Cues from your own knowledge, in the middle of a conversation

Each mode can use a different agent, and each mode can let that agent comment live. That combination is the recipe: a Support mode whose cues come from an agent that can grep the product repo; a Sales mode backed by the pricing sheet and the case-study folder; a Study mode backed by your Obsidian vault.

Illustration. The cue is your agent reading your own documentation.

• The customer asks, the answer is already there. The agent sees the conversation as it happens and comments when it has something — from files it can actually open, not from general knowledge.
• It stays in its lane. Only the modes you point at it. Your personal modes, your family dinner, stay with IRIS.
• It is your bill and your speed. These fire every few seconds for a whole session, on your own key. IRIS drops anything slower than about twelve seconds and answers herself instead.

1. Give the agent the knowledge

   Route A from the spreadsheet guide: one folder the agent can read — the repo, the docs export, the wiki dump, the vault. A Markdown folder is the best possible shape for this; a search tool over a wiki (Confluence, Notion, GitHub MCP servers) is the next best.
2. Pick a fast model for this agent

   Twelve seconds is the cut-off. A reasoning model that thinks for thirty seconds is dropped every time. In OpenClaw, a second agent profile on a small, fast model with the knowledge folder is the usual shape — keep your slow, careful agent for the Terminal.
3. Add it as a second agent in IRIS

   Settings → Connections → Your agent → Add another agent. Name it after the job — “Support brain”. Your first agent stays the default for Ask and the Terminal.
4. Point one mode at it

   Settings → Modes → edit the mode → Cues from your agent → On → Which agent → the one you just added.
5. Tell it how to behave as a cue

   In that agent’s standing instructions:

   You are commenting live on a conversation shown to me on smart glasses.
   Reply with ONE line, under 120 characters, only when you can answer from
   the files you have — a fact, a number, a file path. Otherwise reply with
   nothing at all. Never speculate. Never repeat something you already said.

• IRIS’s own cues keep running in that mode unless you turn them down; the agent’s lines appear alongside, marked as the agent’s.
• Cost is real. A busy hour can be hundreds of requests. Pick a model priced for that, and switch the mode off when the conversation is not the kind that needs it.
• The lens shows a few short lines. A long line wraps, and whatever runs past the bottom of the lens is lost. The 120-character rule above is not style, it is the screen.

Eight things IRIS can already do that most people have not switched on — four with your own agent, four with nothing but the phone.