message-project

name	message-project
description	Forward a message from the user to a specific named project-lead and read the lead's reply. Use when the user says "tell <project> to ...", "ask <project> about ...", or "<project>: ...".
allowed-tools	["mcp__project-orchestrator__send_to_project","Bash(tmux -L soma-lead-*:*)"]

message-project

Project-leads are NOT teammates of the channel bot. Each lead is an independent claude process in its OWN tmux server (socket soma-lead-<name>, session soma-proj-<name>, in a sibling cgroup). CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1 only lets a lead spawn its own subagents; it does NOT federate the lead into the bot's team. So SendMessage(to: "soma-proj-<name>") always fails with "No agent named ... is currently addressable", and there is no push-back channel from a lead back to the bot. Therefore: deliver by typing into the lead's tmux pane, and read the reply by scraping that pane.

If you are the channel bot, do NOT run this skill inline. The reply-poll in step 3 is unbounded (the lead may think for minutes) and would freeze the Telegram channel. Dispatch a background Agent (run_in_background=true, model="opus") whose prompt is to run this flow and return the lead's reply, ack the user immediately, and relay the reply when the agent completes — see "Messaging a project-lead" in system_prompts/responsive_bot.md. Run the steps below inline only when you are already a background/non-channel agent (e.g. that dispatched agent, or a project-lead talking to another lead).

Process

1. Resolve + validate. Extract the target project name from the user's message, then call mcp__project-orchestrator__send_to_project(name, message). This DELIVERS NOTHING -- use it only to (a) confirm the project exists (it raises no project named X otherwise) and (b) confirm the bare name. From the bare name the tmux coordinates are fixed:

   • socket: soma-lead-<name>
   • session: soma-proj-<name>

2. Deliver the message with two SEPARATE tmux calls -- type the literal text, then submit. Combining the text and Enter into one call is unreliable.

   Shell-safety: the user's text is arbitrary (it may contain ', ", $, backticks, #, newlines). Wrap the whole message in SINGLE quotes and escape any embedded single quote as '\''. This is exactly what shlex.quote produces; inside single quotes every other character is literal, so nothing can expand or break out of the argument.

   # type the message literally (-l = literal text, no key-name interpretation)
   tmux -L soma-lead-<name> send-keys -t soma-proj-<name> -l '<safely-quoted message>'
   # submit it as a SEPARATE call
   tmux -L soma-lead-<name> send-keys -t soma-proj-<name> C-m
   

   Worked example -- message is: what's the $STATUS of build #3?

   tmux -L soma-lead-f1-tracker send-keys -t soma-proj-f1-tracker -l 'what'\''s the $STATUS of build #3?'
   tmux -L soma-lead-f1-tracker send-keys -t soma-proj-f1-tracker C-m
   

   If the text lands in the prompt but doesn't submit, send one more C-m after ~1s as a fallback. If the message spans multiple lines, send it as one -l call (single quotes preserve the newlines) -- but note each newline is delivered as an Enter, so the lead may treat lines as separate inputs; to keep a multi-line message as one turn, collapse it to a single line first.

3. Read the reply by scraping the pane (there is no reply bus). Give the lead a few seconds, then capture its pane; poll up to a few times if it's still thinking:

   sleep 4
   tmux -L soma-lead-<name> capture-pane -p -t soma-proj-<name>
   

   capture-pane -p returns the visible screen -- the lead's most recent output -- so just read the last lines of it for the response. For more scrollback, add -S -<N> (e.g. -S -80 to start ~80 lines back). If the footer still shows the lead working/thinking, sleep again and re-capture. (Deliberately no | tail: the bare capture is already the tail, which keeps this skill's only shell dependency the single tmux -L soma-lead-* pattern. The pane is a live TUI, so expect box-drawing and a prompt footer around the text.)

4. Report to the user: relay the lead's response. If it's still working after a couple of polls, say the message was delivered and the lead is still processing.

Error handling

• send_to_project raises no project named X: the project doesn't exist (or already died and was reconciled out). Offer the closest match from list_projects and ask the user to confirm.
• A tmux call prints can't find session or no server running on ...: the lead's session has died even if the registry still listed it. Tell the user the lead isn't running and offer to respawn it (spawn-project).