The interruption problem
You sit down to shape a project description for an onboarding redesign. Three messages in, your phone buzzes — a teammate asks "did the security routine fail again overnight?" You want to answer. You don't want to lose the project you were drafting. You also don't want a new thread that forgets the rest of your morning. Most chat tools force you to choose; Ship doesn't.
Drafting mode is a state, not a thread
When you're shaping a new project, the chat is in drafting mode. You'll see a small pill in the header that says "drafting" — that's how you know. While drafting is on, Ship's attention is pointed at the project you're working on. Messages get interpreted in that frame. Tool calls prefer the project's context.
Drafting is a mode the thread can be in or out of. It's not a separate thread. You can enter it and leave it in the same conversation, multiple times if your day looks like that.
Switching mid-thread
You're in drafting mode, halfway through the onboarding project. Your teammate's question shows up. You type: "wait — did the security routine fail again overnight?" Ship notices the topic changed and offers a banner: "Looks like you're switching out of drafting. Continue here?"
You click it. Drafting mode turns off, the pill disappears, Ship answers your question from the live workspace state. None of your project draft is lost — it's scrolled up in the same thread. If you want to come back to it in a minute, you say "back to the onboarding project" and Ship offers to re-enter drafting mode.
The banner is a suggestion, not an action. Nothing flips until you click it. If Ship's wrong about the switch, you ignore the banner and keep going. The thread is yours either way.
Exiting drafting deliberately
Two ways to exit. You can click the "drafting" pill in the header — it disappears, the mode ends, the conversation continues as a regular workspace chat. Or you can let Ship exit naturally when you create the project ("OK, go ahead and create it"); drafting mode ends on its own because the work has a home now. The trail of how you got there is preserved in chat for as long as you keep the thread open.
Entering drafting from a regular chat
The reverse also works. You're chatting normally, you say "actually I want to think through a new project for the export feature." Ship notices the topic is project-shaped, offers a banner: "Looks like you're starting to draft a project. Switch to drafting mode?"
You click. The pill shows up. Ship starts shaping the project body with you. When you're done, you exit, and the thread continues with whatever else needed your attention.
Why this matters more than it sounds like
Most product founders don't have hours of uninterrupted time. Your morning is six different things in succession — a project draft, a routine that failed, a clarification in your Inbox, a strategy thought, a Slack follow-up. The thread that survives all of that in one place, without making you rebuild context every time you switch, is the thread that fits your actual day.
What gets remembered
Every switch into and out of drafting mode is recorded in the audit log. Not the conversation — that's private to you — but the fact that the state of the thread changed, and when. If you ever need to reconstruct how a project came together, the audit trail shows the shape of the work: when drafting started, when it ended, when the project landed on the tracker.
That's the whole orientation arc. The next part of these docs walks the Inbox, where decisions that come out of all of this land for you and your team.