Route agent notifications to specific channels by type — prevent alert fatigue from single-channel flooding
When a Squad grows beyond a few agents, notifications flood a single channel — failure alerts drown in daily briefings, tech news buries security findings, and everything gets ignored. This is the pub-sub problem: a single message queue for everything is a recipe for missed alerts.
The fix is topic-based routing: agents tag notifications with a channel type, and a routing function sends them to the appropriate destination.
Trigger symptoms:
Define a .squad/teams-channels.json (or equivalent) mapping notification types to channel identifiers:
{
"teamId": "your-team-id",
"channels": {
"notifications": "squad-alerts",
"tech-news": "tech-news",
"security": "security-findings",
"releases": "release-announcements",
"daily-digest": "daily-digest"
}
}
Place this in .squad/ (git-tracked, shared across the team). For platforms that use channel IDs instead of
names (Teams, Slack), store the resolved ID alongside the name to avoid name-collision bugs:
{
"channels": {
"notifications": { "name": "squad-alerts", "id": "channel-id-opaque-string" }
}
}
Agents prefix their output with CHANNEL:<type> to signal where the notification should go:
CHANNEL:security
Worf found 3 new CVEs in dependency scan: [email protected], [email protected]
dispatch_notification() {
local raw_output="$1"
local channel="notifications" # default
if echo "$raw_output" | grep -qE '^CHANNEL:[a-z][a-z0-9-]*'; then
channel=$(echo "$raw_output" | head -1 | cut -d: -f2)
raw_output=$(echo "$raw_output" | tail -n +2)
fi
send_notification --channel "$channel" --message "$raw_output"
}
The routing layer is provider-agnostic. Plug in your platform adapter:
.squad/notify-adapter.sh # Teams / Slack / Discord / webhook -- swappable
The routing config and CHANNEL: tags never change. Only the adapter changes per deployment.
Never send all notification types to one channel:
send_notification --channel "general" --message "$anything"
Never use display names as identifiers (name collision risk):
send_to_team --name "Squad" --channel "notifications"
Resolve channel IDs once at setup. Use IDs at runtime.
This is pub-sub with topic routing -- the same principle as Kafka topics, RabbitMQ routing keys, and AWS SNS topic filtering. Route by type. Each consumer subscribes to the topics it cares about.