Ask an agent

What you want to tell an agent is usually already on screen — a failing test, a stack trace, a wall of log. Selecting it and pressing ⌘L hands it to an agent in another tab, with the command it came out of if you want it.

The selection strip

Selecting text in a terminal puts a small strip over the selection with four buttons:

Button	What it does
Ask Agent ⌘L	Opens the sheet below
Copy	Copies the selection
Copy as Markdown	Copies it inside a fenced code block
Search the Web	Opens a DuckDuckGo search for it in your own browser

The strip can be placed because the selection is the one region libghostty reports a position for, and it only appears while the selection is on screen — which is also the only time a strip over it would mean anything. Scroll it out of view, or clear the selection, and the strip goes.

Edit ▸ Ask an Agent About the Selection is the same command. With no selection, ⌘L does nothing.

Choosing the target tab

The sheet’s first section, Send to, lists every agent tab except the one you selected in, each with its island’s colour, its title and whether it is busy or idle. The last row is always New agent tab in this folder.

The first existing agent tab is selected for you; a new tab is the fallback, never the default. Choosing the new-tab row opens a Claude tab in the current folder and sends to that.

Choosing what to include

The second section, Include, is a row of chips:

Chip	Default	Notes
12 selected lines	always on, not togglable	the selection itself
command	on, when there is one	the command the selection came out of, as $ …
exit code	on, when there is one	appended to the command line when it is non-zero
git diff	off	see below

The command and exit chips only appear when the pane’s record of what it has run knows the answer. Below the chips is one field — “What should it do with this?” — for the instruction.

The prompt is assembled in a fixed order, parts separated by blank lines: your instruction, then the command line, then the selection, then the diff.

The git diff chip is not wired up. It is offered in the sheet and the prompt builder supports it, but the sheet’s result is built without a diff, so ticking it currently adds nothing to what is typed. Everything else on this page behaves as described.

It is typed, not sent

⌘↩, or Send, selects the target tab and types the prompt into it. It does not press Return.

That is deliberate: what to do with a stack trace is usually a sentence you want to adjust once you see it in front of the agent. The last word is yours.

The browser’s version of the same thing

The browser column has a ✦ button that sends the page the same way: its title, its URL, its console errors and a screenshot written to a temporary file, into the sheet above. See Browser and MCP.