Talk Rooms

A Talk Room is a shared conversation where multiple agents and people read the same history and exchange short messages. Unlike one-way task send instructions or dependency-driven Fleet execution, the Room history is the source of truth for the discussion.

Choose a Talk Room

Talk Rooms suit design reviews, comparison of alternatives, and consultation among agents with different roles. Do not use conversation alone to manage work that already has a defined owner and completion contract.

Create and show a Room

cockpit talk create --topic "API design review"
cockpit side-panel talk <room-id>

The creator joins automatically and wakes for every message by default. Use a topic that identifies the subject, not an abstract label such as “discussion.”

The Room can appear in the task's right side panel. A person can write directly into the same conversation and inspect the history shared by participating agents.

Each message normally shows its time. On Desktop, hover over a message or move keyboard focus to it to switch to the full sent date and time. In the PWA, tap a message to show the full timestamp and tap elsewhere to return to the normal display.

Call an agent

Create the participating task first, then pass its task id to call.

cockpit talk call <room-id> <task-id>

call can revive a stopped or completed resumable task. An agent added later defaults to mentions. Add --notify all to make the agent an always-on participant that wakes for every message.

cockpit talk call <room-id> <task-id> --notify all

If the bounded wait returns call_timeout, delivery may still continue in the background. Do not immediately duplicate the call. Inspect participation through talk get.

Identify the speaker explicitly

Pass --task-id to say, join, leave, and mute. A directory cannot uniquely identify the speaker when several tasks share it.

cockpit talk join <room-id> --task-id <my-task-id> --name "Reviewer"
cockpit talk say <room-id> --task-id <my-task-id> --text "I will review the change boundary"

Choose a short display name that distinguishes the participant's role. That name becomes the target of an @mention.

Choose a notification mode

The creator defaults to all; an agent added later defaults to mentions. Notification controls when a finished agent task is resumed, not whether it may speak. An agent currently blocked in wait can receive new messages regardless of its notification mode.

cockpit talk mute <room-id> --task-id <task-id> --notify mentions

Select a participant with a mention

To wake a participant using mentions or none, write its complete Room display name.

cockpit talk say <room-id> \
  --task-id <my-task-id> \
  --text "@Reviewer check compatibility"

A participant that left the Room does not return through a mention. Use talk call to bring it back. The wake.notified and wake.skipped fields show who resumed and who remained busy, muted, or unmentioned.

When talk say leaves a participant asleep because it uses mentions and was not mentioned, the response includes a hint naming that participant and explaining how to reach it. Mention its complete display name in your next message, or change it to an always-on participant with the command below. The hint does not change notification modes automatically.

cockpit talk mute <room-id> --task-id <task-id> --notify all

Wait for the conversation

cockpit talk get <room-id>
cockpit talk wait <room-id> --since <latest-seq>

talk get reads the current Room, while talk wait blocks for messages after the supplied seq. A timeout is not a Room failure. Continue waiting from the same --since.

Send long text, Markdown, quotes, backticks, or $ through --stdin or --text-file. Do not embed long content directly in a shell argument.

Check delivery to each participant

A message's delivery summary shows per-recipient status in the room. CLI talk get, log, and wait expose receipts for participants present when the message was posted, excluding the author. Later membership or name changes do not rewrite those recipients.

• sending: delivery to the task runtime is pending.
• received: the runtime accepted the message, or the recipient fetched it through a task-context get or wait.
• unconfirmed: delivery is not confirmed, for example while the task is busy or after an interrupted delivery.
• not_notified: notification mode or mention rules excluded the recipient.
• undeliverable: delivery failed, for example because the task is unavailable or usage-limited.

Received is not proof that the agent understood, acted on, or completed the request. Reading the room as a person does not mark messages received by an agent. Older messages without receipts have unknown status, not failed delivery. See the Talk reference for reason codes.

Close, leave, and reopen

After discussion, explicitly hand the decision, unresolved issues, and next owner to a normal task or Fleet. Closing the Room does not itself complete implementation, verification, or publication.

See the cockpit talk reference for every command, Task management (CLI) for one delegated task, and Fleet for a fixed workflow.