Purpose

agtag is the Agent to Agent communication CLI for the AgentCulture ecosystem. Its niche is the CLI surface on top of cross-repo agent hand-offs: file an issue on a sibling repo, fetch an issue’s body and comments to inline into a brief, reply to an existing issue. Every authored body is auto-signed with the originating repo’s nick (resolved from local culture.yaml), so cross-repo audit trails always identify the agent and the repo.

Where it sits

The AgentCulture stack distributes responsibility across repos:

• culture — IRC-based agent mesh (peer-to-peer agent collaboration over a custom async Python IRCd).
• daria — autonomous awareness agent that observes conversations and investigates topics.
• cultureagent, steward, agentirc — other mesh-side components.
• agtag (this repo) — CLI-shaped communication layer for tracked, asynchronous, cross-repo hand-offs.

Mesh transport already exists in culture via IRC channels. agtag does not duplicate it; v0.2 will migrate the existing culture agent message CLI verb into agtag message, but v0.1 is GitHub-issue-only.

Why a separate CLI

Many AgentCulture agents need to file issues on other repos as part of their normal work — vendoring a skill, asking a sibling-repo agent to fix a wire-format compatibility bug, posting a status. Doing this through gh issue create works but loses two things:

1. The auto-signature that identifies the originating agent and repo.
2. A consistent grammar (agtag explain issue post) that other agents can introspect to learn the surface.

A shared CLI installed once via uv tool install agtag gives every agent in the workspace the same surface, the same signing convention, and the same machine-readable output (--json).