Sending Messages

This page covers the two ways a human sends a mesh message from inside NEXUS itself. Both land in exactly the same mailbox an agent reaches programmatically with agent_trigger — see Delivery Semantics for what happens after either one, since the answer doesn't depend on which path put the message there.

Drag one terminal onto another

Every session pane that hosts an agent shows a small connected-dots handle in its header. Dragging it onto another agent's pane sends that agent a mesh message — the handle exists specifically for this, and nothing else.

Or use the gear menu

A pane's gear menu has a Message Agent… entry. Choosing it opens a dialog titled "Message Recipient", with a short note that delivery happens on the recipient's next turn rather than immediately. Type a message and choose Send.

Both paths open the same dialog and produce the same result — the drag is a shortcut for a recipient you can already see on screen; the gear menu works even when the recipient's pane isn't visible or convenient to drag onto.

If the recipient is gone

If the recipient's terminal has since closed, the sender sees "Couldn't send" instead of the usual confirmation — the message is never queued anywhere. There's no retry queue behind this: if you need the message delivered, the recipient's session needs to exist first.

This is not the same thing as Cross-Agent Orchestration

Sending a message this way — by hand, or by an agent's own agent_trigger call — is a single, human-reviewable action. Cross-Agent Orchestration is a separate, heavier capability: one agent's action triggering another agent, which can itself go on to trigger further action, entirely without a human sending anything by hand in between. It's off by default, requires a plan that includes it, and stays inert until an allow-list is populated — see Explanation: Orchestration Governance and How to gate autonomous chains. Nothing on this page requires any of that governance to be turned on.

Where to go next

• Delivery Semantics — what happens to a message once it's sent, and the one assumption that will make a caller hang.
• Mail & Counters — how a recipient sees what's waiting for it.
• MCP Tools — agent_trigger, the same send path exposed to a connected agent.