---
id: agent-coordination/turn-a-chat-into-a-commander-or-a-bot
title: 'Turn an ordinary chat into a commander or a bot, carrying its context along'
theme: agent-coordination
status: open
created: 2026-08-27
date_source: stated
order: 4
---

**Every chat should have a "turn into commander" / "turn into bot" action, carrying the conversation's
context into the new one.** Wanted 2026-08-27. The case: a conversation has already built up real
context — you were investigating something, chatting through a problem — and only partway through does
it become clear this should be a standing watcher or a standing job, rather than something to
re-explain from a blank commander or bot.

**Bot and commander are two real, different things today, not one feature with two names** — worth
being precise about which is meant when this is built. Both are just "a conversation whose working
directory is set to a special folder", per `permissions/registry.ts:312`: _"a bot IS a conversation
whose working directory is `bots/`."_ But their briefs are opposite in size on purpose
(`api/bots/brief.ts`'s own comment): **a bot is one sentence and a watch, arm-on-first-message, no
interview.** **A commander is a job** — procedures, a ledger, a dispatch policy, a setup conversation.
So "turn into bot" and "turn into commander" are different destinations with different expectations of
how much ceremony happens next, not two labels for the same button.

**The real obstacle, and it is structural, not a missing button:** both are created fresh today.
`POST /command-hq/commanders/new` takes a `prompt`, a `name`, a `referencePath` — nothing that accepts
an existing conversation's history — and starts a **new** transcript in the commander's own directory.
Bots work the same way. And a Claude Code transcript's identity is scoped to the working directory it
started in (verified this session: `~/.claude/projects/<slug-of-cwd>/<id>.jsonl`) — so there is no
"just move this transcript" version of this feature. An ordinary `/chat` session's transcript lives at
a different cwd than `commanders/<id>/` or `bots/`, and nothing repoints one transcript's directory
after the fact.

So "carrying context" has to mean actually transplanting something into the new session, and which
something is the design question to settle before building, not after:

- **Replay the full transcript** into the new commander/bot's directory as its opening — complete, but
  potentially large, and a commander/bot's brief is deliberately short (arm-on-first-message for a bot;
  a lean setup conversation for a commander) — dumping a long unrelated history in front of that
  may work against the brief's own point.
- **Summarize** what happened and seed the new session with the summary as its first message —
  cheaper, but a summary is a lossy claim about a conversation, the same caveat this platform's own
  email-recall design already states about summarizing versus retrieving.
- Some hybrid: summary up front, full transcript kept alongside as a file the new session can go read
  if it needs the detail rather than carrying it in every future turn's context.

Related, not the same problem: `sub-agents/an-api-endpoint-for-spawning-an-agent-with-a` already
answered "how do you start a commander from code" (`POST /api/sub-agents/spawn` / commander creation) —
this item is specifically about carrying an EXISTING conversation's context across that boundary, which
neither existing endpoint does.