4. Talking to Your Agent

Your agent is one thing; the ways to reach it are several. This chapter walks through the five built-in channels, how a conversation is organized into a session, and the four day-to-day actions you will keep wanting: send, attach, interrupt, resume.

4.1 The Five Channels

All five reach the same agent — same memory, same skills, same configuration. The only thing that differs is how the conversation looks on your screen.

4.2 What a Session Is

Every conversation is a session: a thread of messages with an ID, participants, and a status. A session is created automatically the first time you message an agent through a particular conversation context (a Telegram chat, a Slack thread, an interactive CLI invocation, …).

Sessions persist. You can close one, walk away, and resume it later — the agent picks up where you left off. The agent’s long-term memory survives across sessions, but a session’s own scrollback is private to that session.

4.3 The CLI Channel

hermit chat --agent main

You get a prompt. Type, press Enter, the agent streams its reply. Useful flags:

hermit chat --agent main --session <id>     # resume a specific session
hermit chat --agent main --resume           # resume your most recent session

While inside chat, press Ctrl-C once to interrupt the current reply (the agent stops mid-stream but the session stays open). Press it twice to exit.

4.4 The Web Channel

hermit web start

Open the URL it prints (default http://localhost:4310; the gateway it talks to listens on http://localhost:4000). Pick an agent in the sidebar, pick or create a session, type your message.

The web channel has a few things the CLI does not:

• File attachments — drag a file onto the chat to upload it into the agent’s workspace.
• Session list — every session you participated in, with previews.
• Streaming with markdown rendering — code blocks, tables, links render properly.
• Tool call transcripts — you can expand a step to see exactly what tool the agent called and what it got back.

4.5 Telegram, Discord, Slack

For these to work, the agent’s owner has to connect a bot token first (Chapter 17 · Channels).

Once connected:

• A direct message to the bot opens a session bound to your conversation.
• A group / channel message creates a group session including everyone who has posted (subject to access policy; see Chapter 13 · Access Levels).
• Replying to a thread keeps you in that thread’s session.

If you write to a freshly connected bot for the first time and the agent does not reply, you might be on the wrong side of access levels — ask the owner to add you as a member.

4.6 Four Things You Will Do Constantly

Send — just type.

Attach — drag a file into the web UI, or in Telegram/Slack/Discord attach a file natively. The agent sees the file in its workspace and can open, edit, or refer to it.

Interrupt — sometimes the agent goes off on the wrong path. To stop it:

• CLI: Ctrl-C during the reply.
• Web: click the Stop button next to the streaming message.
• Telegram/Discord/Slack: send a follow-up like “stop” or “wait” — the runner accepts steering messages mid-turn and will fold them into the next step. Hard interrupt is not available on chat channels.

Resume — most channels resume automatically (you message the same Telegram chat → you are in the same session). For the CLI, use --resume or --session <id>.

4.7 Role Differences

The same channel can show different things to different people:

• Owners see every session for the agent.
• Users see only sessions they participate in.
• Guests see only the session(s) they are part of, and the agent has a reduced toolset for them (no exec, no file editing — see the matrix in Chapter 5).

If you log in expecting to see a session and it is missing, it is usually because your role does not allow it.

4.8 How-to Recipes

4.8.1 Resume a session you left yesterday

Scenario — you closed your laptop in the middle of a CLI chat; today you want to pick it up.

Ways to do it

CLI:

hermit chat --agent main --resume

That drops you back into the most recent session for that agent.

Web: open the agent in the web UI; the most recent session is at the top of the sidebar.

Telegram/Slack/Discord: just send a new message in the same chat or thread. The runner re-hydrates the session automatically.

Verify — the agent’s first reply references something from yesterday’s exchange.

4.8.2 Start a fresh session even though you are on the same channel

Scenario — you are in a Telegram DM with the agent, and you want to switch topics cleanly without dragging the previous thread’s context along.

Ways to do it

• Telegram / Discord: tell the agent “let’s start fresh” — it will not automatically open a new session, but for cleanliness you can ask the owner (via Web UI or CLI) to close the current one. New messages then open a new session.
• Web: click New session in the sidebar.
• CLI: exit (Ctrl-C twice) and re-run hermit chat --agent main without --resume.

Verify — the new session has no scrollback and the agent does not reference old context (but it may still recall things stored in long-term memory; that is a feature, not a bug — see Chapter 6 · Memory).

4.8.3 Send a file and ask the agent about it

Scenario — you want the agent to read a CSV you have on disk.

Ways to do it

Web (easiest): drag the file into the chat window and type your question.

CLI: copy the file into the agent’s workspace path first (Chapter 10 · Files and Workspace), then reference it by name in your message.

Telegram/Slack/Discord: send the file as an attachment in the chat. The adapter writes it into the workspace and the agent gets a notification it has arrived.

Verify — ask “what columns are in <filename>?” — the agent should answer with the actual headers.

4.8.4 Interrupt a reply that is going the wrong way

Scenario — the agent has started doing the wrong thing (writing the wrong file, going down the wrong reasoning path) and you want to stop it before it finishes.

Ways to do it

• CLI/Web: hit the stop control mid-stream.
• Chat channels: send a one-line correction. The runner queues it as a steering message — it is inserted into the conversation before the agent’s next step, so the agent reads your correction and changes direction.

Verify — the agent acknowledges the change of direction in its next reply.

4.9 Pointers

• Connect a new channel: Chapter 17 · Channels.
• Manage who can use this agent: Chapter 12 · Inviting People.
• Why the agent forgets / does not forget across sessions: Chapter 6 · Memory.