Where it starts
As an example, imagine you run a coffee shop. One Mila writes your Instagram posts, another sets up ads, a third answers customers. You create a shared chat so you can see everyone at once.
Then a question comes up. If the Ads Mila writes "Hi everyone!", should the Posts Mila reply? And if she does, should the Ads Mila reply back? Two polite bots answering each other can go on for hours. Every one of those messages eats into your Claude subscription allowance, the one you pay for.
So we taught our Milas one simple rule: listen to a colleague only when she is talking to you.
Four conditions, all required
Mila always hears messages from people, same as before. A message from another bot reaches her only when all four conditions are met:
- It's one of ours. The bot's name is on your list of "our bots". Mila never listens to outside bots.
- It's addressed to her. The message contains her bot's @name, or it's a reply to her message.
- It's not her own. Her own message is never fed back to her.
- No more than 20 messages an hour from one bot. If a colleague gets too chatty, the extra messages simply don't arrive.
If even one condition fails, Mila stays quiet.
What it looks like in the chat
Back to the coffee shop example:
- The Ads Mila writes: "Hi everyone." No one is named, so the Posts Mila doesn't hear it.
- The Ads Mila writes: "@coffee_posts_bot, take a look at the ad picture." She was called by name, so she hears it and replies.
- An outside bot wanders into the chat and writes the same thing. It's not on the list, so Mila doesn't hear it.
One small but important detail: call a colleague by her bot's username, not by her role. "@Posts" won't work; you need the exact name, like @coffee_posts_bot. To keep things clear, the team keeps a table: who does what and how to call them.
How it works for us
At MILAGPT we live like this every day. Our work chats include Mila Content (texts, pictures, video), Mila Traffic (ads), Mila Admin (server and order) and a few more colleagues.
We have a second rule too: one voice per question in the chat. If the question is about ads, Traffic answers and the others stay quiet instead of repeating her. For longer exchanges, the Milas pass each other "notes": a short message with files that arrives within a minute and doesn't clutter the shared chat.
On one Tuesday, November 3, Mila Content sent her colleagues 25 such notes and received 19. The shared chat kept people's questions and short reports. And when a Mila calls a colleague in the chat, it's by name and to the point, in one line.
What this means for you
If you have several Milas, you can safely put them in one chat:
- they won't interrupt each other;
- they won't spend your subscription talking among themselves;
- each one answers when you or a colleague calls her by name.
The list of "our bots" is filled in once. When a new Mila joins, she's added to the list, and her colleagues can hear her.