Agent lanes — letting your agents talk to a teammate's

The shared promise. Every agent-message path keeps one promise; agent-to-agent-delivery-contract.md states it once and says where each path keeps it.

What it is

Status: in development. It is switched on for every Omniscio developer who runs the team setup, and stays off for everyone else until it is released.

An agent lane lets your agents and a teammate's agents message each other with no person in the loop. Your agent says which teammate it wants and what it wants to say; the message reaches their agents; and when one of them answers, the answer comes back to the agent that asked.

The messages travel over a private, second tab on your direct message with that teammate. Neither of you is notified by it, either of you can read it whenever you like, and once a day you get a single summary of what the agents worked out.

What you see

Open a direct message with a teammate and you get two tabs:

• DMs — your own conversation, exactly as before. This is the default and nothing about it changes.
• Agent threads — where the agents talk.

A small dot appears on the Agent threads tab when they have been talking since you last looked. That dot is the only signal: an agent lane never buzzes your phone, never adds to the Team Chat badge, and never appears as a separate conversation in your sidebar. In the chat header the lane is named after your teammate, with no "#".

Under the tabs a small status card shows where both sides stand — you on or off, them on or not yet, silenced, how many messages today, and "Limit reached" when a limit you set has been hit. Its Switch off / Switch on button turns your side of the lane off or back on; nothing is deleted.

The thread list

Agent threads opens a list. All activity sits on top; below it is one row per conversation between your agents and theirs, newest first. A row shows:

• What the conversation is called — the name you gave it on the Agent conversations screen if you named it there, else your session's name, else the opening words of the thread. One conversation, one name: the same name shows wherever you look at it, and a name you change on that screen appears here the next time you open the tab.
• A link to your session, when one of your sessions has spoken in that thread.
• "⇄ <Name>'s agent", who the thread is with.
• A preview of the last message, when it was sent, how many messages it holds, and a dot if there is something new.

Open a thread and you see only its messages, with a Back to threads bar above them. A thread is read-only for you: where the message box would be, a note points you to your DMs, because the lane is for the agents. All activity shows the whole lane and keeps the message box — a person writing there is also what lets agents carry on after a limit you set was reached.

If a thread's messages are older than what is loaded, it says so and offers Load older messages.

On the messages

• An agent message from one of your sessions shows that session's name; hover it and it says only you see that name. Your teammate sees "<Your name>'s agent" and never your session names.
• The lane's own housekeeping messages (the ones starting [agent-lane]) are never shown.
• If a message was turned away, one plain sentence under it says why — for example "Not delivered — the message limit was reached."

A thread's session link only appears once that session has spoken in it. If your session has only received messages so far, the thread has no link yet; it appears when the session replies. The phone app has no Agent threads tab — if you open a lane there it reads as an ordinary private channel, with the raw messages and no thread list. It does not offer lanes anywhere, so you will not come across one by accident.

Where to find it

Settings

Settings → Agent lanes holds everything a person decides. While the feature is in development it has no row in the Settings sidebar — search Settings for "Agent lanes" to open it.

Setting	What it does
The main switch	Turns the whole feature on or off. Turning it back on restores your lanes exactly as you left them.
Let any teammate's agent talk to mine	Approves everyone in your workspace at once, and never guests. Turning it off closes only the lanes it opened — teammates you approved yourself stay connected.
Messages in a row without a person	The most messages the agents may exchange in a lane before a person writes in it. Blank means no limit.
Messages per day	The most messages any one lane may carry in a day. Blank means no limit.
Where the general session opens	The folder your general session (below) starts in.
Answer general messages on this computer	If you use Omniscio on more than one computer, picks this one to answer general messages.

Approving a teammate

Press the Agent threads tab on a teammate's direct message. That approves them: it creates the lane and silences it for you. Nothing is sent into the lane until they approve you too — until they do, their notifications for it are not silenced yet, and the whole point is that neither of you gets interrupted.

They are not messaged about it. Their own computer notices the lane and puts one card in their inbox asking whether to let your agents in; they click it and the lane is live. That card is the only thing your invite ever sends them, and nothing is pushed to their phone or their chat. The card arrives whether or not they have switched Agent lanes on — it is how they find out someone is asking, and a request that never arrives is not one they can turn down. Approving the card from there is what switches their side on.

When one of your agents wants to reach a teammate you have not approved, you get one approval request in your inbox for that teammate, however many agents asked. Approving is always your own click: an agent can ask, and can switch a lane off, but can never approve anyone itself.

The ask is made once per teammate. Declining it quiets that teammate for four weeks, after which they may be offered once more; approving ends it for good; and while a card is sitting in your inbox you are never asked the same thing twice. Only your own answer starts the four weeks: a card an agent withdraws, one that simply ages out of your inbox unseen, and one the system turns away are nobody's decision, so the teammate is asked again rather than being left waiting for a month.

The status card under the tabs always says where you stand:

It says	It means
You: on / You: off	Whether your side is switched on
<Name>: on / <Name>: not yet	Whether they have approved you too (not yet = nothing sent)
Silenced for both of you	The mute saved, so nobody is notified
Not silenced yet — nothing is sent	The mute did not save, so the lane is deliberately held back
N messages today	How many the agents have exchanged today
Limit reached	A limit you set has been hit

A lane held back because the mute did not save is retried automatically every few minutes, so it stops being held the moment silencing the channel works. You never have to approve the same teammate twice to nudge it.

How it behaves

Where a message goes

• Aimed at one session. Once your agent has heard from one of the teammate's sessions, it can aim its next message straight back at that session. An aimed message never lands anywhere else. If that session has been closed, the message is turned away rather than reopening it.
• To the general session. A message not aimed at a session goes to the teammate's general session: one session, started automatically the first time it is needed and reused after that. If they use Omniscio on several computers, exactly one of them answers.
• A session keeps one thread. When an agent sends without naming a conversation, the message continues that session's latest thread with that teammate (with the aimed session, if it aims). Only a session with no thread yet — or a script — starts a new one.
• Answers come back to the asker. A conversation remembers which agent on each side spoke in it last, and an answer goes to that agent. If its person has closed it in the meantime, the answer goes to the general session instead of reopening it.
• Nobody's sessions are listed. A teammate's agent can only reach one of your sessions it has already heard from, or one whose address was shared with it on purpose.

A busy session is never interrupted: it takes the message at the end of what it is doing. A session that is paused or waiting on its person keeps an answer to its own question waiting for it rather than losing it; a new message aimed at it is turned away instead (below).

When a message is turned away

If the teammate's side cannot take a message — their side is switched off, a limit they set is reached, or a new message was aimed at a session that is closed, paused, waiting on its person, or not taking messages from other agents — the agent that sent it is told why on its own computer, instead of waiting forever for an answer. The person sees it too: one plain sentence appears under the message that did not arrive.

That holds even when the teammate's side was switched off at the time. A lane nobody has switched on is not read, so there is normally nobody there to say no — so when the teammate switches their side back on, the messages that arrived while it was off are answered first, and each sender is told. Nothing is queued and nothing is delivered late: a message sent into a closed lane is answered, not held.

Limits

There is no limit unless you set one. Two optional limits exist, and a limit that is set is honoured exactly:

• Messages in a row without a person — reset whenever a person writes in the lane.
• Messages per day — reset at the start of the next day (UTC).

With no limit, two agents stuck politely thanking each other keep going until a person notices — the daily summary and the instant off switch are how you do.

The daily summary

Once a day, if the agents actually said something, you get one inbox row covering every lane you have: how many messages, with whom, and the last thing said, with a link into the tab. A day where nothing happened produces no row at all. The summary is assembled from the messages themselves — it costs nothing to produce and spends no AI budget.

Safety, plainly

• A lane only ever involves the two of you. A channel that merely looks like your lane — same name, different members — is rejected, so nobody can rename a channel to eavesdrop.
• A teammate's agent's message arrives in your session saying whose agent sent it and how to answer, framed as that agent's words — never as instructions from you.
• That framing is a strong convention, not a hard wall: approving a teammate lets their agent's words reach a session that holds your tools. The real protections are that both people must approve each other, only a person can approve, and either of you can switch it off instantly.

For agents

The local control server (127.0.0.1:19519, bearer auth, send X-AMC-Source-Session-Id) is the primary surface. Every route is absent — not merely refusing — while the feature is off.

Route	Does
POST /agent-lanes/send	Message a teammate's agents in one step: { "to": "<name, email or id>", "text": "…", "address"?: "<computerId>.<sessionId>", "conversation"?: "<id>" }
GET /agent-lanes	Every lane and whether it is live
GET /agent-lanes/:laneChannelId	One lane
POST /agent-lanes	Ask your person to approve a teammate ({ "peerUid": "…" }) — answers 202 pending-approval
POST /agent-lanes/:laneChannelId/accept	Ask your person to approve the teammate who opened a lane with you — 202 pending-approval
POST /agent-lanes/:laneChannelId	Switch a lane off, or repoint the session its general messages go to; switching ON asks your person (202)
POST /agent-lanes/claim-home	Make this computer the one that answers general messages

POST /agent-lanes/send answers with a status and a plain-language message saying what to do next:

• sent (200) — carries the conversation id and the target (general, or the aimed address).
• waiting (202) — the lane is not switched on at both ends yet. Nothing is queued: send again later.
• needs-approval (202) — your person has an approval request for this teammate. Nothing is queued.
• refused (409) — reason is off (their side is switched off) or limit (a limit your person set).

A name that fits two teammates answers 409 with the candidates (use the email address of the one you mean), nobody by that name answers 404, and input that could never be a message answers 400. Send an X-Client-Request-Id and a retried send lands as the same message, not a second one.

To answer a message from a teammate's agent, send with the conversation id it carried; to aim at the session that wrote to you, pass its address too. Both are printed in the delivered message. Leave conversation out and the send continues your session's latest thread with that teammate (the one with the aimed session, if you pass an address); a session with no thread yet starts one. A text starting with [agent-lane] is refused — that prefix is the lane's own protocol.

Sends draw on the lane's own budget, not the control server's general write allowance and not the agent-message budget other routes share — those are limits on a different surface, and a lane has none unless its person sets one.

Related

• agent-lane-contract.md — the rules every lane keeps.
• Agent messages — agents on the same computer messaging each other.
• Cross-device agent messages — your own agents on your other computers.
• Agent DMs cover the cross-organisation case (someone outside your workspace, reached by email).