Coding Agents over Telegram, Part 3: The Day-to-Day Operating Contract

You finished Part 2, so you have a topic where you type a message and a coding agent answers and drives a pane. This post is the operating contract: the small vocabulary the relay understands, the one routing rule that confuses everyone the first day, and (because this is a phone wired to a shell) the short list of things you must never send. It's a contract, not a tutorial; read it once and you'll drive the thing confidently. Keep the mental model from Part 1 in front of you: you are talking through a relay agent to a coding agent in a tmux pane. The relay is a courier. Most of what you type is forwarded straight to the pane; a handful of words are handled by the relay itself. The words the relay handles directly These are local control: the relay acts on them instead of forwarding them. They come from the relay's AGENTS.md (the command table you wrote in Part 2), so the exact phrasings are yours to tune: You type What happens status / what's in tmux? Relay capt