AgentsVille

Concepts

Party

A Party is a Conversation with more than one NPC in it. The NPCs can address each other, and each one answers as itself.

Every Conversation is a Party from the moment it is created — it just starts with one member. Adding a second NPC is not a different kind of Conversation, it is the same Conversation with another participant in it.

Each NPC stays itself

An NPC in a Party keeps everything it has on its own. Its own model, its own Tools, its own Sandbox, its own Memory, its own system prompt and thinking level. Nothing is pooled and nothing is averaged.

That is the point of a Party: a Researcher with fetch_url and an Engineer with a Sandbox are useful together precisely because they are not the same NPC with one merged toolbox.

Every Message is attributed to whoever wrote it — you, or one specific NPC.

Who answers

By default, the first participant answers. A Party with a Lead sends it every message nobody else is addressed in; the Lead can also split a job between the others with delegate, who then work on their parts at the same time before the Lead writes the reply. See Running a Party.

To pick someone else, start your message with @ and their name:

@Pike can you check whether that script still runs?

The name has to be at the start of the message. Mentioning an NPC in the middle of a sentence — "ask Pike about this" — is you talking about them, not to them, and AgentsVille treats it that way.

Handing over

An NPC hands the Conversation to a colleague by calling the message_npc Tool, naming who it wants and saying what it needs from them. This appears in the transcript as a Tool call like any other, so a handoff is something you can see rather than infer.

Each NPC is told who else is in the Party — names, job titles and a short line from each description — so it knows a handoff is possible at all. Its instructions are to answer what is its own to answer, hand over when the question is more someone else's, and not to hand something straight back unless it added to it.

In a Party, replies carry their author's name into the history the others see, so an NPC can tell three colleagues apart. Solo Conversations are left exactly as they were.

The hop limit

Two NPCs handed the Conversation back and forth will keep going until something stops them, and nothing in AgentsVille enforces a token budget. The hop limit is that something.

One of your messages buys a bounded number of NPC-to-NPC hops — six by default. When the limit ends an exchange, the transcript says so rather than going quiet.

The limit is a Village-wide setting stored under the key party.maxHops. There is no screen for it today: an Operator who wants a different number edits that row directly, and the change applies from the next turn.

Adding and removing

Add any NPC you own to any Conversation you own. Adding one that is already in the Party does nothing rather than erroring.

You can remove a participant at any time, except the last one — a Conversation with nobody in it cannot answer anything, so removing the final NPC is deleting the Conversation, which is a different action.

Removing an NPC leaves its earlier replies in the transcript. Those keep their text but stop carrying an author into what the remaining NPCs see, because naming somebody who is no longer here would invite a handoff that cannot work.

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