---
id: agent-delivery/generalise-it-deliver-a-turn-to-a-named
title: 'Generalise it: deliver a turn to a named session, from anywhere in the backend'
theme: agent-delivery
status: done
created: 2026-08-21
date_source: stated
order: 1
---

**Generalise it: deliver a turn to a named session, from anywhere in the backend.** Wanted
2026-08-21 — "ideal" is the owner's word for it. Today the only server-side caller is the nudger,
and delivery is welded to its schedule: a row in `nudges`, one per (user, session), a fixed
message, a tick. What the dispatcher, the file watchers and Command HQ all want instead is a plain
verb — _here is some text, deliver it to session X_ — with the schedule, if any, belonging to the
caller.

Two things already established and worth not re-deriving. The nudger's `checkSafe` holds three
refusals — not live, live but generating, another live session in the same directory — and the
comments above it carry why each one is there. And "not live" is the case that differs by caller:
the nudger refuses (nudging a dead session would CREATE an agent, which is not what nudge means),
while a dispatcher handing over five todos does want it created.

---

**Closed 2026-08-23.** Answered from both ends, and neither needed the general verb this asked for.

`SendMessage` delivers agent-to-agent with `notify_when_idle` replacing a poll — proven that night by one
session taking over the localisation hand-off from the owner, who had been relaying prompts by hand. And the
nudger delivers backend-to-session on a schedule, which is what a commander now uses to wake its own
conversation and report to the owner rather than into a job panel nobody reads.

The two together cover what was wanted. What remains genuinely missing is spawning a NEW session from a
non-chat caller — a shell loop, a plugin, a background job — and that is
`todo/sub-agents/an-api-endpoint-for-spawning-an-agent-with-a`, which stays open. The harness `Agent` tool
does not close it: it is available to a chat agent and to nothing else, which is exactly why a commander's
loop shells out to `claude -p` by hand.

The pattern is written down as an affordance now — `capabilities/affordances/officer/core/coordinating-another-agent.md`.