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Each time you chat with Maia Team in Designer or Mission Control, you start a new session. A session is an ongoing, structured interaction between you and Maia Team, which includes your full conversation history, relevant context, and any tool based actions Maia Team has performed on your behalf in your Designer branch or chosen branch in Mission Control. Sessions are:
  • Context-aware: Maia Team builds on prior messages within the same session, allowing for more coherent, informed responses across multiple prompts.
  • Session-scoped: In Designer, your chat with Maia Team remains active and visible in the Maia Team panel as long as you’re working in the same Designer project and branch. Once you close a branch, your conversation is saved in your conversation history.
  • Private: Your conversations with Maia Team are only visible to you. When you open a branch in Designer, or when viewing tasks in Mission Control, the only conversations and tasks you can see are your own.
In Designer, you can switch between pipelines in the same branch without losing session context. However, switching branches will close your session and save your conversation in the conversation history.

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Chatting with Maia Team

For the best results, we recommend starting a new conversation or task for each piece of work you want Maia Team to assist with. This helps Maia Team to provide more focused, relevant assistance. Maia Team sometimes needs more context to get things right, particularly when planning pipelines or working on complex prompts. When Maia Team needs more information from you, it will present clear, structured questions to help clarify how to respond to your prompts. These can be:
  • Multiple choice questions: Choose from predefined options, or provide your own answer with the “Other” option.
  • Multi-step forms: When Maia Team needs to ask several questions, it will present them one at a time with step-by-step navigation.
In Designer, if Maia Team appears to misunderstand your intent or lose context, click New Chat in the top right of the chat panel to start a new conversation. If you have a long conversation with Maia Team, it may summarize your chat so far, and then continue.

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Queueing messages

When you send a message in a Maia Team chat, Maia Team starts working on your prompt immediately. You can continue to send messages while Maia Team is processing a prompt—these messages are added to a queue and included in your conversation as soon as Maia Team can start processing them. This means you can clarify your current prompt by adding more context, or add a follow-up task to a prompt without canceling your prompt and starting again. For example, if your original prompt was “Review this pipeline”, you could send an additional message like “Add notes explaining each step”. Maia Team will include the follow-up task in the prompt automatically. You can queue up to five messages at a time—to send more follow-up messages, wait for Maia Team to start working on a queued message. Click the x icon next to a queued message to delete it, or click Clear all to delete all queued messages.

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Attaching images and PDFs

You can attach images and PDFs to your messages when chatting with Maia Team to provide it with additional context. Maia Team can read the content of your attachments directly and use them to inform its decisions. You can attach up to five files to each chat, provided they meet the following conditions:
  • Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP files
    • Maximum file size per image file: 5 MB and 8000 x 8000 px
    • Example files: Diagrams, screenshots, mockups, and whiteboard photos
  • PDFs: Standard PDF files
    • Maximum upload size across all attached PDF files: 32 MB and 100 pages
    • Example files: Specifications, requirements documents, and reports
Text files (.txt, .md, etc.) aren’t supported as attachments. These file types belong in the project itself, where Maia Team can already read them.
To attach a file, click + in the chat panel, then click Attach to conversation, and then select the file you want to attach.

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Visualizing data

In Designer chats and Mission Control tasks, Maia Team can visualize the data it samples in a component directly in the chat panel. These visualizations enable you to discover key insights and identify trends. To visualize your data in the Maia Team panel, prompt Maia Team to create a chart or graph representing the data in a specific component. These visualizations are based on sampled data and don’t include the entire dataset. For more information about how Maia Team samples data, read Sampling data.

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Plan mode

Use plan mode in Designer and Mission Control to chat with Maia Team about your work without making any changes. Plan mode provides you with extra visibility and control over Maia Team‘s suggested actions, which can be useful when working on complex pipelines, and enables you to suggest changes to Maia Team‘s approach before any work is performed on your pipelines. In plan mode, Maia Team will analyze your prompt, explore your project and data warehouse, then present a multi-step plan to achieve your goal without making any changes to your pipeline. You can then suggest changes to the plan if needed, or accept Maia Team‘s suggestion. Maia Team will only make changes to your pipeline after you have approved the suggested plan. To use plan mode, toggle on Plan mode in the dialog when creating a task in Mission Control, or at the bottom of the Maia Team chat panel at any time when working on a task in Designer or Mission Control. Maia Team will automatically suggest switching to plan mode if it thinks your prompt is complex enough to require planning. When this happens, you will see a message in the Maia Team chat panel—click Accept to allow Maia Team to use plan mode. Expand this box to watch our video about using plan mode for complex tasks.

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Conversation history

In Designer, Maia Team automatically saves your conversations, making it easy to continue where you left off or revisit previous work. This ensures that important context and progress aren’t lost when you need to step away or switch tasks. Your conversation history with Maia Team is kept for two years. None of your data is used to train third-party AI models or to enhance Matillion’s AI services. Your conversation history is unique to your current branch. Switching to a different branch, e.g. from main to developer-1, will show your conversations on that branch. You can never view another user’s conversations with Maia Team, even if that user has worked on the same branch as you. The 10 most recent conversations on your branch are available for you to resume, rename or delete.

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Resuming recent conversations

When you open the Maia Team chat panel, the Recent section shows the titles of your most recent conversations. Maia Team dynamically updates the title of your conversation as you work, so that it always reflects the topic you’re discussing. Click a conversation to open it and resume your chat with Maia Team. When you select a previous conversation, Maia Team loads the complete chat history and you can continue exactly where you left off. To see more conversations, either click See all above the recent conversations, or click Chat history in the top right of the Maia Team chat panel.

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Renaming and deleting conversations

You can rename and delete your previous conversations with Maia Team. Renaming a conversation makes it easier to find useful pipeline information or data analysis, while deleting conversations lets you clear conversations you no longer need. If the conversation you want to rename or delete is not shown in the Recent section, click Chat history in the top right of the Maia Team chat panel to see all your conversations. To rename or delete a previous conversation, hover over the conversation tile, and click the three dots … that appear. Next, click Rename or Delete.

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Explore files

Maia Team can search through and explore files in your project, making it easier to understand existing work, find specific configurations, or perform project-wide updates. Maia Team’s file search capabilities help you:
  • Locate specific files: Find pipeline files, scripts, or documentation by name or pattern.
  • Discover existing components: Find configured components to copy or reference.
  • Validate project-wide changes: Ensure parameters or configurations are updated everywhere they’re used.
  • Understand your project structure: Get an overview of what files and pipelines exist in your project.
For example, you could prompt Maia Team as follows:
  • "Find all transformation pipelines that connect to the "product-orders" table."
  • "Show me any existing Salesforce load components I can copy."
  • "Find every time the database name 'PROD_DB' is mentioned."
  • "Summarize the content of the pipeline files in the analytics folder."

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Search performance

For larger projects with many files, searches may take longer to complete. Maia Team will let you know when it’s working on your search request. Using file search is much more efficient than having Maia Team view each file individually, especially when you need to:
  • Perform large-scale refactors across multiple pipelines.
  • Check whether changes were applied consistently throughout your project.
  • Find specific patterns or configurations across many files.

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Slash commands

In Designer, slash commands are a command-line interface (CLI) style method of interacting with Maia Team. These commands simplify complex prompts into a one-word command to standardize common tasks. The table below explains what Maia Team will do as a response to each slash command. To use a slash command, type a forward slash / in the Maia Team chat panel, followed by the command you want to give. After you type /, an autocomplete list of available slash commands will appear. After typing the command, enter the name of the object that you want Maia Team to process—you can use the @ symbol here to mention a specific file in your project. For example, you could prompt Maia Team “/document the customer_data folder”, “/explain this pipeline” or “/fix @weekly_orders”. Expand this box to watch our video about using slash commands when chatting to Maia Team.

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Tool permissions

Maia Team uses tools to perform tasks in your Designer workspace based on your prompts. These tools let Maia Team go beyond chat and perform real, interactive actions. Tools allow Maia Team to create and modify pipelines, add and configure components, search your data warehouse, preview or sample data, and run and monitor pipelines. For security and transparency, Maia Team asks you for permission before using tools that can affect your work. When relevant, you will see a permissions dialog in the Maia Team chat panel. This permission-based model ensures that you stay in control while enabling Maia Team to act confidently on your behalf. You can:
  • Accept: Approve the action for a one-time use.
  • Accept for session: Allow Maia Team to repeat this action without asking again during the current session.
  • Decline: Deny the request and optionally provide a reason for declining. This helps Maia Team adjust its response or better understand your prompt.

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Background notifications

Background notifications enable Maia Team to notify you when it finishes a task or requires your input, such as requiring permission to sample data. This means you can give Maia Team a prompt, then switch to a different browser tab or program while Maia Team is working, and resume your task as soon as Maia Team finishes. Background notifications are provided as:
  • Tab indicators: A dot in the browser tab title.
  • Audio chimes: A notification sound.
  • Browser notifications: A system-level notification, if you grant Maia permission to show browser notifications.
To activate background notifications:
  1. Open the Maia Team chat panel in Designer.
  2. Click the three dots in the top right to open the Settings drop-down menu.
  3. Toggle on Notifications.

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Test suggestions

In Designer, Maia Team can suggest and create test pipelines when building or modifying pipelines. When you update a pipeline, Maia Team will also automatically flag any existing tests that are affected. To enable Maia Team to work with test pipelines:
  1. Open the Maia Team chat panel in Designer.
  2. Click the three dots in the top right to open the Settings drop-down menu.
  3. Toggle on Test suggestions.

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Canceling a prompt

If you want to cancel Maia Team‘s current response, click Cancel—this icon appears in the input field of the Maia Team chat panel when Maia Team is responding to a prompt. This stops the current response but keeps your session open. You can continue the conversation or ask something new immediately. Canceling a prompt does not clear the conversation history.