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Sidekick can take real actions in Plain and in your connected tools: assign a thread, add a label, create a Linear issue, post a Slack message, update a HubSpot record. Some actions run immediately; anything higher-stakes or hard to reverse waits for your explicit approval first.
Actions and approvals in Plain

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How approvals work

Every action Sidekick can take is classified as either runs directly or requires approval, based on how reversible and how high-impact it is. When an action requires approval:
  1. You ask Sidekick to do something
  2. Sidekick presents the proposed action with confirm and deny controls
  3. You approve or deny
  4. If you approve, Sidekick carries it out and reports the outcome back in the conversation. If you deny, it stops and you can redirect.
How approvals work in Plain
Sidekick never takes an irreversible action on its own. It proposes, drafts, and prepares, and you stay in control of anything that matters. You can also approve or deny requests from Slack, without switching to Plain, if Sidekick in Slack is enabled. An agent you built yourself uses the same cards. It decides which of its own actions to put behind one, rather than reading the classification below, and the approve and deny controls behave identically. See tool calls.

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Actions in Plain

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Run directly

These lower-impact actions execute immediately:
  • Assign or unassign a thread
  • Add or remove labels
  • Change a thread’s priority
  • Rename a thread
  • Set or update thread fields
  • Add an internal note (visible to your team only, never to the customer)
  • Link a thread to a Linear or Jira issue
  • Draft, update, or publish Help Center articles

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Require approval

These higher-impact or harder-to-reverse actions show a confirm step first:
  • Change a thread’s status (for example, marking it done)
  • Escalate a thread
  • Merge two threads
  • Lock a thread
  • Mark a customer as spam
  • Change a tenant’s tier

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Actions in connected tools

What Sidekick can do in each tool depends on the integration and the scopes it was connected with. Some tools may need re-authorisation with write permissions before actions are available. Observability integrations (Datadog, Grafana, Sentry, PostHog, LaunchDarkly) are read-only. Sidekick reads from them but cannot change anything in them.

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Examples

Escalate to engineering. Ask Sidekick to escalate a thread and it creates a linked Linear or Jira issue, pre-filled with context from the thread, the logs, and the error data, then waits for your approval before creating it. Investigate an error. Ask “trace this error” and Sidekick searches your logs and spans, cross-references Sentry, reads the alert channel in Slack, and names the likely root cause. Reading is always automatic; only the follow-up write actions ask for approval.