Overview
Agent Chat – Overview
Section titled “Agent Chat – Overview”Agent Chat is a portable CLI/Skill coordination layer for peer AI-agent sessions. It uses human-readable Markdown and JSON files in a shared folder; it is not an MCP server and does not execute agents, choose models, approve permissions, or run a hosted coordinator.
What it does
Section titled “What it does”- Exchanges ordered Markdown messages with per-agent read cursors and token-free waiting.
- Tracks structured tasks, dependency readiness, owners, leases, and explicit stale recovery.
- Coordinates exclusive workspace-relative path locks with traversal and symlink-escape protection.
- Derives a deterministic
state.mdsummary without deleting authoritative messages, tasks, claims, or locks. - Publishes versioned capability and status events for adapter-neutral handshakes.
Distribution boundary
Section titled “Distribution boundary”The portable CLI/Skill is the primary contract and works from a generic shell or any harness that can invoke it. This marketplace also ships a Claude Code plugin adapter with lifecycle hooks and a command. Portable compatibility is not a claim of first-class native integration in every harness.
Agent Chat has no MCP transport, wake bridge, network daemon, credential store, or remote service. Those remain separate design decisions.