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Steer sends a message into a session. Inbound and outbound messages share one channel-agnostic envelope — so you handle every message the same way, wherever it came from or goes. Outbound delivery has its own page: Webhooks.

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Steer (inbound)

Send a message to a running or idle session; it wakes and continues with its prior context. Minimal form is just text: 
curl https://api.opencomputer.dev/v3/sessions/$ID/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -d '{ "text": "also check the CI config", "idempotency_key": "nudge-1" }'
Pass idempotency_key so retries (flaky network, double-click) are de-duplicated — applied at most once per session, so the same key is safe to reuse across different sessions.

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The envelope

Every inbound and outbound message normalizes to this shape. The core fields are fixed; anything source-specific lives under raw, which the platform never interprets. 
{
  "id": "client:abc123",
  "source": "client",
  "kind": "message",
  "actor": { "id": "client:user-7", "display": "Ada", "type": "human" },
  "conversation": { "source": "client", "ref": "thread-42" },
  "text": "also check the CI config",
  "refs": {},
  "ts": "2026-06-18T12:00:00Z",
  "raw": {}
}
  • id — the idempotency key, deduped per session (not global).
  • actor — who sent it (human | agent | system), namespaced.
  • conversation — an opaque reply/routing anchor.
  • text — the content the agent reads (or that you receive).
  • refs — structured context the agent shouldn’t have to infer from prose. Blessed keys: repo, branch, commit, ref, issue, pr (plus your own). Pass them on the initial input so a coding agent knows its target.
  • raw — untouched original payload; optional, never read by the core.
To get a session’s output out, register a webhook destination. Deliveries carry the full Event (a message event’s body is this envelope) — see Webhooks.
Inbound channels (Slack, GitHub, Jira, email) are coming soon — they map onto this same envelope; today you steer in via the API.