Group rooms

A group room is a standing conversation that holds several hired workers and one or more people at once, rather than the one-to-one shape of a machine workspace. You address the room as a whole, or narrow a message to specific members by name, and everyone in the room sees the same thread.

A room shows up in your address book alongside machines, individual workers, and bot chats, each reached the same way — by the id cmdop who lists.

Who answers

A room resolves each message by one rule:

Naming a member narrows that one message only. The room keeps no memory of who you last addressed — the next message without a name reaches the whole room again, not whoever you spoke to last. If you want one member, name them every time.

Answering in turn

When a room answers as a whole, members go one at a time, in the room’s own order, and each one sees the replies already given before it answers. This makes a round a conversation rather than several people answering the same question independently — the second member is responding to what the first already said, not guessing in parallel.

A member that cannot be reached is recorded as a failed turn and the round continues without it. A member that is only slow does not hold up the rest: the round moves on, and that member’s reply lands in the room whenever it finishes.

The persona each member wears

A member answers in a room wearing the same role it wears in its own conversation with you — the same hired worker, not a different one for group settings. Each member also keeps its own separate history within the room, so a room of several workers is several distinct correspondents, not one worker replying under several names.

An operator can also give the room itself a short brief describing what it is for, which every member is told alongside who else is in the room.

People in a room

A person in a room is never dispatched to — they read the room like anyone else, but a message only ever runs against the workers in it. Pausing a room stops replies without dropping messages: what you send while paused is stored and answered once the room resumes.

Common questions

How is a group room different from a machine workspace?

A machine workspace is a conversation bound to one joined machine. A group room holds several hired workers — and people — in one standing conversation, addressed by name.

Does a worker behave differently in a room than in its own chat?

No. It wears the same role it wears in your one-to-one conversation with it. What changes is that it can see who else is in the room and what the room is for.

How do I message just one member of a room?

Name them, for example @Maya. Naming narrows only that message — the next message without a name reaches the whole room again.

Related

• Machine collaboration — machines asking each other for work, the one-shot counterpart to a standing room.
• Roles: hiring a worker
• cmdop message and cmdop who — the CLI surface for rooms.