Mentions and Notifications

Mention a teammate or Hamster in a conversation and send the right person back to the message in context.

Overview

The mention picker lets you address a member of the current workspace or the Hamster AI with @. Human mentions are stored as structured targets, not recovered later by guessing from message text.

When a message mentions a teammate, Hamster adds that person to the thread as a collaborator when needed and queues an in-app notification. The notification links to the relevant Brief, Blueprint, Method, Initiative, or Chat thread and focuses the authored message.

Mentioning Someone

Type @ in a message composer.
Continue typing a teammate's name or email, or hamster, to filter the picker.
Choose the intended target and send the message.
For a teammate mention, Hamster attempts to add that person to the thread before delivering the notification.
The recipient opens the notification to return to the originating surface and message.

The picker is account-scoped. Invite someone to the workspace before trying to mention them.

Mention Targets

Target	Behaviour
`@hamster`	Routes the message to the Hamster AI.
`@teammate`	Adds the selected workspace member as a collaborator when needed and queues an in-app mention notification.
Mixed targets	Hamster can respond while selected teammates receive their own notification jobs.

Mentioning a teammate from an Initiative's chat works the same way as other document-backed chats. The notification returns to that initiative and focuses the relevant message.

Notification Delivery

Mention notifications are asynchronous and best-effort:

One delivery job is queued per mentioned person and authored item.
Delivery retries transient queue failures.
A recipient who is currently active in the thread does not receive a redundant in-app notification.
Participant enrollment is idempotent; mentioning an existing participant does not create a duplicate.
Failure to add one participant or enqueue one notification does not fail the original message or other recipients.

Human-authored mentions use the selected structured targets. AI-authored @handle text is resolved against the current workspace members. AI-authored mention notifications are emitted for document-backed conversations, not plain core-chat or internal routine-run threads.

Deep Links

The destination depends on the conversation:

Conversation	Notification destination
Brief	Brief page and authored message; child replies also focus the child thread
Blueprint	Blueprint page and authored message
Method	Method page and authored message
Initiative	Initiative page and authored message
Core Chat	Account home, thread, and authored message

The page opens the surrounding thread and focuses the referenced item. The notification body contains the author, thread title, and a bounded preview of the message.

Other In-App Notifications

The notification center also receives account activity and asynchronous outcomes, including:

Notification	Recipient
Brief ready for review	Selected brief participants
Alignment vote	Brief owner, excluding self-votes
First human reply in a child thread	Author of the parent message, excluding self-replies and AI-authored parents
Initiative owner assignment	Newly assigned owner, excluding self-assignment
Plan generation completed or failed	User who started generation
Cloud Agent delivery completed, incomplete, or failed	User who started delivery

Notification severity is one of Info, Warning, Error, or Success. Severity describes the outcome; it is not a separate semantic event type.

Slack DM Mirroring

If the recipient can use a connected Slack installation, Hamster mirrors eligible in-app notification inserts to a Slack DM on a best-effort basis.

The Slack message uses the same human-readable body as the in-app notification.
When the notification has a link, the DM appends View in Hamster.
Hamster resolves the Slack user through a verified identity binding or matching email.
The mirror does not add notification-specific emoji, native Slack mentions, or custom templates.
Slack API or identity-resolution failures do not roll back the original Hamster action.

Notification Center

Marking a notification as read clears its unread state while leaving it available.
Dismissing a notification removes it from the notification surface.
Notifications are account-scoped, so switching workspaces changes the visible list and unread count.