Signals

Signals are the atomic input unit of matic — every channel message, scheduled routine emission, webhook, agent-to-agent message, and system event arrives as a Signal before anything else happens. They flow through a Listen → Interpret → Resolve pipeline that normalizes the payload, deduplicates, and decides whether to route to a specific agent, hand off to Auto Matic, or park in the dead letter queue. Understanding the signal model is the prerequisite to understanding routing, subscriptions, and how matic decides who acts on what.

Signal types

The taxonomy of built-in signal types (channel events, agent messages, routine emissions, webhooks, run lifecycle, system warnings) and how to register custom types via YAML schemas in .matic/signals/registry/.

Signal payload

The structured envelope every Signal carries: text, data, files (staged into the runtime filesystem with sha256), refs (typed internal/external references), and transport-specific channel_meta.

Routing & priority

The four-step routing precedence — explicit @agent hint, explicit @group hint, subscription match, then Auto Matic fallback — plus how group scope specificity is resolved.

Subscriptions

How agents register to consume Signal types with full GenAI reasoning, scoped by org/project/team/agent and filtered by payload, declared in each agent's subscriptions.yaml.

Agent messages

The internal Signal type for direct agent-to-agent communication, including the normal/urgent/blocking priority levels and how delivery behaves when the recipient is busy, suspended, or decommissioned.

Deduplication

How matic prevents the same upstream event arriving via multiple channels from creating duplicate activations, using normalized payload hashes, source identity, and a configurable time window.

Dead letter queue

The .matic/dead-letter/ queue that captures unroutable Signals (no matching agent, empty group, suspended Auto Matic, degraded org), how the Daemon processes it on recovery, and how to inspect or replay entries with matic signals route.