/bg (formerly /background, which is retired) keeps the existing semantics:
spawn a fresh, independent agent session in the background.
/btw is now its own command matching the convention other harnesses use:
ask a quick side question ABOUT the current conversation without
interrupting it. A one-shot auxiliary LLM call (main model by default,
overridable via auxiliary.side_question.* in config.yaml) answers from a
read-only transcript snapshot — the live session's history, role
alternation, and prompt cache are untouched, and the current turn keeps
running.
Surfaces wired: CLI (inline mid-run dispatch), gateway (all messengers,
busy-dispatch table + idle dispatch, i18n across all 17 locales), TUI
(prompt.btw RPC + btw.complete event), Discord native slash, relay
command manifest, desktop exec routing, docs (EN + zh-Hans).
/background (/bg, /btw) exists to start independent work while the current
turn keeps running. Typed while the agent was busy it went into
_pending_input like ordinary input, and process_loop is blocked inside
self.chat() for the whole run, so the background task only started once the
foreground turn had finished. That is the one moment it was not needed.
/steer had the identical problem and was fixed the same way, by dispatching
inline on the UI thread. The command's own CommandDef already declares
busy_policy="dispatch"; the gateway honours that, the classic CLI never
consulted it.
The foreground turn is untouched: no interrupt, no steer, and ordinary
non-slash input keeps following the configured busy-input behaviour.
Teknium