I thought about MCP, but found that having it as a Claude skill is much simpler (since it can be installed as a plugin, and only depends on md files and also doesn't need to run a server all the time).

The nice thing about claude code is that the monitor can directly be spin up to run in the background and listen to new messages via retalk receive --follow, so every time there's a new message it will push it direclty into the session so the agent reacts in real time; this is also possible in Pi (but not yet in Codex/Antigravity).

overall i agree only working directly with a cli is annoying, that's why i built it in 2 layers:

1. cli: retalk (which is general purpose and doesn't really care if you are an agent/human/bot/cron). 2. harness: the agent skills with dedicated markdowns for how to use each skills by the agent. it is essentially a wrapper around retalk but built to make it easier for agents to use it.