How to create a bot reply without spamming user

[thathurtabit]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I've been making a simple bot with @atproto/api - the bot awaits for interactions and generates a reply and sends it.

The bot runs from a cron task every hour (currently), but each time the cron task runs, it creates a new message to the same post it found previously, creating new reply (to the same thread) every hour, until (I think) I manually view the post via the Bluesky app which then makes the post as read.

Example code:

    const notificationsResponse = await agent.listNotifications();
    const notificationsData = notificationsResponse.data;
    const { notifications } = notificationsData;

    for (const { cid, uri, isRead, reason } of notifications) {
      if (!["reply", "mention"].includes(reason)) return
      if (isRead) return; // --> how do I set `isRead` to true? Seems it's always false every cron tick

      await agent.like(uri, cid);
      await agent.post({
        text: getDarkSoulsWisdom(),
        reply: {
          root: { cid, uri },
          parent: { cid, uri }
        },
      })
      await agent.updateSeenNotifications(); // --> would this be a way to mark the notification as read? The args say `seenAt: string` - where would I get that value? How would it apply to the current notification?
    }

Describe the solution you'd like

A way of setting a notification as viewed/read/seen so isRead is true, and the bot does not reply to the same notification multiple times

Describe alternatives you've considered

My bot runs in a serverless environment, so storing local files won't work as they're ephemeral. Setting up a database for this seems overkill, perhaps.

Additional context

I'm almost certainly missing something from docs somewhere - but I'm not able to find what I'm looking for.

[thathurtabit]

Update!
I've just spotted that const notificationsResponse = await agent.listNotifications();
returns a notifications and seenAt value... (listNotifications)

I'll try using the seenAt value like this (after I've replied to the notifications):
await agent.updateSeenNotifications(seenAt);

I'll see if this works...

[thathurtabit]

Another update! This didn't work.