep contacts current, open deals and move them down the pipeline as they progress, and write notes so nothing is forgotten. You get one clean place to see who you know, what's in flight, and what it's worth, without paying for a separate CRM.
- Sales Pipeline: Your deals live on a pipeline board, the same shape as your task board: a column for every stage, New, Screening, Meeting, Proposal, Customer, and a card for each deal showing its value and the company behind it. As a deal gets closer to won, it moves down the board. Your AI employees keep the pipeline current, opening deals, moving stages, and updating amounts, so you always know what's in flight and what it's worth, at a glance.
- Let Your Employee Use Any Desktop App: Your employee controls your actual desktop, not just a browser tab. It clicks, types, manages files, and runs terminal commands in real applications on your machine, the same way you would sitting at the keyboard. It works through the free Desktop Companion app and covers native software, file management, and shell tasks in one capability.
- Let Your Employee Run Terminal Commands: Once you pair the Sista desktop app, your employee can run real shell commands on your machine: git, npm, brew, ls, grep, and anything else you'd type yourself. Commands run as your own user with no privilege escalation, and a hard-coded blocklist rejects destructive patterns like rm -rf /, disk formatting, or piping a remote script into a shell before they ever execute.
- Let Your Employee See Your Screen: Your employee looks at your actual screen and works from what it sees, not just an API. It captures your desktop through the Sista desktop app, reads the pixels the same way you would, and can click, type, and scroll based on what it finds. That covers any app you have open, including native software, dashboards, and design tools that never had an integration.
- Employee Drive: Every document, generated image, video, screenshot, and daily work log an employee produces lands automatically in its Drive, no saving required. Browse it per employee, per team, or company-wide, as a searchable flat grid or as folders. Files preview inline, from PDFs and spreadsheets to code and video, so you rarely need to download something just to read it. Every update becomes a numbered version that you can preview or restore without losing the original file.
- Company Drive: Every employee keeps its own Drive, but you shouldn't have to open ten employees to find one file. Company Drive rolls every employee's Drive into one company-wide view: every document, transcript, and deliverable your whole workforce has produced, browsable and searchable from one tab.