How It Works

A plain-language guide to how Comis processes messages and connects your agents

Comis is a system that connects AI agents to your messaging apps. This page explains how it all fits together — no technical background required.

You don’t need to understand the technical details to use this feature. The configuration examples below are copy-paste ready.

The journey of a message

When someone sends a message to your agent, it goes through a simple pipeline. Think of Comis as a mail sorting office: messages arrive from different platforms, get routed to the right agent, and responses get delivered back.

Here is what each step means:

• You send a message — This could be a Discord message, a Telegram chat, a Slack DM, or even a message typed in the web dashboard. It does not matter which platform you use.
• Comis receives it — The gateway (Comis’s front door) accepts the message and figures out where it came from.
• Routes to the right agent — If you have multiple agents, Comis checks its routing rules to decide which one should respond. You can set up rules based on the platform, the channel, or even specific users.
• Agent thinks and uses tools — Your agent reads the message, checks its memory, and decides how to respond. It might also use tools — like searching the web, checking a schedule, or reading a document.
• Reply sent back to you — The response travels back through Comis and appears in the same chat where you sent the original message.

The whole process takes just a few seconds.

The building blocks

Comis is made up of a few key building blocks that work together. You do not need to understand all of them to get started, but knowing what they are helps you make sense of the rest of the documentation.

Building Block	What It Does	Analogy
Channels	Connect to messaging apps (Discord, Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, IRC, LINE, Email)	Phone lines to different networks
Agents	The AI brains that read messages and write replies	Employees who handle customer requests
Memory	Stores what agents learn and remember across conversations	A filing cabinet for each agent
Skills	Extra abilities agents can use (web search, scheduling, file management)	Tools in a toolbox
Gateway	Allows the web dashboard and other apps to talk to Comis	A reception desk at the front of the office
Security	Keeps everything safe — encrypted secrets, access controls, audit logs	Locks, alarms, and access badges

Each building block is independent. You can start with just one agent on one channel and add more pieces as your needs grow.

How agents think

When a message reaches your agent, it does not just fire off a quick reply. It goes through a thoughtful process to give you the best possible response.

Here is what is happening:

1. Check memory — Your agent looks back at previous conversations to understand context. If you mentioned a project last week, it remembers.
2. Build a prompt — The agent combines the message, its memory, and its instructions into a single request for the AI provider. The context engine automatically optimizes the prompt by trimming older content to fit within the AI model’s limits.
3. Send to AI provider — The request goes to your configured provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.), which generates a response.
4. Use tools if needed — Sometimes the agent needs more information. It might search the web, check a calendar, or read a file. After getting the result, it sends another request to the AI provider with the new information. This can happen several times in a row.
5. Send the reply — Once the agent has a final answer, it formats the response for your platform and sends it back to you.

Your agent does not just answer — it can think in steps, use tools, and remember what it learns for next time. The more you use it, the more helpful it becomes.

How multiple agents work together

If you run more than one agent, each one operates independently with its own memory, tools, and personality. Comis routes each incoming message to the right agent based on rules you define.

For example, you might have:

• A support agent in your Slack workspace that answers customer questions
• A research agent in Telegram that searches the web and summarizes findings
• A scheduler agent in Discord that manages reminders and recurring tasks

Each agent only sees messages meant for it. They do not interfere with each other, and they each have their own memory and conversation history.

For advanced use cases, agents can delegate tasks to other agents using sub-agent sessions, or orchestrate entire multi-agent workflows using execution graphs — declarative DAG pipelines where each node is a sub-agent task that can run in parallel, wait for dependencies, and share data.

Want to go deeper?

Architecture (for developers)

The full technical architecture with code-level details.

Packages

Explore the individual packages that make up Comis.

Agent Lifecycle

How an agent processes a message from start to finish.

Glossary

Definitions of every term used in the documentation.