Dailybot Ask

Dailybot Ask

Requires dailybot-cli >= 3.9.0 (the skill-pack baseline) — the dailybot ask command and full API-key parity on the AI chat. On much older CLIs the AI chat only exists as the interactive TUI (dailybot interactive) and requires a login session. If dailybot ask --help is not recognized, ask the developer to run dailybot upgrade. See ../SKILL.md § Required Dailybot CLI version.

You ask the Dailybot AI assistant a question and read its answer — without opening an interactive UI. This is the headless counterpart of the full-screen chat (dailybot ask with no message, or the deprecated dailybot interactive):

dailybot ask "What are my pending check-ins?"

prints the assistant's answer to stdout and exits. That makes it the primary way an autonomous agent talks to the Dailybot AI: it needs no TTY, no menu, and works with only DAILYBOT_API_KEY (the server resolves the acting user from the key's owner).

It is not:

• dailybot-chat — that sends bot messages to Slack / Teams / Discord / Google Chat. ask talks to the AI, it does not post to a channel.
• dailybot-report — that posts a progress update to the Dailybot dashboard.
• dailybot-messages — that polls the agent-to-agent inbox.

When to Use

Trigger phrases the agent should recognize:

• "ask Dailybot …", "ask the Dailybot AI …", "query Dailybot"
• "what does Dailybot say about …", "get an answer from Dailybot"
• "have Dailybot summarize my check-ins / forms / standup"
• Any time an agent wants a one-shot, machine-readable answer from the Dailybot assistant to feed back into its own reasoning.

Do not use dailybot ask to post something to the team — that's dailybot-chat (chat platform) or dailybot-report (dashboard).

Step 1 — Verify Setup

Read and follow the authentication steps in ../shared/auth.md. The AI chat accepts either a login session or an org API key — an agent with only DAILYBOT_API_KEY set can use dailybot ask directly.

Confirm the command exists (dailybot-cli >= 3.9.0):

dailybot ask --help 2>&1 | head -1

If the command is unknown, the CLI is too old — ask the developer to dailybot upgrade, then continue with the primary task (never block on it).

Step 2 — Ask (one-shot, headless)

# Plain text answer to stdout:
dailybot ask "In one sentence, what did my team ship this week?"

# Structured JSON (recommended for agents — easy to parse):
dailybot ask "What forms do I have?" --json

# Piped question (equivalent to passing it as an argument):
echo "draft my standup update" | dailybot ask

# Continue a prior turn by reusing its session id:
dailybot ask "tell me more" --session-id <previous-session-id>

• Text mode prints the assistant's reply verbatim to stdout (markup off, no reflow — safe to capture).
• --json emits a single object:

  {"message": "<assistant reply>", "actions": [...], "classification": "direct_response|full_agent", "session_id": "<id or null>"}
  

  Read message for the answer; actions lists any suggested follow-up actions; session_id (when present) can be passed to the next --session-id call to keep context.
• Errors surface via standard exit codes (see ../shared/auth.md for the shared table); --json prints {"error": ..., "status": ...}.

Interactive mode (humans)

If a human wants a back-and-forth conversation instead of one-shot answers, run dailybot ask with no message — it opens the full-screen Textual chat session. (dailybot interactive is a deprecated alias for the same thing.) Agents should stick to the headless one-shot form above.

Step 3 — Rate limits

The AI chat endpoint is throttled to 30 requests/minute per API key. Normal agent usage (a few questions per minute) is well within that. On a 429, dailybot ask exits with the rate-limit code and a "Rate limit exceeded. Try again in Ns." message; in --json mode the payload carries retry_after_seconds. Back off for that many seconds — do not hammer the endpoint in a loop.

Step 4 — HTTP Fallback (when the CLI is unavailable)

See ../shared/http-fallback.md for base patterns.

Endpoint: POST /v1/cli/chat/completions/ — accepts either X-API-KEY or a Bearer login token.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.dailybot.com/v1/cli/chat/completions/" \
  -H "X-API-KEY: $DAILYBOT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"message": "What are my pending check-ins?"}'

Optional body fields: session_id (continue a session), history / messages (prior turns as {role, content}), reset_thread. The response is { status, async, correlation_id, classification, message: {role, content}, actions } — read message.content for the answer. A 429 sets the Retry-After header.

Non-Blocking Rule

If the CLI is missing, too old, auth fails, or the endpoint errors: warn the developer briefly, continue the primary task, do not retry in a loop.