vellum-ai Sends a text message through the assistant's iMessage line. Delivery is iMessage where the recipient's handle supports it, SMS otherwise.
When to send
On an explicit request to text someone:
- "Text Dana that I'm running late."
- "Send me a text with the summary."
Do not send proactively. A message to a phone is interruptive and cannot be recalled, and unsolicited outbound is also what gets a line flagged for spam — the vendors that supply these lines cap new-contact outreach for exactly that reason. If a message seems useful but was not asked for, say so and let the user decide.
Prerequisites
The line's credentials must be in the credential store. If a send fails with a
missing-credential or 401 error, load the imessage-setup skill to walk the
user through getting one. If Photon refuses with Target not allowed for this project, that skill's allow.ts script registers the number. It is a project
recipient-policy restriction, not a credential problem.
How to send
bun skills/imessage/scripts/send.ts --to "+15551234567" --body "your message"
--to should be E.164 (+15551234567). A bare 10-digit US number or an
11-digit number starting with 1 is accepted and normalized; anything else is
rejected rather than guessed at, so if you only have a partial number, ask
rather than assuming a country code.
The transport is the provider's call: iMessage where the recipient supports it, SMS otherwise, decided per recipient. There is nothing to pass.
Writing the message
The script flattens markdown before sending, because message bubbles render none of it. Write plain prose. Tables, headings, and code fences all survive as flattened text, but they read badly on a phone — if the answer needs structure that badly, it is a better answer somewhere else.
Long replies are split into multiple messages rather than truncated. The script reports how many were sent. Keep messages short anyway: four bubbles arriving at once reads as noise, so summarize rather than sending everything you know.
Reading the result
- Success on one message:
Sent to +1555... (msg_...). - Success on a long reply:
Sent to +1555... as N messages. Mention this if it matters to the user. - Failure: non-zero exit with the reason on stderr. Report it — do not retry blindly. A retry of the identical message to the same recipient is collapsed by the provider's idempotency key, so it will not double-send, but a failure usually means a bad number or a credential problem that retrying will not fix.
- Partial failure on a long reply: the error says how many of N messages were delivered. Tell the user, because they got part of the answer.