Ways to Chat

Terminal

Your home base. Displays and direct chat, all in tmux.

Say "show me notifications" and a TUI pops up. Say "check my emails" and it just does it. Full mouse support, keyboard shortcuts, split panes.

Heartbeat

The AI reaches out to YOU. You don't check in — it checks in on you.

How it works

Write a plain text file describing what you want checked. Add when you want it to run. That's it — the AI spawns a sidekick on schedule, does the work, and pings you if something matters.

These are called "bot chores" and they live in chores/bots/. Each one is just a .txt file with instructions and a schedule.

Example: morning check-in

Check my email and calendar for today.
Summarize anything I need to know.
If something's urgent, ping me on Telegram.

[heartbeat-meta]
interval: 1d
time: 09:00
model: haiku

Every morning at 9, a sidekick wakes up, reads your inbox, looks at your calendar, and sends you a summary. You didn't ask for it — it just shows up.

Example: urgent monitoring

Check for any urgent alerts or errors.
If found, immediately ping Telegram with details.

[heartbeat-meta]
interval: 5m
model: haiku

Every 5 minutes. If something breaks, you hear about it before you'd ever think to check.

Combine heartbeat with notifications. A bot chore processes your dirty notifications every 15 minutes, curates them into clean items, and only bothers you when something actually needs your attention. 20 emails become 4 items. You wake up to a summary, not a wall of noise.

Disabling a bot

Prefix the filename with a dot: .my-bot.txt — stays in the folder but won't run. Remove the dot to re-enable.

Settings

recall/settings/heartbeat/:

enabled.txt — on or off
interval.txt — how often (5m, 15m, 30m, 1h)
starting-model.txt — which model heartbeat agents start with

SSH

Tailscale + SSH. Access your AI from your phone, another laptop, a coffee shop — anywhere.

Install Tailscale on your machine
tailscale up
From another device: ssh user@your-machine.tailnet-name.ts.net
tmux attach — you're back in your session

Works great with mobile terminal apps like Blink or Termius.

Messaging

Text your AI from Telegram or Slack. Each message spawns a sidekick — a full Claude Code session that processes your request and replies.

Telegram — two-way conversations from your pocket. Photos, voice notes, documents. Each thread maintains its own context.

Slack — threaded replies, each spawning its own terminal session. Mention your bot in any channel or DM it.

Ask Claude to set either one up — it handles the bot creation, webhook config, and settings.

# Ways to Chat 4 ways to talk to your AI. each gets a section - Terminal — you're already here, displays + direct chat - Heartbeat — AI pings YOU on a schedule - SSH — tailscale + ssh from anywhere - Messaging — telegram, slack, imessage keep it simple, quick 1-2-3 for each on how to get going "ask AI to set it up" is honestly the real answer for most of these