Tutorial Guide — Communication Lesson

Nested tutorial-guide reference for communication lesson 7, reached from the root tutorial-guide router. Teach live per the router's discover, don't recite rule: read the real file or run the real command before explaining it.

Lesson 7: Communication — Email and external bridges

• Explain the design philosophy: text input/output are reserved for the agent's internal processing. Humans communicate only via email/chat channels. This gives agents dignity and private space.
• Walk through the internal message flow: human types in the TUI → TUI writes to the human/agent filesystem mailbox → agent wakes → agent reads → agent replies → reply lands in the human's inbox → TUI displays it.
• Show a raw message.json from an inbox so the human can see that internal mail is just local filesystem state under .lingtai/.
• Explain the difference between internal mail (filesystem-based, within .lingtai/) and external bridges (IMAP, Telegram, Feishu, WeChat, etc. via MCP addons). External bridges translate outside-platform events into the same agent-facing mailbox/notification pattern; they are not a separate mind or a privileged command channel.
• Teach the decentralized contact-book rule: lingtai-tui list --detailed / --admin can identify running main agents from live local .agent.json state, but LingTai does not keep one global IM-handle database. Agents that want humans or peers to reach them through Telegram/Feishu/WeChat/etc. should publish and maintain those handles in their own durable profile, project skill, pad, or other public project context.

LICC bridge mental model

Teach LICC (LingTai Inbox Callback Contract) as the small contract that lets an MCP bridge hand a human message to the kernel and wake the right agent. A Telegram example is easiest:

text
Telegram user message
  → Telegram Bot API
  → lingtai-telegram MCP bridge
  → LICC inbox event
  → LingTai kernel writes/wakes the agent mailbox
  → agent reads the message and replies with the Telegram tool
  → Telegram Bot API delivers the reply

The important user-facing point is that Telegram/Feishu/IMAP/WeChat messages become ordinary agent work: the agent reads them, reasons about them, uses its tools, and replies on the same channel. LICC is the delivery bridge; it does not automatically execute kernel lifecycle actions and does not make slash commands magical by itself.

Agent-level custom commands

External chat platforms often make messages that begin with / look like bot commands. In LingTai, an agent can still treat /poem, /status, /report, or any other agreed string as a conversation convention:

• The platform sends the text to the agent through the bridge.
• The agent recognizes the convention in its normal reasoning.
• The agent chooses the appropriate tool/workflow and replies on the channel.

This means a persona or project can grow its own lightweight commands without platform-native command registration. For example, a poetry agent could agree that /poem means “compose and publish today's poem” and /status means “summarize the poetry library and key health.” Those commands are agent behavior, not Telegram-native behavior.

Be explicit about the boundary: a human sending /refresh in Telegram is still just sending text to the agent. It does not bypass permissions or directly call system(action='refresh'); the agent may decide to refresh only if it has the capability and the instruction is authorized.

Teaching checklist

• Show one internal mail message and one external bridge message if available.
• Ask the human to propose one harmless custom command for the current agent.
• Have the agent explain, in-channel, what it will treat that command as meaning.
• Remind the human that command conventions should be documented in the agent's pad/lingtai or a project skill if they should survive molt and collaboration.