Sessions and tools in Maia
A session is an ongoing, structured interaction between you and Maia. A session includes your full conversation history, relevant context, and any tool based actions Maia has performed on your behalf, all within the current Designer workspace.
Sessions are designed to help you work more efficiently and offer the following benefits:
- Context-awareness: Maia builds on prior messages within the same session, allowing for more coherent, informed responses across multiple prompts.
- Session-scoped: Your chat with Maia remains active and visible in the Maia panel as long as you're working in the same Designer project and branch.
- Resettable: If you'd like to start fresh or you're seeing unexpected behavior, click the New Chat icon in the top-right of the Maia panel to clear the current session and begin a new conversation.
Note
You can switch between pipelines in the same branch without losing session context. However, switching branches will automatically reset the session and clear your chat history.
If Maia appears to misunderstand your intent or loses context, use New Chat to reset and start a clean conversation.
Tools
Maia uses tools to perform tasks in your Designer workspace based on your prompts. These tools let Maia go beyond chat and perform real, interactive actions.
Maia tools allow it to:
- Create and modify orchestration or transformation pipelines.
- Add and configure pipeline components.
- Search for tables in your data warehouse.
- Preview or sample table data.
- Run pipelines and monitor their status.
Note
Tools let Maia take real actions in the Designer, not just respond with suggestions for you to take yourself. These actions include building pipelines, configuring components, and running tasks directly in your workspace.
Tool permissions
For security and transparency, Maia requires explicit permission before using tools that can affect your workspace.
When a prompt requires tool access, Maia displays a Tool Permissions dialog. You can:
- Accept once: Approve the action for a one-time use.
- Accept for session: Allow Maia to repeat this action without asking again during the current session.
- Decline Deny the request and optionally adjust your prompt.
This permission-based model ensures that you stay in control while enabling Maia to act confidently on your behalf.
