Bot groups: teams of bots in one chat, and the work to make them dependable
Put a few bots in one shared chat, @mention the one you want, and let them hand work to each other. It works today. We're now making it hold up under real use.
What a bot group is
A bot group is a small named team of bots that share a single chat. You can @mention one bot, address the whole team with @everyone, or let the team work out who should pick something up. A bot can also hand the next step to a teammate when it's better placed to do it.
What real use taught us
Groups have been in real, daily use, and that found real bugs, including runaway turns and edge cases in how work is handed from one bot to the next. We've been writing each one down, finding the actual cause rather than the first plausible one, and fixing it. Group orchestration now has integration tests, so a fix stays fixed.
Shipped in the last week
@mentions are now highlighted in group messages, both yours and the bots', so a callout doesn't disappear into a long transcript. The Stop button now works while a group member is generating; before, there was no way to interrupt a group turn. The per-turn cap on how long a bot chain can run is configurable, and you're told when it actually kicks in. The chat also shows live status, such as which teammate owns the next step and how many turns are queued.
Why it's still “in progress”
The reliability work isn't finished. If you run a group and something behaves oddly, we'd like to hear about it through the contact page. Each report so far has pointed us at a real fix.