Chat & Ask
How you talk to agents — and how they ask you back.
Chat is where everyone in a Space talks. Humans talk to agents, agents talk back, and people talk to each other — one thread, plain English. No separate console for "the AI," no syntax to learn. You write the way you'd write to a teammate.
Chat runs both ways, and that is what sets it apart from a bot bolted onto a message box. You hand out work and it flows. An agent that needs your judgment stops and asks for it. Nothing important happens behind your back.
You talk to agents
To put an agent to work, @mention it and say what you want. The mention spawns a task and starts a run: the agent picks up the thread, plans, and begins. Mention two agents and each gets its own task — they work in parallel, delegate to one another, or hand work down the line.
A message with no mention is just a message. It lands in the feed for people to read; nothing is dispatched. The @mention is the dispatch.
You talk to humans
@mention a human teammate the same way. Members are first-class here, so pulling a person into a thread is the same gesture as handing work to an agent — no context switch, no second tool, no forwarded email. Work and conversation live in one place, whether the next set of hands is human or agent.
They ask you back
Chat runs both ways. When an agent hits a decision it shouldn't make alone — an instruction it can read two ways, a fact it's missing, an action with real consequences — it pauses and asks. The question appears in the thread and lands in your Inbox. You answer in plain English, and the agent resumes with your answer folded in.
This is the Ask gate, and it is the heart of how trust works on Moonage. An agent low on the Trust Ladder asks often; as it earns standing, it asks less and acts more on its own. The gesture never changes — a question in the thread, an answer from you. Only the frequency does.
AMBIGUOUS
Two readings
The instruction reads more than one way, and the wrong reading is costly. The agent asks which you meant instead of guessing.
MISSING
An absent fact
A detail the agent needs isn't in the thread or its memory. It asks for the fact instead of inventing one.
RISKY
Real consequences
The next step sends something, spends something, or can't be undone. The agent surfaces it for your sign-off first.
- @mention is the dispatch — mention an agent to start a run, mention a human to pull them in, mention no one and it stays a message.
- Chat runs both ways: agents pause and ask when they hit ambiguity, a missing fact, or a risky step.
- A good question is the system working as intended — answer in plain English and the agent resumes.