How to talk to Lucius

Talk to Lucius like a financial adviser who already has your numbers open — specific and direct, no need to be formal.

Where to find him

The Lucius tab in the sidebar — full-screen chat with your conversation history beside it.
On any other screen — the Ask Lucius button opens the chat panel next to what you’re looking at (Ctrl / shows or hides it — see Keyboard shortcuts).
On your phone — through Telegram, once it’s set up.

Lucius needs an AI model first. If he asks to be set up, see Connecting an AI provider.

Be specific

He has your real data, so specific questions get checkable answers:

“How much did I spend on restaurants in July?” → a real number, not a generic tip.
“Add a $42.50 transaction at Trader Joe’s today, groceries” → added, and shown back to you.
“Why did my net worth drop this month?” → he traces what actually moved.

If something that changes the answer is unclear — which account, which month, two payees with similar names — he asks rather than guessing.

To point at an exact account, transaction or holding, type @ and pick it. To run one of your saved playbooks, type /. See Mentioning things in chat.

Before he changes anything

Whether Lucius asks first depends on the conversation’s approval mode — the control in the message box’s toolbar showing Manual, Auto or Skip. A new conversation starts in Auto: ordinary changes happen straight away and his reply shows what changed; risky ones still ask. Pick Manual if you want to approve every change. See Permissions.

Changed your mind? The Restore button on a reply puts your data back as it was before that message.

Attach a file or picture

Click the paperclip (Attach file or image) or drop a file into the message box: a statement (PDF, CSV, Excel), a receipt photo, a screenshot of your banking app, a Word document. Then say what to do — “import this”, “log these purchases”, “what’s my deductible?”. Files you send are stored so the conversation can refer back to them (they’re listed in Settings → Data → Uploaded files). To keep one with your other papers, ask Lucius to save it to Documents.

If you press Send while a file is still uploading, the message goes the moment the upload finishes. If a file can’t be uploaded, the message stays in the box and a note under the file tells you which one, so nothing is sent without it by accident.

Ask for a file when you want to keep it

Charts and reports appear right in the chat. When you’d rather have a file, say which kind:

“Make that a PDF” → a printable, paginated document.
“Give me September’s transactions as a spreadsheet” → an Excel file (.xlsx) with dates, amounts and categories formatted, a filter on the header and totals as real formulas. It opens in Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets.
“Export it as CSV” → a plain table for another tool.

Each one appears as a card: click it to open, Save to keep it in Documents, or Download.

Weekly and monthly reports (the weekly-report and monthly-report skills) are a designed page, short enough to read on a phone. They separate your bills (rent, subscriptions, loan repayments) from day-to-day spending, and compare that spending with your usual week or month. Refunds and money paid back to you are taken off, so a returned purchase isn’t counted as spending. Sent by an Automation, they arrive on Telegram as an interactive page — tap a bar or slide along a line to read the exact figure.

Short answers by default

Lucius keeps replies short and won’t recite your whole portfolio, budget or memory unless you ask. Want everything? Say so: “give me a full breakdown of…”.

He can see what you’re looking at

With Screen awareness on (the default), what’s on your screen goes along with your message — “why did this drop?” while looking at a chart is enough. Password and key fields are never included. See Mentioning things in chat.

What you see while he works

While Lucius works, his thinking shows as he writes it; once the reply is done it folds into a short preview you can open. Each step he takes shows as its own row, named after what it does (“Get net worth”, “Delete envelope”), and you can open a row for its details.

If a reply goes quiet, a small Still working… line with the time so far shows up after about ten seconds, so you can tell Lucius is alive and not stuck.

If a reply fails

Sometimes the model on the other end goes silent. After a couple of minutes Lucius gives up on that attempt and quietly tries once more on his own. If that also fails, the reply shows the error as the model’s app reported it (for example Claude Code CLI timed out after 300s). Press Retry under it: your message is sent again in place, so it appears once in the conversation, not twice. (If the failed attempt had already changed something, the retry adds your message again so Lucius still knows what was done.)

Chat settings

Settings → Chat & Memory has a few switches for how chat behaves:

Follow-up suggestions — suggested next questions under a reply. Off also saves the model call that writes them.
Show cost per turn — the tokens, price and model under each reply.
Group reasoning into one block — show Lucius’s thinking as one block above the answer, instead of step by step.
Multi-turn chat — let you send another message while Lucius is still answering; it’s woven into the same reply. Off, Send waits until he’s done.

The conversation list

Each conversation in the history list (and in the Automation runs group) shows where it stands:

Marker	Meaning
Working…	Lucius is answering right now
Needs you	He’s paused, waiting for you to approve or deny a change
New reply	He finished since you last looked
Failed	A reply ended in an error since you last looked. An Automation run that failed keeps this until a later try succeeds

“Read” is remembered by your Open Net Worth server, not by one window: reading a reply on your phone, in another browser or in the desktop app clears New reply everywhere.

Lucius keeps working when you leave — switch apps, lock your phone, close the tab, or open another conversation. When you come back, the conversation catches up on its own. Loading messages or Catching up… appear only while that takes a noticeable moment.

If your connection drops just as you send, the message may still have reached Lucius. The chat checks before it reports a problem: if he got it, his reply appears as usual. You see Sorry, something went wrong with Retry only when the message didn’t get through.

Automation runs can pile up unread. Mark all read (the check-mark button in a group’s header) clears them all at once; it never touches a conversation that is Working… or Needs you.

To stop a reply partway, press Stop in the message box.

What he’ll tell you straight

No tool or connector for what you asked? He says so instead of pretending.
A tool set to Blocked? He tells you it’s blocked rather than quietly trying another way.
Asked to move money at your bank or place a trade? He tells you that’s not something this app does — see what he can’t do.
Asked about something he was never told? He won’t make it up. He only remembers what’s in Memory or in your data.

Automations and skills follow the same rules — including the same permissions, whether you’re watching or not.