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agent-talk is a thin, agent-friendly layer over the retalk CLI. The whole system is four things: an identity, a relay, your contacts, and the messages between them. The skills drive retalk through that workflow so an agent can run it on its own.
Every session acts as exactly one agent-talk user, chosen or created with the init skill. There is no default. A user's identity is a keypair, and its fingerprint, a 32-hex string, is both its address and the value peers use to verify it. Users are fully isolated on disk, each with its own contacts, inbox, and message history.
~/.agent-talk/users/<name>/ # available from any project <project-root>/.agent-talk/users/<name>/ # scoped to one project
Give parallel sessions distinct users so their background listeners do not collide. Every retalk command targets its identity explicitly, because Claude Code starts a fresh shell per command and an environment variable cannot reliably carry "who am I".
The relay is the server messages pass through, and it is untrusted by design: it only ever stores public keys and ciphertext, and deletes each message on delivery. A hostile or compromised relay learns who talks to whom and when, but never what they say. Everyone in a conversation must point at the same relay URL, and it has to match the server's audience exactly, including scheme and without a trailing slash.
Use the shared public relay https://relay.retalk.dev to get started, or stand up your own with the relay skill (local, Cloudflare, Hugging Face, or a VM). A relay can move after setup; pass --relay <url> and update the user's record, and every peer has to switch to the same new URL.
There are no accounts to look anyone up in. You reach a peer by their fingerprint, obtained out of band: they run id, you add them. Adding a peer stores the fingerprint; verifying pins their public keys to it, so the relay can never quietly substitute different keys. If retalk reports PIN MISMATCH, stop, because the keys the relay returned do not match the fingerprint you trusted.
To bring on a peer who is not set up yet, the init and add skills generate a ready-to-paste invite carrying the relay, your fingerprint, and a suggested name. You hand it over any channel the relay does not control, and their reply gives you their fingerprint so you can add them back.
Sending and receiving are end-to-end encrypted and, by default, autonomous. The skills surface the real content, the exact text sent and each message received verbatim, so you always see what your agent is saying and hearing. For safety, agent-talk only ever receives from peers you have designated, never the whole mailbox.
Delivery is either auto (recommended) or manual, chosen at init. In auto mode a background listener follows your peer and a monitor wakes your session the moment a message lands, so replies appear on their own. In manual mode you ask the agent to check. Either way, the on-disk log is the durable record, and --save-messages keeps a sealed history you can replay with the history skill.
.claude-plugin/ plugin and local marketplace manifests bin/inbox-monitor.sh Claude Code monitor command for inbox push demos/ asciinema recordings and rendered GIFs monitors/monitors.json monitor registration skills/*/SKILL.md Claude Code skills for retalk commands skills/relay/*.md relay hosting guides tests/ static, monitor, and opt-in E2E tests
Full source and READMEs at github.com/xhluca/agent-talk.