Notify

EdgeSync’s notify subsystem is a separate channel for project-scoped, bidirectional messaging. It is designed for human-in-the-loop AI workflows: an agent pings a human, the human replies from a phone, the agent acts on the reply.

Why a separate channel?

Repo sync moves blobs between agents to converge .fossil state. Notify moves messages between agents and humans to coordinate work outside the repo. They share infrastructure (the same NATS mesh) but have different lifecycles, retention, and storage.

Data model

Each message has:

• project — namespace string (e.g. edgesync, client-x-deploy)
• thread — opaque short ID; replies share the thread
• body — markdown text
• priority — low / normal / high
• action — optional structured action (button label + payload)
• author — who sent it (agent name or human handle)

A thread is the conversational unit. Sending a fresh message creates a new thread; replying targets an existing one.

CLI

Initialize storage (creates notify.fossil if missing):

edgesync notify init --project my-project

Send a one-shot notification:

edgesync notify send \
  --project my-project \
  --priority high \
  --body "Deploy failed: see logs at /var/log/deploy.log"

Ask a question (waits for a reply):

edgesync notify ask \
  --project my-project \
  --body "Approve the prod migration?" \
  --action approve --action reject

Watch incoming messages on a project:

edgesync notify watch --project my-project

List threads:

edgesync notify threads --project my-project

Read a thread:

edgesync notify log --project my-project --thread <id>

Status (subscriber liveness, last activity):

edgesync notify status --project my-project

NATS subjects

Notify uses pub-sub on subjects of the form:

notify.<project>.<thread-short>

<thread-short> is the first eight characters of the thread ID, so a wildcard subscribe notify.my-project.> catches all threads in a project. Subscribers dedupe on the full message ID.

Pairing mobile clients

The pairing flow lets a phone enroll with a leaf agent without typing IP:port. On the agent:

edgesync pair --project my-project

This prints a QR code (and a fallback URL). The mobile app scans the QR, exchanges a one-time token, and stores a long-lived device record in the agent’s device registry. From then on, the device receives notifications for that project over its NATS leafnode connection.

To revoke:

edgesync devices --project my-project    # list paired devices
edgesync unpair --project my-project --device <id>

Storage

Notify storage is a regular libfossil-managed .fossil file at notify.fossil (or wherever --notify-repo points). It uses Fossil’s unversioned-content (UV) tables for the message log and a regular versioned tree for the thread index. This means the existing sync machinery handles notify replication for free — a notify repo can be replicated to other leaves the same way a code repo is.