---
title: "Comms"
description: "How long-lived agents exchange messages and external events in Meerkat."
icon: "tower-broadcast"
---

Comms is Meerkat’s inter-agent messaging model.

It connects:

- keep-alive sessions
- peer discovery and trust
- inbound work from other agents
- inbound work from outside systems

## Why this is a concept

Comms is not just “some tools”. It defines:

- what it means for a session to stay alive for future work
- how peers are discovered and trusted
- how host-side ingress differs from in-agent messaging

## Mental model

```text
keep-alive session
  -> comms runtime
  -> peer messages / requests / responses
  -> external events
  -> runtime-backed admitted work
```

## Key distinction

- **Agent-side comms tools** are what the model can use during a turn.
- **Host-side comms/session ingress APIs** are what applications use to feed work into the runtime.

That distinction should stay visible across the docs.

## See also

- [Tools](/concepts/tools)
- [Comms guide](/guides/comms)
- [Mobs](/concepts/mobs)
