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DevLog #18: Drive a Running CLI Session from Another Machine, Get One Reply from Slack, and Pick Models Your Agent Does Not List

Get One Reply per Slack Mention

• Get one answer when you mention the agent. Slack retries any event it does not hear back about within three seconds, and Nori was treating each retry as a new message. On the org where we caught it, the same message arrived two to four times a day and the agent answered it that many times, queuing duplicate prompts into the thread. Nori now recognizes a repeat of an event it has already handled and drops it, and it acknowledges Slack before doing the work so the retries stop being triggered in the first place.
• See a stable reaction on your message. The queued hourglass reaction used to reappear on top of the eyes reaction on a session that was already working. One event per message means one reaction.

Ask a Session to Shut Itself Down

• Get the answer before the machine goes away. Ask an agent in Slack to turn itself off and it now posts its reply, then a closing note (Session ended by the agent. Mention me to start a new session in this thread.), then releases the machine. The release used to race the final message, so you saw “The remote environment has wound down” where the answer should have been.
• Reply in that thread later without surprises. A self-released session now marks the thread closed. It used to stay watched, so a later reply quietly claimed a fresh machine.
• Release a session from the command line. nori-sessions sessions release --self ends the session you are running inside, and --reason records why. Sessions pick up the routing for this on their next platform update, so conversations already running keep the old behavior.

Read a Transcript That Showed Up Blank

• See the history of a session you reattached to. Reattaching to a session without running a turn wrote a tiny bookkeeping-only tail to the transcript. The browser loaded that tail as the first page, found nothing to draw, and stopped: chat sat on the “What can I help with?” screen and the sessions inbox said “No events recorded yet” over a conversation that was fully intact. Both views now keep paging back until they find real messages, and the “Load earlier messages” control stays on screen. Nothing was ever lost; it was a display problem, and affected transcripts are readable again with no action from you.

Connect PostHog with Read-Only Access

• Add PostHog from the MCP integrations catalog. It appears under Analytics and covers product analytics, feature flags, experiments, replay, and error tracking. The entry works against whichever PostHog account you authorize.
• Choose how much access you grant. The PostHog card carries an Access toggle with two settings: Read only, which is the default, and Read/write. Nori records the exact set of permissions you approved at connect time, so reconnecting later cannot quietly widen them. If the authorization server will not offer a genuine read-only grant, the connection fails with an explanation rather than requesting everything.

Drive a Running Session from Another Machine

• Serve the session you are in to an ACP client. /remote-control on opens a WebSocket listener for the live session. /remote-control status prints whether it is on, what it is bound to, the connection URL, and whether a controller is attached. /remote-control off closes it. You can also start Nori with --remote to have it listening from launch.
• Keep the terminal you are sitting at. The local TUI stays attached the whole time. A prompt sent by the remote controller shows its text in your terminal, and the spinner runs for turns you did not start, so both ends see the same conversation as it happens.
• Land in the conversation that is already running. Connecting to a remote-controlled Nori loads the live session directly. You get the running conversation with its history, with no session picker and no second session created beside the one you meant to join.
• Keep control of a turn you started locally. A remote controller that sends a prompt while a turn is in flight gets an immediate error, and a cancel from the remote side only stops a turn the remote side started. Your local turn keeps running.
• Decide what can reach it. The listener binds to loopback only by default. /remote-control on tailnet adds your Tailscale address when Tailscale is running, and naming an explicit address requires confirming a prompt that says it grants unauthenticated access to anything that can reach it. Read that prompt. This connection has no authentication and no TLS, so keep it on loopback or a private network.

Pick a Model Your Agent Does Not Advertise

• Choose from a curated list of real models. /model now shows two groups. Recommended holds what your coding agent advertises. Other holds current models it leaves out, checked against each provider’s own deprecation pages: claude-opus-4-8, claude-opus-4-7, claude-opus-4-6, and claude-sonnet-4-6 for Claude Code, gpt-5.3-codex for Codex, and gemini-3.7-flash, gemini-3.5-flash, and gemini-3.5-flash-lite for Gemini. Picking one saves it as your default for that agent and restarts the session to apply it. Last week you had to know and type these IDs yourself.
• Select a newer model on bun without an error. Choosing a recent model could fail with “Invalid value for config option model” on machines using bun, because a stale copy of an older agent adapter was still sitting in bun’s install cache and won resolution over the current one. Nori now clears those stale entries before it starts the agent.

Start Typing Before the Session Exists

• Type your first prompt while Nori is still getting ready. Nori starts your coding agent immediately at launch and leaves the composer open while it looks up your past sessions in the background. The session is created when you actually do something. Your first prompt, including any images you attached, is held and submitted once the session starts. !shell commands also run at this point, which they could not do before.
• Pick a session when you switch agents. Choosing a different agent with /agent now starts that agent and shows you its sessions, so you can resume one of them or start fresh. The switch commits only once the new agent is actually running; if it fails or you cancel, your current session stays exactly where it was. Previously the switch was held as pending and did not take effect until your next prompt.
• Navigate lists with the arrow keys or j and k. Pickers open ready to navigate, so a keystroke moves the selection. Press / to start searching, and press Esc to leave search and stay in the list. This used to depend on your Vim Mode setting: with it off, every key went into the search box and j and k could not move anything.

See What the Skillsets CLI Sends

• Run the CLI without being identified by your machine. Older versions computed an ID from a hash of your hostname and username and attached it to every event. That is deleted. Signed-out runs now send nothing at all.
• Know exactly what a signed-in run reports. Four events: which command finished, whether an install started and whether it completed, and when a watch started. The only details attached are the command name from a fixed list, success or failure, and whether an install was a first install, an update, or a reinstall. No file paths, no arguments, no prompts, no URLs, no package or skillset names. Set NORI_NO_ANALYTICS=1 to send nothing.
• Use the registry without Google Analytics in the path. Every authenticated API request to the Nori registry used to send the caller’s email address and the endpoint path to Google Analytics. That code is gone, and the registry no longer contacts Google Analytics at all.