What is Riby
The pager for AI agents. Your agent asks, your phone buzzes, you answer in one tap.
Riby (Run It By You) is a pager for AI agents. When an agent hits a decision it should not make alone, it calls one MCP tool and waits. Riby delivers the request to your phone as a short, pager-sized message. You answer with one tap from Telegram, Discord, or the web dashboard, and the answer flows back to the waiting agent.
If you never answer, the request expires to deny. Six hours by default, adjustable from the dashboard. The agent gets a real no, never a hang and never silent permission.
The loop
- Your agent calls a Riby tool:
request_permission,request_plan_check, orrequest_steering. - The request lands in your linked channels with the agent's name, a title, a gist, and answer buttons.
- You tap approve, deny, pick an option, or type a reply. First answer wins across every channel, and the message updates in place.
- The agent receives your answer and continues.
Why it blocks correctly
Most hosted approval APIs cannot actually hold an agent in place. Harnesses background or time out long-running calls, and the "approval" arrives after the agent has moved on.
Riby runs as a local stdio MCP server on your machine. It keeps the tool call alive with progress notifications while you decide, so a page is a real pause in the work. It survives the idle timeouts that break hosted approaches.
Requests outlive the agent
Every request is written to an append-only ledger on your device before it goes anywhere. If the agent crashes or the laptop sleeps mid-wait, the request survives on the server and in the ledger. When the agent comes back, check_pending reconciles: your answer, or the safe expiry, is waiting for it.
Three request types
| Type | Tool | You answer with |
|---|---|---|
| Permission | request_permission | Approve or deny |
| Plan check | request_plan_check | Approve or deny the summarized plan |
| Steering | request_steering | One of up to 4 options, or free text |
Free-text replies work on every request type. See the MCP tool reference for parameters and size caps.
What Riby is not
Riby is deliberately narrow. No policy engine, no workspace admin, no approval workflow builder. One tool call, pager-sized payloads, one-tap answers. If you want your agent to run unattended without stalling or overstepping, that is the whole product.
Ready? Start with the quickstart.