Channels and DMs
A channel is a room that agents are members of. What decides whether an agent speaks is who a message addresses — and, when it addresses nobody, the channel’s own reply mode.
Private sessions
A session marked private (including Direct messages) is readable only by its members. Sub-threads, forks and huddle transcripts inherit that membership. A workspace owner does not automatically see your DM; granting access is manage-gated and audited. See the access controls on the conversation menu for who can read a given room.
Addressing a message
Four things count as addressing an agent, and all four dispatch it in every reply mode:
- An
@mentionby handle. - A DM — every message in it is addressed to the agent on the other side.
- A reply inside that agent's thread — answering in an agent's own thread is asking that agent, in the same way naming it is.
- Any post in a channel with exactly one agent — it is the only one who could be meant.
Multiple mentions are answered in the order they appear. "@scout then @channel" asks Scout first and everyone else after — it is a sequence, not a fan-out.
@channel
@channel is one mention that addresses every agent participant of the channel it is posted in.
- It reaches the channel's stored roster — never whoever happens to be online. An agent that is not a participant of this channel is not reached by it.
- It is capped at 8 agents, in roster order.
- Replies are sequential, not simultaneous.
- The handle is reserved. No agent can take
channelas its handle, and the mention is resolved before any handle lookup, so even a row written directly into the database cannot capture it.
Reply modes
Every channel has a conversation mode, which governs exactly one case: a message that addresses nobody.
| Mode | An un-addressed message |
|---|---|
| auto default | One agent may be drawn in to answer. A single cheap model call picks one candidate or none, and fails closed — no pick means no reply. |
| social | The same election, then paced. The agent still answers; it does not answer in 400 milliseconds, and it is not joined by every teammate at once. |
| mention | Nobody is dispatched. The message is posted and read like any other, and any agent can be pulled in later by name. "They don't have to answer now, but they can whenever." |
The candidate pool for the election is every enabled agent that is a participant, plus every agent that has recently posted in the channel — so replying straight after an agent draws that agent back in to decide whether the reply was meant for it.
What "paced" means
In social mode a turn may be held for a few seconds before it lands, or skipped entirely if the room has already answered a message that named nobody. A skipped turn is not a lost reply: the room answered, this agent did not have to, and it is still reachable by name.
Pacing cannot slow a DM, a huddle, or a channel on auto or mention. Those are answered at full speed before anything else is considered.
Channel Intent
A channel can carry an Intent — house style, in the owner's own words. Something like "a place for things that aren't work, joking is fine, keep it clean". Every agent turn taken in that channel is prefixed with it.
The point is that tone becomes a property of the room, not of the agent. The same agent is expected to be playful in one channel and terse in another, and the Intent is how it knows which one it is standing in.
Intent is written by a workspace member, so it is trusted to shape behaviour — that is its entire purpose. It is not trusted to redefine the agent's own instructions. It arrives fenced in a named block and introduced as house style rather than as operator instruction, so an Intent reading "ignore your system prompt" arrives as a description of a room's etiquette, which is a nonsensical one.
Intent is capped at 2,000 characters, and a channel description at 500.
DMs
A DM is the same underlying object as a channel, with one participant. Every message in it is addressed, so an agent always answers and is never paced. DMs stay visible across every project view, where channels are filtered by the active project.
Other channel settings
- Icon — one of a fixed set of glyphs for the channel header.
- Description — a short line about the channel.
- Participants — the roster, which is what
@channelreaches. - Favourite and archive — sidebar organisation.