Multi-agent

Multi-agent conversations let a second agent speak into an existing conversation as a guest. A guest turn is a first-class message from the guest agent; it is not a tool call, a delegation, or a paraphrase.

Guest turns

A guest turn runs a named guest agent against the primary conversation’s history and appends the guest’s response to that history. The primary agent of the conversation is unchanged.

A guest turn is requested by setting StreamMsg.guest to the name of the guest agent. The conversation is still addressed by the primary’s (agent, sender) pair; guest selects who speaks on this turn, not whose conversation it is.

Flow

When StreamMsg { agent: A, sender: S, guest: G, content: C } is dispatched:

1. The conversation (A, S) is resolved, creating it if necessary.
2. The user content C is appended to the history.
3. The daemon runs agent G against the history using G’s system prompt and instructions.
4. The response is appended to the history, tagged with agent: G.

The primary agent is not invoked on a guest turn. A subsequent StreamMsg without guest resumes normal operation with the primary agent against the updated history.

Tools on guest turns

A guest turn is text-only. The guest agent’s tool schemas are not attached to the request, and any tool call emitted by the guest is rejected.

Tool-using work belongs to the primary agent. A guest is a voice in the conversation, not a worker.

Attribution

Each message in the history carries an agent field.

• agent empty — the message originates from the conversation’s primary agent.
• agent non-empty — the message originates from a guest. The value is the guest agent’s name.

Attribution survives compaction: archive entries preserve the agent field of each archived message.

Framing

When building a request, the runtime auto-injects framing messages that are not persisted between runs. Two framings exist:

• Guest framing. Injected when a guest is running. It tells the guest that it is joining a conversation and explains the <from agent="..."> tag convention.
• Primary framing. Injected when the primary is running and the history contains at least one message with a non-empty agent. It tells the primary that some messages are from guest agents and it should continue responding as itself.

Framing messages are marked auto-injected. They are stripped from the history at the start of each run and re-injected for that run only. The history on disk never contains framing messages.

Tagging

Assistant messages with a non-empty agent field are prefixed with <from agent="{name}"> when they appear in an LLM request. The prefix makes the speaker visible to whichever agent is currently reading the history.

A message without an agent field carries no prefix.

Cancellation

KillMsg addresses the conversation by (agent, sender). It cancels whichever run is in flight, whether that run is the primary or a guest. A cancelled guest turn leaves the user’s content appended to the history; the guest’s partial response is discarded.