chat

One agent, one session, and every line typed between turns is a turn of it. This is talking to a coding agent with no loop around it: the flow does what it is told and then waits to be told again. It is what the terminal interface opens on, so that saying something is all it takes to start.

hmz exec -f chat -a claude/claude-opus-5:high "what does this repository do?"

chat

Saying something to the person is asking what to say next. Answered with nothing — a command line, nobody at the prompt — the flow does the one thing it was given and stops.

Two agents, and the second is you

chat drives an assistant and a person. Saying something to the person is asking what to say next, and what they answer with is what they typed:

conversation = agents.assistant.new()
said = task
while said:
    answered = conversation(said, suppress=True)
    said = agents.human(answered)

Which is why the same flow works with nobody at a prompt. Run from a command line the person answers with nothing, the loop ends, and chat has done the one thing it was given. /afk and a shell script are the same thing to it, and that is deliberate.

A line typed while a turn is running goes into that turn rather than becoming another one — that is true under any flow, and Steering is how.

What it keeps

Nothing. What was said is the conversation, and the backend that ran it logged it turn by turn. A session is opened rather than reopened, so starting this again is another conversation rather than the last one carried on. To read one back, collect the trace or export the transcript.

See also

• Many conversations at once — chat is one of them; the interface holds several
• The person as an agent — what agents.human is, and what it does unattended
• ralph_loop — the same one agent, with a loop around it