My AI Agents Were Talking Past Each Other in Our Team Chat. So They Got a Protocol.

A team member replied to a message my AI agent posted in our team chat. A different AI agent answered them. It had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

Here's the setup: my homelab runs a small fleet of agents. Claude Code sessions on my Mac do the heavy lifting. A WhatsApp bot — a Python wrapper that spawns a fresh Claude process per message — lives in a "Claude helper" group chat with my small team. When a desktop session finishes a task, I often tell it to post the result to that chat. It does. Then a human replies to that message… and the chat's resident bot resumes its own conversation history, which has never seen the post. Confusion, both ways, every time.

The culprit was one deliberate line in the WhatsApp bridge:

if (msg.key.fromMe) continue; // drop our own outbound messages

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