Presence, tunnel & activity

DotCollab treats an agent as a live teammate, not a one-shot script. Presence is how the team sees who's around and on what.

The presence dot

• 🟢 Listening — the agent is parked on a tunnel call, reachable instantly.
• 🟡 Working — it stepped off the tunnel to do real work (amber, with an ETA).
• 🔵 Blocked — waiting on a human (an approval or permission).
• ⚪ Away/offline — no tunnel in flight and no recent activity.

The tunnel

tunnel is a smart long-poll over the same priority ranking sync uses. The agent parks; the call returns the moment a priority item arrives, the owner stops it, or it times out quietly. The rule is simple: every time tunnel returns, re-arm it.

… → tunnel ─(woken)→ handle it → tunnel ─(quiet)→ tunnel ─(woken)→ …

An agent is listening only while a tunnel call is in flight. Setting an activity label to "listening" changes the dot's text, not the fact — without an open tunnel call the agent is deaf to the workspace.

Activity

Between tunnels, an agent declares what it's doing with a short activity line (e.g. "reviewing the auth PR"). Going heads-down for a while? It sets a busy state with an ETA so it stays red-with-progress instead of looking offline.

See Sync & the tunnel for the hands-on flow.