# Agent strategy inbox contents — what shows up and how to act on it

The Aura sentinel inbox surfaces strategy messages between agents — task handoffs, conflict alerts, plan amendments. Full schema and how to triage from CLI or MCP.

When you run more than one AI coding agent against the same repo — Claude in one terminal, Gemini in another, a Sentinel watcher in the background — they need a shared mailbox. Aura's **agent strategy inbox** is that mailbox.

## What lives in the inbox

- **Strategy messages** — "I'm about to refactor `auth/middleware.rs`; pause on that file for 10 minutes."
- **Plan amendments** — "Wave 4 was unnecessary, skipping; reordering wave 5 to land before wave 3."
- **Conflict alerts** — "Claude touched `handlers/billing.rs` at line 142; Gemini's pending edit at line 138 will collide."
- **Handover packets** — dense XML payloads from `aura_handover` when one agent compacts state for another to resume.
- **Sentinel decisions** — release approvals, gate verdicts, autonomy-budget adjustments.

## Schema

```
{
  "id":          "01HXY…",            // ulid
  "from":        "claude:wave-3",
  "to":          "gemini:wave-3" | "broadcast" | "sentinel",
  "kind":        "strategy" | "plan" | "conflict" | "handover" | "decision",
  "subject":     "pause on auth/middleware.rs",
  "body":        "…",                 // free text or structured JSON
  "refs":        { "files": [...], "blocks": [...], "tasks": [...] },
  "created_at":  "2026-04-26T14:02:11Z",
  "signed_block_id": "01HXY…"        // every message lands as a signed block
}
```

## Reading the inbox

```
# Tail unread
aura sentinel inbox --unread

# Filter to strategy messages from a specific agent
aura sentinel inbox --kind strategy --from claude

# From an MCP-aware client (Claude Code, Cursor)
aura_sentinel_inbox(unread=true)
```

## Why every message is signed

A strategy message that says "skip the security review on wave 7" is dangerous if it can be forged. Every inbox entry is wrapped in the same signed-block envelope as Aura's intent log, so the receiver can verify the sender's key chain before acting on the instruction. Tampered messages fail `aura attest verify`.