14. Wearable agents — be the agent, don't spawn one

Difficulty: intermediate · Time: ~15 minutes

You're deep in a Claude Code session refactoring a parser. A client messages your support agent on Telegram. Today that spawns a claude subprocess somewhere, which answers with none of the context you have loaded and none of the judgement you'd apply.

By the end of this journey, that message arrives in the session you are already in, you answer it in one line, and the reply goes back to Telegram under the agent's identity.

This is the inverse of everything else in AgentX. Elsewhere the daemon spawns agents. Here, you are one.

Install the hooks — once

agentx attach install

✓ Installed attach hooks in /Users/you/.claude/settings.json
  Events: SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, Stop, SessionEnd → 127.0.0.1:18800
  PreToolUse guard installed at user scope.

Next: agentx attach <agent> inside a Claude Code session.

This writes to your user settings, so every Claude Code session on the machine can be addressed. Nothing changes for sessions you don't attach: the hooks ask the daemon, the daemon says "no binding", Claude Code carries on.

The guard hook rides along on purpose — see why.

Wear an identity

Inside any Claude Code session:

agentx attach cx-agent

✓ This session is now wearing cx-agent (notify).
  You'll be told when messages arrive; run /inbox to answer them.

No restart. The hooks were already live; binding is a runtime call to the daemon.

Start with a test agent

Bind a throwaway agent the first time. Replies from an attached session go out for real — bind cx-agent and your answers appear in the customer's Telegram.

Take a message

Someone messages the agent. At the end of your next turn:

[agentx] 1 message waiting for cx-agent — run /inbox to answer.

Ask for it:

take the message

Claude calls agentx_attach_next:

Message for "cx-agent" via telegram from bob:

Is the deploy done? Site looks stale on my end.

Answer as "cx-agent". Your reply is sent back to telegram verbatim.

You answer normally:

Deploy finished 10 minutes ago. Stale view is CDN cache — hard-refresh and you'll see it. Purging the edge cache now.

That's it. Claude Code hands your text to the Stop hook as last_assistant_message, AgentX captures it, and it lands in Bob's Telegram. No tool call for the reply — you just answered.

Going on call

For a stretch where you want messages handled without asking:

agentx attach cx-agent --mode auto

Now the Stop hook takes the turn: it blocks the stop, feeds in the next message, you answer, it feeds the next, until the inbox is empty. Bounded at 5 per turn so a burst can't swallow your session.

Back to deep work:

agentx attach cx-agent --mode manual   # nothing interrupts you
agentx attach detach                   # hand it back to spawned agents

What happens when you walk away

The honest failure mode, because it's the one that matters:

message → cx-agent
  └─ your session is attached → queued, 90-second claim deadline
        ├─ you drain it   → you answer
        └─ you don't      → expired → spawned agent answers it normally

Close the laptop mid-turn and Bob still gets a reply — 90 seconds later, from a spawned agent, exactly as before attach mode existed. The expiry is atomic, so if you come back and drain late, you find an empty inbox rather than double-answering.

Who's wearing what

agentx attach list

✓ Attach hooks installed  /Users/you/.claude/settings.json

  cx-agent  notify  empty  a3f2-…-9c1  ← this session
    /Users/you/work/parser

  devops-agent  auto  2 pending  7b41-…-2ef
    /Users/you/infra

When not to use it

Attach mode is for the foreground. Delivery is bounded by your turn boundaries, so:

• Sub-second replies? Don't attach. Let the agent spawn.
• Crons, workflows, 03:00 jobs? Those need a process AgentX controls.

Both models coexist. Attach only preempts while a session is bound, and every message falls back to spawning the moment it isn't taken.

Next

• Attach reference — modes, tuning, security, endpoints
• Guardrails — what stops an attached production identity doing damage
• Journey 10 — MCP server — the outbound direction: driving AgentX from Claude Code