The conversation

The thing the operator actually talks to is a queue: same container, same chain, same trace — with a kind that tells the engine to wait instead of closing.

A queue you talk to

A chat is not a second system beside the queues. It is a queue whose kind is conversation, and the kind is the whole difference: a queue with nothing left to do waits instead of closing. Everything else — the steps, the session, the ceiling, the trace — is the machinery the rest of the site describes.

His messages are its steps

Every message the operator sends is a step of the chain, and every answer is that step's brief — the short text a delivery carries for the person who has to read it, with the long report behind it.

So the chain in the database is the transcript. There is no conversation table and no extra field on a task: the queue's id is the conversation's id, and the history is the same rows the trace was already made of.

It grows by a declared function

A started queue refuses more steps — except a conversation. There, one verb appends the next message, and that is the only way a conversation grows. Nothing is relaxed to make the chat work: the +N is still the operator giving it more room, and it is still a number somebody said.

The idle clock

A chat with nothing to do is paused by the engine's own clock after a short silence — the actor of that pause is the engine, never the operator — and the next message resumes it. The session is untouched by both, so a chat that slept overnight answers in the morning with its context intact.

Its own slots

A conversation is counted in slots of its own, so it never waits behind the work. It is carried by an external hand, which is also why the operator's external stop stops the chats too: the same switch that stops the work on the machine stops what is talking to him.

The memory is the ledger

Every prompt carries the operator's messages and the briefs they were answered with, read off the disk at every step. So a chat is answered from what was actually said, and not from a session that may be gone tomorrow: the session is the bonus, the ledger is the memory.