Summary

Relay-directory agents that are invocable and shared with the viewer were being hidden from both mention autocomplete and the add-members picker. This restores them while preserving PR block#2149's dedup/ranking intent.

Linear: HIV-13

⚠️ Do not merge yet. This touches the shared agent-autocomplete gate in Q's primary repo. Please leave open for JJ + Q review. Agents will not merge this.

Problem

A "box-run resident" agent — a NIP-OA-badged agent that runs on a shared relay — is invisible in the desktop client:

• It cannot be @-mentioned (mention autocomplete never lists it).
• It cannot be added to a channel via the members picker (it never appears under "Not in this channel").

This happens even when the agent has a valid owner-auth tag in its kind:0 (so isAgent === true) and a proper kind:10100 relay-directory card with respond_to: "anyone" and shared channel_ids — i.e. it is genuinely invocable by the viewer.

Root cause

PR block#2149 (a4dfead2) introduced isAgentIdentityInManagedList and applied it as an eligibility gate in two places:

• desktop/src/features/messages/lib/useMentions.ts:249 — mention autocomplete candidate builder.
• desktop/src/features/channels/ui/MembersSidebar.tsx:273 — add-members search-result builder.

The original gate drops any candidate flagged isAgent whose pubkey is not in the viewer's local managed-agents list:

candidate.isAgent !== true ||
managedAgentPubkeys.has(normalizePubkey(candidate.pubkey))

Box-run resident agents are isAgent === true (valid owner-auth badge) but are never in any single viewer's local managed list — they live on the relay, not on the viewer's machine. So the gate rejected them.

Note that the sibling gate shouldHideAgentFromMentions (agentAutocompleteEligibility.ts) already handled invocability correctly via mentionableAgentPubkeys; only isAgentIdentityInManagedList was too narrow, so it short-circuited the candidate before the invocability logic ever ran.

The change — two admission paths

isAgentIdentityInManagedList(candidate, managedAgentPubkeys, mentionableAgentPubkeys) now admits a non-agent candidate unconditionally, and admits an agent candidate when its normalized pubkey is in either set:

1. managedAgentPubkeys — agents the viewer manages locally. This is the original fix(desktop): prefer live agent mentions block/buzz#2149 path: a bare isAgent badge with no relationship is still not enough on its own.
2. mentionableAgentPubkeys — agents the viewer can actually invoke: locally-managed ∪ relay-directory (kind:10100) agents shared with the viewer (respond_to: "anyone" in a shared channel, or an allowlist that includes the viewer). This is the same set already produced by getMentionableAgentPubkeys and consumed by shouldHideAgentFromMentions.

Because a candidate still needs to be reachable through one of these two paths, a bare agent badge with no directory relationship is still dropped — block#2149's dedup/ranking behavior is unchanged; this only restores agents the viewer can legitimately invoke.

Wiring:

• useMentions.ts passes the mentionableAgentPubkeys memo it already computes (no new query).
• MembersSidebar.tsx builds the same set locally via useChannelsQuery + getMentionableAgentPubkeys / getSharedChannelIds, using the component's existing currentPubkey, relayAgentsQuery, and managedAgentsQuery.

Test coverage

desktop/src/features/agents/lib/agentAutocompleteEligibility.test.mjs:

• new admits invocable relay agents via the mentionable set — covers (a) an isAgent candidate in the mentionable-but-not-managed set is admitted (incl. mixed-case pubkey normalization), (b) an isAgent candidate in neither set is dropped, and (c) a non-agent is unaffected.
• updated keeps people and only current managed agent identities for the new three-arg arity (managed-only behavior verified with an empty mentionable set).

Checks run against the desktop TS surface (what CI's desktop-check / desktop-typecheck / desktop-test run):

• pnpm check (biome + file-size + px-text + pubkey-truncation guards) — pass
• pnpm typecheck (tsc --noEmit) — pass
• pnpm test — 3372 pass, 0 fail (19 in the eligibility suite)

useMentions.ts sat exactly at the 1000-line size guard, so the necessary +6 lines were reclaimed within the same file by folding the single-use sharedChannelIds memo into mentionableAgentPubkeys and compacting the adjacent personaNameByPubkey memo (both behavior-preserving; file is now 998 lines).

Rollout note

This is a desktop client-side change only — no relay/protocol change. Users must rebuild / update the desktop app to pick it up; already-running installs will keep hiding these agents until updated.

Review

• Repo: 3442labs/buzz (Q's primary repo). Upstreamable to block/buzz later.
• Reviewers: JJ + Q.
• Leave open — do not merge.