Auto-replies (auto-respond to a session's own output)

What it is

Auto-replies are the lightweight half of Omniscio's two auto-response tools. They were split into their own sidebar row on 2026-08-14; the heavy conditions + action-chain engine now lives beside them as Automation Rules. Both live in the Automation sidebar group. The two share one on/off toggle (automationsEnabled), so turning the feature off hides both rows together.

An auto-reply is a simple rule that watches a session's finished output — Claude or a non-Claude engine (Codex / Gemini / OpenCode / …) — and, when its trigger matches, fires exactly one action. This is the tool you want when the goal is "when a session says X, do one thing" — not a multi-step pipeline.

• Trigger — one of keyword, project, tag, or time (a single condition, no AND/OR logic). Keyword / tag matching is a case-insensitive substring of the agent's finished turn; text the agent places in a fenced code block, inline code, or a > blockquote is ignored, so a session that merely quotes your trigger won't fire the rule.
• Action — exactly one of six:
  • Reply (default) — inject a message or a Quick Reply snippet so the session keeps going.
  • Rename the session — set a new title.
  • Archive the session — stop it and archive it.
  • Start a new session — spawn a fresh Claude session with a prompt you set. Billable — it starts a real session each time it fires.
  • Add an inbox note — drop a dismissible note (title + optional body) to yourself.
  • Organize the session — set any combination of a new title, a library tag, and an inbox color.
• Scope — an optional Only in project filter so a rule fires only for sessions in one project.

The rules are stored in the away_mode_rules SQLite table and driven by the AUTO_RUN_* IPC channels (both names are legacy — the feature was once called "Away Mode" — and stay byte-stable so existing installs keep working).

Where to find it

How to use it

1. Open Auto-replies in the left sidebar's Automation group (next to Automation Rules and Quick Replies).
2. The panel is a single scrollable list of your auto-reply rules with a sticky filter at the top (case-insensitive match against the trigger keyword, the reply text, and any linked snippet label). Each row collapses to a header (trigger + action badge + last-fired / fire count) and expands inline to its editor.
3. Click + New auto-reply in the header bar to create one: pick the condition type, enter the match value, then choose what happens when it matches from the action dropdown. Each action reveals only its own fields. Optionally fill Only in project. Save.
4. Flip a single rule on or off with the switch at the right of its row — a rule that is off stays in the list, dimmed, and never fires. The master switch in the view header (labelled Auto-replies) turns the whole engine on or off: with it off, no rule fires however its own switch is set. That master switch is the engine switch — separate from automationsEnabled, which only controls whether the Automation rows appear in the sidebar at all.

Where the rules also appear

Nowhere else — auto-replies are managed exclusively from this panel. A parallel Settings → Auto-replies page once mirrored the same away_mode_rules rows; it was removed as a duplicate of this list, and the master on/off switch was part of the page that went with it. That is why both switches live on this surface today, and why this page no longer sends you to Settings to find them.

How it behaves

Loop-safety for the billable actions

The two actions that spend money or re-drive the agent are loop-guarded:

• Start a new session — a session an auto-reply itself spawned can never trigger another spawn; the same rule can't fire twice for one session within a short window; and each rule may spawn at most 50 sessions/day, past which it pauses until local midnight and drops a deduped inbox card.
• Reply — a rule only matches the turn that just finished, and consecutive "no-progress" replies are capped (after which the reply is skipped and the session surfaces to you). A substantive turn resets that counter, so a productive hands-free run never trips it. Replies are not subject to the per-rule daily cap.

The other four actions (rename / archive / inbox note / organize) are cheap and don't re-drive the agent, so they need no cap.

Auto-replies vs Automation Rules

	Auto-replies	Automation Rules
Watches	a session's finished output (any engine)	incoming channel messages + session/PM events
Condition	one simple trigger	AND/OR operators or AI classification
Actions	exactly one (of six)	an ordered chain of up to 10
Table	away_mode_rules	automation_rules

Most people start with Auto-replies and reach for Automation Rules only when they need multi-step, condition-rich workflows (forwarding, AI triage, action chains).

Related

The heavy counterpart to this page is Automation Rules, the conditions-and-action-chain engine that shares the same Automation sidebar group and the same on/off toggle. The reply text an auto-reply injects is usually one of your saved snippets, covered in Quick Replies, and the triggers that schedule work rather than reacting to output are described in Cron session jobs.