Friends

Friends lets people share tasks between their own Ponds. It is off until you turn it on in Settings › Friends. It needs two Macs, or two macOS users, and a relay.

The rules that do not change

• An agent runs only on its owner's Mac, on the owner's own Claude sign-in. Pond never shares accounts, tokens or terminals.
• A friend can never type into, steer or stop your agent.
• A friend's blob is a picture. Clicking it shows information and never opens a terminal.
• Nothing that arrives starts an agent by itself, unless you turn Auto on for it (see below).

Invite a friend

1. In Settings › Friends, or in the sidebar, click Copy invite link. The link works for 48 hours.
2. Send it outside Pond. Your friend opens it and Pond asks "Add <name> as a friend?", with a safety code.
3. You then see "<name> wants to join with your invite", with the same code. Choose Add or Not them.

Compare the safety code with your friend before you add them. Removing a friend revokes their access. Block also ignores later invites from the same key. You can have up to 32 friends.

Groups and tasks

A group has members and linked projects. To make one, go to Inbox › New group in the sidebar. Group names cannot contain a slash. A group admin can add or remove members and link or unlink projects, each behind a confirm sheet. Anyone can leave a group.

Anyone in a group can post a task with a title and a body. When someone takes a task, their own Pond starts their own agent, in a new worktree of the same project, on their own Mac. The agent posts progress and a short summary.

Code travels through your own Git remote, and only for projects where you turned on Sync with GitHub. It is off by default, and a sheet says what it will do before you turn it on.

An agent can post a task to a group only if you allowed it in Settings › Friends › the group › Agents. Each post then shows as a card in your Inbox. Post sends it and Discard tells the agent no. After 100 seconds without an answer, the card goes away and the agent hears "no answer".

Take mode: Off, Ask, Auto

You set the take mode per group, then per project, then per member. The most specific setting wins.

Mode	When a task arrives
Off	It shows in the group's list. Nothing else happens.
Ask (default)	A Take button appears. Your agent starts only after you click it.
Auto	Your Pond takes open tasks for that project from the members you ticked, and starts an agent for each in a new worktree.

Turning Auto on shows a warning: "Tasks from <names> will reach your agent without you reading them first." Return cancels, so you have to click Turn on Auto. A member who joins later, and a project linked later, stay on Ask until you set them. Auto never takes a task that an agent posted, and never takes your own tasks.

Auto has limits per group: 1 to 3 agents at a time (default 1), and 1 to 20 starts a day (default 5). It also waits while Kadans reports that you are close to your usage limit.

What goes through the relay

• Everything is sealed on your Mac before it is sent. The relay cannot read it and never hands out keys. Keys come only from invite links.
• The relay sees inbox ids and public keys, token hashes, group ids, the kind and size bucket of each item, the time, and your IP address while a connection is open.
• It logs only start, stop and error counts. It never logs payloads, tokens, ids or IP addresses.
• Your code does not go through it.