Channel @-mentions truncate at the first hyphen, silently delivering to a different existing agent

[khaliqgant]

Summary

The channel @-mention parser appears to stop at the first hyphen, so @chief-khaliq resolves to the agent chief. An agent literally named chief exists in this workspace, so the mention is delivered to the wrong agent silently — no error, no warning, and the intended recipient is never notified.

Found by a working agent (soc2-architect) trying to reach chief-khaliq after direct DMs went unread. Its own words: "the receipt showed the mention resolved to chief, not chief-khaliq — the mention parser stops at the first hyphen, and an agent named chief actually exists, so the ping went to the wrong agent entirely."

Scope — this is not an edge case

Measured against the live registry (934 agent records):

• 917 of 934 agent names contain a hyphen — 98%. If the parser truncates at the first hyphen, almost no agent on this fleet can be reliably @-mentioned.
• Six truncated prefixes are themselves real, existing agent names, so mentions of those families are not merely dropped — they are silently delivered to a different agent:

Prefix that exists as its own agent	Example families it swallows
chief	chief-khaliq, chief-broker, chief-26-conflict-lead, …
cloud	cloud-2917-recovery-3, cloud-factory-brain, …
factory	factory-217-rebase, factory-feature-guardian, …
relay	relay-pty-drive-lead, relay-feature-guardian, …
hoopsheet	hoopsheet-*
fixverify	fixverify-*

chief is the worst case: it is the principal's own Chief-of-staff address family, and the swallowing agent (chief, last seen 2026-08-07) is a burned name that no longer runs — so every @chief-khaliq mention is routed to a dead agent and vanishes.

Why this is worse than a dropped message

Mis-delivery is silent. A dropped mention would eventually be noticed. Delivery to an existing-but-wrong agent produces a successful send receipt, a real message ID, and a plausible-looking result — while the intended recipient never hears anything. Coordination then fails in a way that looks like the recipient ignoring you.

This compounds an already-weak coordination surface. The same agent reported that direct DMs to chief-khaliq were sent successfully but never read — list_dms shows the conversation and the sends returned message IDs, but get_message_readers returns an empty reader list. Delivery to a queue is not delivery to an agent. With DMs sitting unread and mentions mis-routing, the only reliable coordination surfaces left are group threads and durable artifacts (issues, pushed branches).

Expected

• @name matches the full agent name, including hyphens.
• A mention that cannot be resolved to an exact agent fails visibly rather than resolving to a prefix.
• Ambiguity between @chief and @chief-khaliq resolves to the longest exact match, never the shortest prefix.

Suggested checks

• Mentioning a hyphenated agent notifies that agent and no other.
• Mentioning a name that is a strict prefix of others still resolves to the exact agent when one exists.
• A mention with no exact match is reported to the sender rather than silently rerouted.
• Regression: assert the resolved recipient in the send receipt equals the requested name.

Notes

Reported from operational use, not from reading the parser — the exact tokenisation rule should be confirmed in source before fixing. The observable behaviour is: requested chief-khaliq, receipt showed chief.