ask-always-on-agent

A coding CLI session lives in a terminal; Frank cannot see it from his phone. The always-on paseo agents can be seen there: paseo's app runs on mobile, and a question an agent asks shows up in it. So when Frank is away from the terminal, a CLI session reaches him by sending its question to an always-on agent, which re-asks it in paseo. The always-on agent is a relay: it shows, it does not judge or answer.

When to use it

• Unanswered question. Your question tool returned with no answer (timeout, cancel, headless run), or the question has waited 15 minutes. This is the only time you message an always-on agent on your own. In a herdr pane you need not count: the ask-watchdog LaunchAgent (~/coding-agent/devops/ask-watchdog/README.md) relays a pane blocked on any dialog for 15 minutes and types the answer back.
• Explicit hand-off. The user says to ask, tell, message or hand work to one of the agents.

Which agent

Agent	Topic	Runs on
coding-agent	engineering, coding, the fleet, products	mac-mini-m2, mac-mini-m6, dev-server-frank-lume, archs-mac-mini
personal-agent	Frank's personal life	mac-mini-m2 only

For an unanswered question, pick by folder: a session under ~/personal-agent sends to personal-agent; any other folder sends to coding-agent. For an explicit hand-off, pick by topic; when the topic is unclear or mixed, ask the user which agent before sending.

The script finds the agent by its label keepalive=<name> on this host's paseo daemon, and follows the name to its home host (ssh://mac-mini-m2 or ssh://mac-mini-m6) when it is not here. It prints one stderr line when it does. Pass --host <endpoint> to choose the daemon yourself; then it never falls back.

The script

~/.agents/skills/ask-always-on-agent/scripts/ask-always-on-agent [--host <endpoint>] <name> [paseo send options] [prompt]

Everything after <name> goes to paseo send unchanged. The script waits until the agent is idle again, through any question the agent asks in paseo, then prints the agent's tagged reply. There is no timeout. --prompt-file <path> sends a long message; --image <path> attaches a screenshot; --behavior interrupt cuts into a busy agent (default steer queues behind its current turn); --no-wait returns at once, then paseo logs -f <id> shows the reply.

Escalate an unanswered question

1. Write the message from this template, with the question and its options verbatim:

   Show Frank this question with your AskUserQuestion tool, verbatim with these options.
   Do not answer it yourself. Reply with only his answer.
   
   Context: <what this session is doing, in one or two sentences>. Folder: <cwd>.
   My recommended option: <label>.
   
   Question: <the question>
   Options:
   - <label>: <description>
   - <label>: <description>
   

2. Send it, with --prompt-file for a long one:

   ~/.agents/skills/ask-always-on-agent/scripts/ask-always-on-agent coding-agent --prompt-file /tmp/question.md
   

   The command returns when Frank answers in paseo; that can take hours. Wait.

3. Take the reply as Frank's answer and continue. Your next message to the user says, in full: the question waited 15 minutes, so it was relayed through <agent> on <host>; Frank answered it through paseo (mobile); and this is the answer you are acting on.

4. If the command fails or the reply is empty, stop and keep waiting for the user. Do not take your own recommended option.

Every message gets a reply tag at its end, and the script prints only the reply that begins with that tag. The always-on agent is a shared inbox, so an untagged reply is someone else's turn.

Hand off a task

Send the task as a plain message, no relay wording. The agent runs in bypassPermissions and acts on it. Relay its reply to the user as written, with one line naming the agent and host. End the message with the address the agent can reach you at later:

Reply-to: herdr <hostname -s> <$HERDR_PANE_ID>     # when HERDR_ENV=1
Reply-to: tmux <hostname -s> <$TMUX_PANE>          # otherwise

Reverse channel

paseo send goes one way. Every coding CLI session runs in herdr or tmux, so the always-on agent reaches a session by typing into its pane, at the Reply-to address from the hand-off. Both commands work from the paseo agent, which runs in no pane: herdr and tmux find their sockets by default path for the same user.

• herdr: herdr agent prompt <pane> '<text>'. When in doubt that the pane still hosts the agent, herdr agent get <pane> first; a closed pane errors agent_not_found, and pane ids are never reused.
• tmux: tmux send-keys -t <pane> -l '<text>'; sleep 0.3; tmux send-keys -t <pane> Enter. The pause stops a TUI from swallowing the Enter.
• Another host: prefix either command with ssh <host>, using the ~/.ssh/config alias.

The text lands as typed input and queues behind a busy agent's current turn. Keep it to one line, or write a file and send its path with one line saying what to do with it.

As the always-on agent: answer a hand-off at its Reply-to address this way. A hand-off with no Reply-to gets only the reply to its own message.

If it fails

• no agent labelled keepalive=<name>: the keepalive job is not loaded on that host (launchctl list | grep keepalive), or the daemon is down (paseo daemon status). See ~/coding-agent/devops/paseo-keepalive/README.md.
• more than one agent labelled: the job made a duplicate; archive one by hand, same README.
• Cannot connect to daemon with --host: the endpoint must be host:port, ssh://host, or a pairing URL.