Concepts

Spaces

A Space is a named group of Ellivate users with a shared chat and a set of attached tools. Members get access to every tool in the Space; conversation and tool-use live in the same place.

Why Spaces exist

You publish a tool, you share it with your family or your team, and then everyone keeps coordinating in iMessage anyway. The chore tracker has data nobody opens; the meal planner is full of votes nobody recorded. The conversation is happening somewhere else, so the tool starves.

Spaces is the bet that bringing the chat inside Ellivate — right next to the tool — is what makes the tool stick. Not by beating iMessage on general-purpose messaging, but by making the conversation happen where the activity the tool is for already lives.

What a Space contains

A small group of people. One owner plus invited members. No follower model, no public discovery — Spaces are private by design.
A flat chat log. Text messages, newest at the bottom, no threads. Edits, reactions, and read receipts are intentionally not shipping in v1.
A set of attached tools. Apps the owner shares into the Space. Every Space member can open them; there's no per-app invite step.

The Space is your tool's chat — don't build your own. Every tool automatically has a home Space: a group chat with everyone it's shared with, right inside the Ellivate app. So if you want the people using your tool to talk to each other, that's the Space — you don't build (or embed) a message board, comments, or discussion feed inside the tool. To surface tool events into that chat, post a card with ellivate.notify({ to: { space: "current" } }). (A chat with the tool's own AI assistant — user↔model — is a different thing; that's built with ellivate.reason().)

Who Spaces are for

The same people Ellivate is for in general — anyone who's using tools they vibe-coded with Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor for a personal-software use case. Spaces is what you reach for when that tool is meant for a group rather than just you: a family, a household, a team, a friend group.

If you're publishing tools to a customer base or a paid audience, Spaces isn't for you — Ellivate isn't for you either. Spaces is for the long tail of small, trusted groups.

Sharing through a Space vs sharing one-to-one

You can still share an individual tool with a single email — the original sharing flow hasn't gone anywhere. The difference is what the recipient gets:

Action	What the recipient sees
Share an app to an email	That one tool, in their “Shared with me” list.
Invite to a Space	The Space (with chat) plus every tool currently attached to it. Add a new tool later and they get it automatically, no fresh invite needed.

Roles

Spaces have two roles. They're deliberately simple — no admin tier, no per-tool permissions, no granular ACLs.

Owner. The person who created the Space. Can rename it, attach or remove tools, invite or kick members, transfer ownership to another member, or delete the Space entirely.
Member. Can read and write chat, open any attached tool, see the member list, leave the Space at any time.

Owners can't leave a Space that has other members — there'd be no one to own it. The platform asks you to transfer ownership first, or delete the Space outright.

What about my data?

Tool data lives on the same scope prefixes a tool always uses: personal: (private per viewer), shared: (shared with the group), and public: (visible to anyone). Attaching a tool to a Space gives the Space's members access to the tool; the tool itself doesn't change how it stores data.

shared: data is what makes a tool participate in its Space. A Space is backed by a share group, so a tool attached to a Space keeps its shared: data scoped to that Space's members automatically — and that's the data the @ellivate chat agent reads and writes when a member asks it to do something. The same tool sitting in two different family/team Spaces keeps each Space's shared: state separate without you doing anything; the share group is the isolation boundary. There's no separate space: scope to learn.

personal: data is invisible to the Space: it's private to each viewer, so the @ellivate agent and other members never see it. If you want the agent (or the group) to be able to act on something, put it under shared:.

What's shipping next

Phase 1 is just the container — chat + tool list. The interesting parts are in Phase 2:

Tool cards in chat. When a tool sends a push, it shows up as a card in the Space (RSVPs, completions, reminders).
@toolname mentions. Type @grocery in chat to see actions the tool exposes, pick one inline, and have it open the tool with your action pre-filled.
@assistant. A built-in helper that can read the Space's chat and attached tools' data, and answer questions across them.

Each of those ships behind its own usage gate — we're watching whether Spaces actually replaces the go-to-iMessage-to-coordinate behavior before we layer on more surface.

Create a Space — walkthrough.
Sharing & invites — the per-app share flow Spaces extends.
Notifications — what shows up in chat when a tool calls ellivate.notify(...) (Phase 2).