How our two AI teammates share Slack: who drives each thread, what the stickers and reactions mean, how they review each other, and the no-bandage-fix rule.
20 October 2026 · Agent Smith and Trinity · live in the agent-smith repo · ADR-0071 and ADR-0070
Every thread has one driver. Both agents acknowledge every message, and neither ships a fix the other hasn't checked. Correction, 20 Oct: the driver sticker is not placed on every thread yet. Today it appears only when Smith hands an alert to Trinity. Stamping it whenever a driver is decided is being built now.
| Situation | Driver | Helper |
|---|---|---|
| Gera's area (agent fleet, Smith, docs, most of the app) | Agent Smith | Trinity reviews |
| Fede's area (Clara, voice, AppFolio sync, customer setup) | Trinity | Smith reviews |
| Anything in #alerts | Smith triages first, then keeps it or hands it to Trinity | The other agent |
| You disagree with the pick | Whoever you sticker by hand | A hand sticker always wins |
The area comes from the systems catalog: which repo the problem lives in and who owns it.
| Signal | Where | Means |
|---|---|---|
| driver sticker | Reaction on the thread's first message (today: only on alerts handed to Trinity; every thread soon) | This agent owns the thread and will drive it to done |
| driver card | One short message, edited in place | Subject · driver · whose work · status: investigating, planning, driving, in review, done |
| 👀 | On your message | Seen, and the agent is acting on it |
| 👌 | On your message | Seen, nothing needed from the agent |
| Alert ID: … · ALR-xxxxxxxx | Last line of every alert | Search it in Slack to find every past firing and fix |
👍 stays reserved for approving held messages, so the agents never use it.
| Rule | What happens |
|---|---|
| Take turns | Each agent waits until the other's reply is marked final before answering it. If it waits too long, it answers and says the other reply is still pending. |
| Alert hand-off | When an alert is Fede's area, Smith CCs Trinity and puts her sticker on it. |
| Cross-review | Before a fix merges, the other agent critiques it: is this a bandage or a real fix, will it come back, does it fix the whole class of problem? |
| Ask each other | The helper can be asked for input or confirmation anytime. The driver posts the answer. |
| Earlier fixes that didn't hold | What the driver must do |
|---|---|
| None | Fix it, with a test showing the alert's condition is gone |
| One | Explain why the last fix failed, then fix the whole class, not just this instance |
| Two or more | No more patches. Write a design doc and bring the decisions to a human |
Before every alert fix, Smith now looks up past attempts for that Alert ID. Quieting an alarm that was already "fixed" in the last two weeks needs a human ✅. Alerts and fixes run on Opus 5.5.
| Item | Status |
|---|---|
| Trinity on the new rules | needs a pull on Fede's machine Until then both agents keep the old rule, which is safe. |
| Driver stickers | being built Gera picked the existing :agent-smith: and :trinity: emoji. Stamping them on every thread with a driver is in progress. |
| Trinity answering follow-ups in #alerts | Fede-side setting Today she picks alerts up from the hand-off note. |
Decision record: ADR-0071 (team protocol) and ADR-0070 (alert IDs), agentflow. Built 19–20 October 2026 in the agent-smith repo, which both agents run.