trigger-chat-agent-advanced

An advanced guide to Trigger.dev's chat.agent features for building conversations that can run over time. Trigger.dev is a service for running background tasks, while a session keeps a conversation's state available between messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building durable chat sessions, custom chat transports, streamed responses, human-in-the-loop steps, steering, background work, recovery, or tests.
Why use it?
It helps handle complex chat behavior such as interruptions, human approval, sub-agents, recovery, large inputs, and custom connections without relying on fragile one-off requests.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/trigger-chat-agent-advanced
Any agent
npx skills add triggerdotdev/trigger.dev --skill trigger-chat-agent-advanced
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 154 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,150 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00154 $0.01150
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00575
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00230
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00115

Measured yesterday against content hash 2e1f2745b736, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

trigger-chat-agent-advanced scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

packages/cli-v3/skills/trigger-chat-agent-advanced/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

chat.agent — advanced & operational

The full, version-pinned reference ships inside your installed @trigger.dev/sdk. Read it before writing code — it always matches the SDK version in this project, so it never drifts:

  • Skill: node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/skills/trigger-chat-agent-advanced/SKILL.md — Sessions primitive, custom transports/wire protocol, sub-agents, HITL, steering, actions, background injection, fast starts, resilience (compaction/recovery/OOM/large payloads), chat.local, testing, upgrades.
  • Docs: the full, version-pinned docs ship bundled at node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/docs/ai-chat/ (including patterns/ for HITL, sub-agents, sessions); the skill above lists the exact pages it draws from in its sources: frontmatter. Grep for an API, e.g. grep -rl "mockChatAgent" node_modules/@trigger.dev/sdk/docs/.

If those paths don't exist, @trigger.dev/sdk isn't installed yet — install it first. In a non-hoisted layout, resolve the package with node -p "require.resolve('@trigger.dev/sdk/package.json')" and read skills/ + docs/ beside it.

Common mistakes

  • CRITICAL: sending a follow-up by re-POSTing POST /api/v1/sessions.

    // Wrong - a cached re-POST silently drops basePayload.message; basePayload is trigger config, not a channel
    await fetch("/api/v1/sessions", { method: "POST", body: JSON.stringify({ ...createBody }) });
    // Correct - append to the session's input channel
    await fetch(`/realtime/v1/sessions/${id}/in/append`, { method: "POST", body: JSON.stringify({ kind: "message", payload }) });
    
  • Using the wrong token for .in / .out. Use publicAccessToken from the create response body (session-scoped). The x-trigger-jwt response header is run-scoped and cannot subscribe.

  • Initializing chat.local in onChatStart. It is skipped on continuation runs, so run() crashes with chat.local can only be modified after initialization. Init in onBoot.

  • chat.defer for the message-history write. A mid-stream refresh would read []. await that write inline before the model streams; reserve chat.defer for analytics, audit, cache warming.

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 71 lines · 154 tokens per session scan A 2e1f2745b736

Subscribe to this mod's changes

trigger-chat-agent-advanced is a skill published in the GitHub repository triggerdotdev/trigger.dev (16,165 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 154 tokens to every session and 1,150 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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