AI Actions

AI Actions are reusable prompt presets that show up as a dropdown in the AI composer. Pick one and the prompt drops into your draft, ready to send or edit. They live in a single file in your workspace, so they're easy to version, share, and edit.

The Actions dropdown open in the AI composer, listing seed entries like Review changed files, Plan implementation, and Draft release notes
The Actions dropdown open in the composer.

When to use Actions

Actions are the lightest-weight way to reuse a prompt:

  • Action: a prompt you reuse often, defined in one file, picked from a dropdown.

  • Command (/): a slash command in .claude/commands/<name>.md. Runs in either Claude Code or Codex.

  • Skill: a richer integration with workflow logic and tool usage patterns.

If you're copy-pasting the same prompt more than twice, turn it into an Action.

Where Actions live

Actions are defined in nimbalyst-local/ai-actions.md in your workspace. The first time you open the Actions dropdown in a workspace without that file, you'll see a "Create ai-actions.md with examples" button that seeds it with a few starter entries.

File format

Each ## Heading is one action. Everything between that heading and the next ## is the prompt body that gets inserted into the composer.

Launching a new sibling session from an Action

By default an Action drops its prompt into the current composer. You can also configure an Action to spin up a brand-new sibling session and submit the prompt there, so the current session stays focused on what it was already doing. See Workstreams for how sibling sessions appear in the sidebar.

Add a fenced YAML config block right under the heading:

Supported config keys:

Key
Values
What it does

launch

same-session (default), new-session

Whether the Action drops its prompt into the current composer or starts a sibling session.

model

a model id (e.g. opus, sonnet, haiku, a specific provider model)

Model to use when launch: new-session. Defaults to the current session's model.

foreground

true (default), false

When false, the sibling session opens in the background so you stay focused on the current one.

autoSubmit

true (default), false

When false, the prompt is dropped into the sibling's composer but not sent. Useful when you want to tweak it before submitting.

Actions with launch: new-session show a small "open in new" icon in the dropdown so you can tell at a glance which ones will spin up a sibling.

Editing your Actions

Click Edit actions… at the bottom of the Actions dropdown to jump straight to nimbalyst-local/ai-actions.md. Save the file and the dropdown updates the next time you open it. No restart needed.

Sharing Actions with a team

nimbalyst-local/ is part of your workspace, so committing ai-actions.md to git ships the whole team's Action set with the repo. Pair this with .claude/commands/ and your skills/CLAUDE.md to make a one-clone-and-go agent environment.

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