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Send a thread from chat into your terminal

by Ano team #shell #threads #claude-code

Look around. The team’s been arguing about a flaky build in a thread for an hour. Five hypotheses, three log paste-ins, no conclusion. The thread is the right place for the discussion. The terminal is the right place for the work.

Ano bridges them. You can send a thread from chat into your shell in one click, with the conversation as context.

The “Send to shell” gesture

Hover any message in Ano and there’s a “Send to shell” action. It appears on threads too. Click it, and a structured <ano_payload> block lands in your local terminal that has Claude Code attached.

The payload contains:

  • The thread’s parent message.
  • Every reply, in order.
  • Reactions and any file attachments.
  • The channel name and a timestamp.

Your terminal now has the entire thread loaded as context.

What lands in your terminal

The desktop app drops an <ano_payload> block into the shell. That block carries the structured form of whatever you forwarded: the message or thread, the channel it lives in, and metadata an agent can use to know what kind of content this is.

You don’t have to parse the payload yourself. The @ano-chat/skills package teaches Claude Code how to read these payloads:

claude plugin install @ano-chat/skills

After that, Claude Code recognizes <ano_payload> blocks automatically. The exact schema lives in the skills repo; check there for the latest shape.

What you can do with it

Anything you’d do in your terminal, with the thread as the problem statement.

A common pattern, for the flaky-build example:

> read the payload. fetch the last green build's logs from CI.
  diff them against the latest failed build. tell me what
  changed.

Claude Code reads the payload, calls your CI’s CLI, diffs the two log sets, and tells you which lines first appeared in the broken builds. You paste the answer back into the thread when you’ve got it.

The team gets the chat. You get the terminal. The agent stitches them.

Going deeper

The skills repo at github.com/ano-chat/ano-skills is the canonical source for how Claude Code reads Ano’s payloads. If you’ve got a recurring thread shape your team handles often, extending Claude Code with a custom skill that knows about it is the next step.

For the opposite direction (terminal pushing back into chat), see Send a message to a channel from your terminal. For the in-channel sibling that runs Claude Code without leaving the app, see Press ⌘J: a shell in every channel.