Prevent bot-to-bot status messages from waking peer bots

[Marcusmei6]

Background

In a Lark/Feishu group with multiple botmux-managed bots, one bot can hand off work to another bot via botmux send --mention <peer_bot_open_id>. That part works, but ordinary follow-up/status messages from the recipient bot can accidentally wake the sender bot again if the message replies to or mentions the sender bot.

We saw this in a Seed/Claude -> Codex workflow:

1. Seed/Claude sent a formal handoff to Codex with --mention.
2. Codex sent a pickup/progress/final-style message.
3. That message triggered Seed/Claude as a new incidental session.
4. The two bots started exchanging low-value status/ack messages until the sessions were manually closed.

This is especially easy to hit in scheduled automation where nobody is watching the group in real time.

Expected behavior

Agent-facing routing hints should make bot-to-bot communication one-way unless a message assigns a new concrete task.

Suggested rules:

• Only --mention another bot for a real handoff that assigns a new task.
• Do not reply to another bot's pickup/progress/ack/final-summary/correction message.
• Final results should be sent to the user/group as a top-level message without mentioning the peer bot.
• If a bot session is opened only by another bot's status/progress/summary message, it should stay silent and close the incidental session.

Local mitigation that worked

We patched the installed botmux prompt/i18n text locally to add a "no bot chatter" rule in both Claude Code append-system-prompt and generic shell hints. The important behavior change was prompt-level only; no protocol change was required.

The wording we used was roughly:

• Do not send bot-to-bot acknowledgements, progress-only messages, thanks, corrections, or final summaries with --mention.
• Only mention another bot for a real handoff that assigns a new concrete task.
• If opened by another bot's status/progress/summary message, do not reply; close the incidental session.

Possible upstream change

Add this rule to:

• src/i18n/zh.ts
• src/i18n/en.ts
• Claude Code append-system-prompt identity/routing block
• Generic shell hints / available-bots hint, if applicable

This would make multi-bot scheduled workflows less likely to create accidental bot chatter loops.

[deepcoldy]

@Marcusmei6

感谢反馈，我怕我理解有误，issue的意思是：A跟B对话，B再回复A时，发现A启动了个新对话？
我本地是没有复现这个问题的

Thanks for the feedback. I’m afraid I may have misunderstood: does the issue mean that A is chatting with B, and when B replies to A, B finds that A has started a new conversation?

I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue locally.