The rooms-as-contexts pattern is underrated. You get namespace isolation for free without building any session management. Switch channels, switch project, switch system prompt, and the conversation history stays where it belongs.

The other win is client agnosticism. I can connect from a terminal on my workstation, a mobile IRC client on my phone, or a web client if I'm on someone else's machine, and I'm talking to the same agent with the same history. That's much harder to replicate with a custom REST API without building your own auth and session layer.

The backscroll is the part that makes it feel persistent. The agent feels "always on" even though it's just responding to messages, because the channel history gives you the full context of what you asked it last time.

This sounds a lot cleaner than the approach I was thinking of with a separate bot for each role. I like it.