Notification Routing

Context

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:

• Important alerts missed because they're buried in routine notifications
• Team members turning off notifications entirely (signal overwhelm)
• Onboarding friction: "where do I look for X?"

Patterns

Channel Config Schema

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" }
  }
}

CHANNEL: Tag Convention

Agents prefix their output with CHANNEL:<type> to signal where the notification should go:

CHANNEL:security
Worf found 3 new CVEs in dependency scan: lodash@4.17.15, minimist@1.2.5

Routing Dispatcher (shell pseudocode)

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"
}

Provider-Agnostic Adapter

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.

Anti-Patterns

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.

Distributed Systems Pattern

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.