Chat Guide

protege chat is a terminal-based inbox client for interacting with your agent locally. It doesn't introduce a new protocol — every message is stored as email-thread data in the persona's database, just like real email conversations.

Starting Chat

# Open the unified inbox (all personas)
protege chat

# Filter to one persona
protege chat --persona 5d52

# Jump directly to a specific thread
protege chat --thread thread_abc123

Views

Inbox View

The inbox shows all known threads across selected personas:

│ Research Assistant — Weekly Report
│ 2 minutes ago · alice@example.com
│ Here's your weekly summary...
│
  DevOps Bot — Server Alert
  15 minutes ago · ops@example.com
  All systems operational...

The blue bar (│) marks the selected thread.

Thread View

Press Enter to open a thread and see the full conversation:

• alice@example.com — 10:30 AM
  Can you research the latest Node.js release?

• agent@mail.protege.bot — 10:31 AM
  Node.js v22.x is the current LTS release...

Keybindings

Inbox

Key	Action
Up / Down	Move selection
Enter	Open selected thread
Ctrl+N	Create a new writable thread
Ctrl+V	Toggle light/verbose display mode
Ctrl+R	Refresh inbox
Ctrl+Q	Quit

Thread (Command Mode)

Key	Action
Esc	Back to inbox
i	Enter compose mode
Up / Down	Scroll thread
PageUp / PageDown	Fast scroll

Thread (Compose Mode)

Key	Action
Ctrl+S	Send message
Left / Right	Move cursor
Home / End	Jump to start/end of line
Backspace / Delete	Delete characters
Esc	Back to command mode

All keybindings are customizable in configs/system.json under chat.keymap.

Sending Messages

1. Press Ctrl+N to create a new writable thread
2. Press i to enter compose mode
3. Type your message
4. Press Ctrl+S to send

When you send:

1. Your message is persisted immediately in the database
2. Harness inference runs asynchronously
3. The agent's reply appears in the same thread once inference completes

Chat polls for new messages at the interval set in configs/system.json (chat.poll_interval_ms, default: 1500ms).

Display Modes

Toggle between modes with Ctrl+V:

• Light — shows sender and message body only
• Verbose — shows full email headers (from, to, subject, date, message ID) for each message

Local Addressing

Chat uses synthetic local email addresses:

• Your messages appear as user@localhost
• Agent responses appear as {persona_email_local_part}@localhost

This means chat threads are locally scoped — they don't go through the relay or real SMTP.

Logging

Chat writes structured events to the log file (configured in configs/system.json → logs_dir_path) without cluttering the TUI:

protege logs --scope chat --tail 100

Current Limitations

• Existing threads are read-only — only threads created inside chat (Ctrl+N) can receive new messages
• Poll-based updates — chat polls for new messages rather than receiving push updates
• No attachment UI — composing messages with attachments isn't supported in chat v1