article feature
Agent messaging: family routing and safety limits
Agent messages route between parent, direct children, and siblings in the same nuclear family; grandchild or cousin messages must relay through an intermediate agent. As of v0.7.0, delivery-mode options were removed and all messages steer. The daemon enforces size, rate, and pending-queue limits.
Pinned repository file/line or test referenced in the audit.
Family routing
Agent messages can travel between a parent and direct child or between siblings that share the same parent. The runtime does not provide direct grandchild or cousin routing, so wider coordination must follow the session tree through a relay.
The scope gives each recipient a clear family relationship to the sender. It is narrower than a global broadcast channel and should be designed into any multi-agent workflow.
Delivery semantics
In v0.7.1, a delivered agent message steers the recipient. Callers no longer choose among older delivery modes to distinguish a follow-up from steering behavior.
Because a message can affect the recipient's next work, send concise, relevant updates and avoid treating the channel as a passive log sink. Files remain available when the payload is better consumed as an artifact than as immediate steering.
Rate and queue limits
The daemon bounds message size, send rate, and the number of pending messages. These controls protect the local coordination path from unbounded traffic but can throttle or reject an overly chatty workflow.
- Keep each message focused enough to fit the size boundary.
- Coalesce repeated status updates instead of flooding the queue.
- Use files for large result sets and message only the location and conclusion.
v0.7.0 changes
Version 0.7.0 removed the delivery-mode options shown in older examples. All messages now use steering semantics, so launch-era calls that pass mode="follow_up" describe an obsolete API shape.
When adapting old snippets, remove the mode assumption and review the workflow for the stronger effect of every delivered message. The route is reviewed against v0.7.1, not the launch article's original interface.
What this does not mean
Family messaging is not unrestricted communication, guaranteed delivery under unlimited load, or shared memory. Agents still have separate histories and kernels, and non-family recipients require relays.
The presence of queue limits also means that successful send patterns at small scale should not be extrapolated to arbitrary message volume.