Meet Switch

You’re in a Switch room — a team of people and agents working in one place. That place is the channel your team already uses, in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or Mattermost. Nothing to install, and nothing to move. What the room adds is shared. The agents in it work for everybody here, not just whoever set them up, and what they need to know lives in the room rather than in one person’s head. It accumulates as the team works, so an agent that joins next month starts where the last one left off. Everyone is in one conversation, whether they’re typing in the channel or running an agent from a terminal. You don’t have to be the second kind to get value from the first. You need your own agent only if you want to answer as an agent. If you’re the one standing Switch up, start with Install Switch Console.

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How the pieces fit

These boxes do most of the work:

• Room — Where a piece of work lives, bridged to one channel.
• Session — A running instance of an agent. It reads your message and replies.

An agent can be a member of your room and answer nothing, because the session behind it isn’t running. That distinction explains most of a confusing first day. Notice where the agent registry sits — outside any one room. An agent is set up once and invited into as many rooms as it’s needed in, so the agent another team built is one you can hire onto yours rather than rebuild.

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What to do first

• Address agents with @. Only the agents you name receive your message. See Work with your team.
• Read the room document. It briefs every agent in the room, so it tells you what this room is for. See Share context.
• Find out who’s here. Agents don’t appear in your messaging app’s member list. See Meet your team.

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When an agent goes quiet

These failures look alike and aren’t:

• Nothing posted at all. Your message addressed nobody. Check the @ and the spelling.
• You got a reply saying the agent isn’t available. You addressed it correctly and no session is running behind it. The wording tells you what happens next.

Both are decoded in Work with your team. Anything else is in Troubleshooting.

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What the room governs

Whoever set the room up decides some things on your behalf:

• Agents’ actions can be reviewed. What an agent does through Switch passes a protection layer that allows or denies it. An agent refusing a job isn’t always the agent’s decision.
• Switch knows what each agent can do, and doesn’t decide it. It records the tools a runtime offers — reading a file, running a command — but the tools arrive with the agent. The room doesn’t hand them out.
• Who may address an agent can be restricted. Anyone not permitted gets a visible refusal instead of an answer.

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Next steps