AI Assistant

Holocron includes a built-in AI chat assistant. Users can ask questions about your documentation and get answers based on the docs content. By default it appears as a sidebar widget. Set assistant.display to floating to show a bottom pill instead.

To embed the chat on an external website (outside your docs site), see the Chat Widget page.

Enabling and disabling

The assistant is enabled by default. To disable it:

json

12345{
  "assistant": {
    "enabled": false
  }
}

When disabled, the sidebar widget, chat drawer, and mobile "Ask AI" button are hidden. The chat route still exists and returns 404 Assistant is disabled.

Display location

By default the assistant sits in the right sidebar. Set assistant.display to floating to use the same bottom pill as the embeddable ChatWidget instead:

json

12345{
  "assistant": {
    "display": "floating"
  }
}

Value	Trigger
`sidebar`	Ask AI widget in the right aside (default)
`floating`	Bottom-center textarea pill that morphs into the chat drawer

Floating mode hides the sidebar widget and the mobile "Ask AI" button. The pill is the trigger on every screen size.

Compact layout in docs.json defaults to floating unless you set assistant.display yourself. Compact removes the right aside, so the sidebar widget cannot show.

Suggested prompts

The empty chat screen shows a short pitch and up to three suggestion links. Clicking a suggestion submits it as a prompt. Customize them with assistant.suggestions:

json

123456789{
  "assistant": {
    "suggestions": [
      "What is Acme?",
      "Show me the quickstart",
      "Search the docs for ..."
    ]
  }
}

A suggestion ending with ... is treated as open-ended: clicking it fills the chat input with the text (dots removed) and focuses it, so the user can complete the query before sending.

When suggestions is omitted, three defaults based on the site name are shown:

What is {site name}?
Guide me through the pages I should read first
Search the docs for ...

How it works

The assistant uses the hosted Holocron AI gateway to process questions. When deployed, the docs app sends the current page plus either inline docs in local development or a docs.zip URL in production, then streams the answer back into the chat UI.

Hosted chat uses Cloudflare Workers AI. Authenticated sites send HOLOCRON_KEY; unauthenticated requests use a temporary fallback with stricter IP rate limits. The default model is GLM 4.7 Flash.

Table of contents in the sidebar

With display: "sidebar" (the default), the AI assistant widget occupies the right sidebar. If you prefer a traditional table of contents instead (or alongside the widget), add the TableOfContentsPanel component to your page:

mdx

123<Aside full>
  <TableOfContentsPanel />
</Aside>

This renders a sticky "On this page" panel with heading links and active-state highlighting as the user scrolls. When the sidebar AI widget is enabled, it appears above the TOC panel automatically. With display: "floating" or enabled: false, the TOC panel takes the full sidebar.

See the Table of Contents component page for all props and usage patterns.

What gets disabled

Setting enabled: false removes:

The sidebar chat widget
The chat drawer overlay
The mobile "Ask AI" floating button
Useful responses from /holocron-api/chat; the endpoint returns 404 while disabled

Skill loading

The hosted gateway can accept remote skill URLs, but the built-in docs assistant does not expose a docs.json setting for them yet. Today it answers from the current docs content and the docs zip payload.