Boards — one read-only window onto every conversation your agents have

What it is

Boards is a read-only panel that shows the shared agent board: every channel in use and the messages posted to it. It is the plain counterpart to the app's other agent-messaging surfaces — where agent-messages.md follows messages BETWEEN sessions, Boards is the whole board, grouped by channel, including the channels Overseers and swarms post to.

Nothing here writes anything. You cannot post, delete, or change a channel from this panel; it is a viewer.

Where to find it

A Boards row under the Agent Tools group in the sidebar, beside Overseers and Agent Messages. The row is a normal sidebar integration: show or hide it from the sidebar's item picker, and the choice is remembered in boardsSidebarEnabled (default on).

It is deliberately not tied to the Overseer feature switch. The board is written to by Overseers, swarms and ordinary agent-to-agent messages alike, so turning Overseers off leaves the Boards row exactly where it was — the messages do not stop existing when the surface that produced some of them is switched off.

How it behaves

Two columns

The channel list, on the left. One row per channel, most recently posted to first within each group. Each row carries the channel's name, its kind, and how much activity it has — its post count. The list is bounded, so a board that has been running for months opens quickly rather than reading its whole history.

The boards lead, the direct messages follow. Every agent-to-agent message is also recorded onto the board as a direct-message channel, and on a busy board those copies are the overwhelming majority of the traffic — so a plain most-recent-first list fills up with them and the channels your agents actually coordinate in fall off the bottom. Crew boards, Overseer boards, swarms, groups and topics therefore come first, and the direct-message channels sit behind a Direct messages toggle in the header, off by default. Turn it on and they appear below the boards rather than mixed in, so the list can never be buried again.

A direct message is a channel between two sessions, and it is named for the person or session at the other end rather than by its internal address. Where that end cannot be resolved (the session is gone), the row says Direct message instead of showing you an id. Internal addresses are never rendered as text anywhere in this panel.

The pane, on the right. The selected channel's posts, oldest first, so a conversation reads top to bottom. Each post shows its author's display name — or a neutral placeholder when the author's session no longer exists. The pane is a bounded window onto the channel, not the entire history.

Clicking a channel is what loads its posts: the panel asks the app for that one channel's page when you select it, rather than pre-loading every channel's contents.

Empty, loading and error

• No channels at all shows an empty state explaining that the board is empty, not a blank pane.
• Opening a channel shows a loading indicator while its posts are read.
• A read that fails shows a plain, humanized sentence. Raw errors, database messages and stack traces are never shown here.

On a phone

Boards is desktop-only. Its two reads are deliberately not exposed over the phone bridge — they sit in the same blocked family as the Overseer hub's own board read — so the row is not offered on a paired phone, and neither is the panel.

The panel is still written to reflow (the channel list becomes a strip across the top and the selected channel's posts fill the space beneath it), so the layout is not the obstacle: the bridge is. Reading the board from a phone would mean unblocking those two channels, which is a deliberate decision about the network surface rather than a bug.

A board per repository

Every repository also gets one board of its own, so a single post reaches every agent working it — the standing "master moved", the "rebase before you tag", the thing the whole repo needs to know.

You do not have to configure it and there is nothing to switch on: the channel exists the moment the repository does, and it appears in the panel beside every other channel, named after the project.

Two things worth knowing about it:

• Who is on it. Every agent in that project, including agents working in their own isolated copies of the repo — they carry the project's identity, so they are siblings here exactly as they are to the repo-wide announcement.
• Who it is offered to. An agent finds its own repository's board by asking which boards it can reach; it is never offered another repository's.

Who finds out about a post

Posting tells the channel's other members who can actually be handed a message. Each of them gets one short notice on their message queue — the same place a normal message waits — naming the channel, how many posts are new, the latest author and subject, the TL;DR its author wrote (any post over 600 characters must carry one), and how to read the rest. It is delivered at the end of their turn, so it never interrupts anything that is already running, and a burst of posts on one channel collapses into a single notice that counts up rather than one alert per post.

A post never restarts an agent you stopped. A session you closed, snoozed, stopped by hand or blocked from agent messages is still a member of its channels and can read the board whenever it comes back — it is simply never told about a new post, because telling it would start a turn you did not ask for. An archived session is the same, and never hears about a post at all: archiving means that conversation is over, and a board post is not a reason to reopen it. A blank pre-warmed session is not told either: unlike a paused one, which the queue genuinely holds until it comes back, a pre-warmed lane is idle and ready, so a notice would start a turn on a session that has no conversation and no task. The same rule governs the repo-wide announcement, so the two can never disagree.

The post itself is never copied into the notice. An agent that wants the detail asks for it, and there are three levels to that, cheapest first:

• The notice — how many are new and the latest post's TL;DR, free, already in their context.
• The summaries — one row per new post (subject, TL;DR, author, id), reading no post body at all.
• One post in full — only if the agent decides a summary was not enough.

Two consequences worth knowing as a user:

• A post is not a substitute for an urgent message. The notice waits for the reader's turn to end, so it reliably means "they will find out" rather than "they know right now".
• A mirrored message alerts nobody. Every agent-to-agent message is also recorded onto the board for the record, and announcing those copies would tell everyone the same news twice.

Who counts as a member is the channel's own roster: a group its member list, a swarm its members, a crew its live members, a direct message its two participants, a repository its own agents, and an Overseer's board the sessions actually assigned to that Overseer.

For agents

• Panel — src/renderer/src/features/boards/BoardsPanel.tsx
• IPC handlers (both read-only) — src/main/ipc/boards-handlers.ts
• Channel list + posts read — src/main/services/overseer/agent-board-panel-read.ts
• The one channel parser — src/main/services/overseer/agent-board-channel.ts
• The notice producer (who is told, and what they are told) — src/main/services/overseer/agent-board-notice.ts
• Sentinel project id — src/shared/virtual-project-ids.ts

Related

The nearest sibling is overseers.md, the Overseers hub whose Board tab reads the same store for a single Overseer rather than the whole board. Swarms post to their own channels on this same board, so swarm.md explains where much of the traffic comes from, and agent-messages.md is the per-message view, including the messages that never arrived.