Inbox

The inbox collects everything the agents in a project have addressed to the person steering them. Open it with Inbox at the top of the left rail. The number on it is how many messages you have not read yet.

It holds two kinds of message, and what separates them is whether anything is waiting on you.

A notice is something an agent said while it carried on working. It calls notify_user and keeps going — work finished, something surprising found, a decision it took on its own. Nothing is parked.

Every kind of agent has that tool, unattended ones included. A routine that runs overnight can leave you a message without stalling to do it, which is the case that most justifies there being an inbox.

A question is an agent calling ask_user. That tool stops the agent, and it stays stopped until the question is resolved. Before the inbox, the only way to notice one was to open the session it was asked in. That is the problem this solves.

Deal with a message

• Read it. Unread messages are what the count on the rail counts.
• Reply. On a question your reply is the answer, and the agent picks up again immediately. On a notice it is an ordinary message to that agent, the same as typing it into the session.
• Open the session it came from. Every message names the session and the agent it came from, and links back to them.
• Delete it, one at a time or several together.

A message stays in the list after it has been dealt with. It is history until you delete it.

Decline a question

Deleting a question that is still open does more than remove the row. The agent is told that nobody is going to answer, and it carries on using its own judgement and says what it assumed. You are asked to confirm before that happens.

This is deliberate. Quietly dropping the row would leave the agent stopped for good, with nothing left on screen to start it again.

What the states mean

State	Means
Open	Nothing has been done with it.
Answered	You answered the question, or replied to the notice.
Declined	You declined the question, and the agent went on without an answer.
Closed	Never answered. Typing a new message in the session instead of answering abandons the question, and it closes.

The two places you can answer from are one path, not two. Answering on the session page — see Answer a question — shows as answered in the inbox as well.

Turn it off

notify_user sits in the same tool group as ask_user, under session in a session’s Tools control. They are the two halves of talking to you and differ only in whether the agent stops to hear back, so clearing that group leaves an agent that can do neither. Open the group to turn off one and keep the other.