afk

Imported from kunchenguid/firstmate (.agents/skills/afk/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add kunchenguid/firstmate --skill afk. Copyright stays with the author.

afk

Away mode is a POSTURE of the one supervision session, not a second architecture. Being away changes exactly two things: how the captain is informed, and what happens at a captain-owned decision point (hold for return, or the answer the captain's away words already gave). It never changes the authority set. The posture is a file, state/.afk-contract, written only by bin/fm-afk-contract.sh after the captain confirms a read-back; nothing infers the posture from chat. Hold-for-return is the default and the only reach profile this release records: there is no phone channel, and the entry announcement says so aloud every time.

Entering: /afk [words]

1. Record the captain's words, verbatim. The words are the whole mandate: bin/fm-afk-contract.sh records them exactly as given, with no clause fields, verbs, ids, or merge-grant list, and by the captain's mandate no parser, tokenizer, classifier, or grammar reads them anywhere. Read bin/fm-afk-contract.sh --help for the flags rather than memorizing them. Plain /afk with no words is a valid entry with no mandate.
2. Propose and read back. Run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh propose --words-file <path> [--expected-return <UTC ISO 8601>] [--spend <n>] (or --words <text>); it writes the proposal and prints the record's read-back. Then relay your own plain-sentence restatement of the words to the captain in AGENTS.md section 9 language - what you read them as asking for, sentence by sentence, never a numbered field list - beside the expected return, the spend cap, and the one-sentence reach announcement, so the captain can catch a misreading before saying go. Say plainly which sentence, if any, you could not act on while away (a red merge, a discard, anything on the never-set, local-only landing), so the captain can restate it or accept that it waits for their return.
3. Confirm on the captain's go. Run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh confirm; it promotes the proposal into the record and prints the entry announcement. Relay that announcement verbatim in spirit: hold-for-return only, no phone channel, your instructions are recorded and the away session will carry them out where it can, anything it is unsure of, or that needs you, waits for your return, and destructive, irreversible, and security-sensitive actions are never pre-authorizable whatever the words say. With no words, run propose and confirm back to back; the announcement says no instructions were recorded. Re-invoking /afk while already away with no new words is a refresh and leaves the standing record untouched; new words replace the mandate after the same read-back, preserve the original session entry, and archive the superseded words for the return brief.
4. Per harness, after the record exists:
   • Pi and pi-signed: stop here. The away daemon is no longer launched on Pi; the ordinary supervision session (docs/pi-supervision-branch.md) keeps running with the record present, and bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start refuses on these harnesses. With the record present main is parked: the supervision branch takes every safe actionable wake, captain outcomes accumulate for the return brief, and main's standing authority relocates to the branch through the guarded scripts (docs/pi-supervision-branch.md "Postures"); only a wake the branch declines (including a broken branch or unsafe scan) or a watcher failure wakes main. /quiet needs nothing extra on Pi: the attended branch already keeps routine wakes out of this conversation, so quiet-while-present is the attended posture's own shape there.
   • Harness WITH a native in-pane tracked-background tool (claude's background bash, grok's background tool): run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start-native, then run FM_AFK_STATE_PREPARED=1 bin/fm-afk-start.sh through that native tool. This is a deliberate no-separate-terminal exception because the harness-hosted job creates no terminal or layout mutation, and a shell launcher cannot invoke a harness-native background tool. If the native launch fails, run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh stop to roll back the prepared lifecycle. Do not wrap it in nohup ... & (Codex/herdr can reap fire-and-forget shell children after a tool call returns).
   • Every other harness (codex, opencode, omp, kimi, cursor): run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start. It is the single owner of the daemon terminal: it creates a NON-VISIBLE tracked terminal for the current backend and passes the captain pane in as FM_SUPERVISOR_TARGET so the daemon injects into the captain, not its own new pane (docs/herdr-backend.md "Away-mode supervisor support"). Both daemon paths require the already-confirmed record and share bin/fm-afk-start.sh as the daemon entry. The daemon is presence-gated: it injects escalations only while state/.afk exists, and stays quiet otherwise.
5. Do not separately arm fm-watch.sh where the daemon runs. The daemon manages the watcher as its child; the singleton lock no-ops a stray arm harmlessly. On Pi nothing changes about arming: the supervision session's own cycle continues.

While away

• The record exists, so the watcher never rechecks an item held for the captain, in either supervision shape; the return brief lists it instead. Declared external waits keep their condition-aware, hours-long recheck cadence (bin/fm-watch.sh, bin/fm-classify-lib.sh).
• The away session acts on the captain's words. It reads them at the tail of every wake, decides by its own judgment whether the event in front of it is the moment they name, acts on them only through the guarded scripts under standing authority, never by analogy, holds with verdict captain on doubt, and opens every outcome summary for an action taken under the words with "per your away instructions:" (bin/fm-branch-prompt.sh "Postures" owns the execution rules). Destructive, irreversible, and security-sensitive actions are never pre-authorizable whatever the words say, and ask-user findings keep the ask-user-authority policy unless the words pre-answer the exact decision; anything else that needs the captain holds for their return.
• On Pi, main is parked and the supervision branch handles every safe actionable wake under main's standing authority, through the same guarded scripts main would use: any pull request green at its live head may merge (which one the words meant is the branch's reading), queued work whose blockers cleared - already queued, or filed by the branch because the words explicitly call for it - dispatches within the spend cap, and a decision is answered with the captain's own pre-stated answer or under ask-user-authority. Anything else holds for the return, a red merge never proceeds while away, local-only landing always waits for the captain, and only a wake the branch declines (including a broken branch or unsafe scan) or a watcher failure wakes main (docs/pi-supervision-branch.md "Postures").
• The session-start digest reports the posture under its AFK subsection, so a restart re-enters the posture from the record, not from memory.

How to exit: the return

No /back is needed. The first genuine message is the return signal:

• A message without the current operational prefix or a legacy bare marker, and not starting with /afk -> the captain is back. Run bin/fm-afk-return.sh before acting on the message that brought the captain back. That script owns the correct-ordered daemon shutdown where a daemon ran, the archive of the posture record, durable wake presentation and post-handling acknowledgement, escalation and wedge evidence, the return brief, and the return-catch-up gate. Relay the return brief in section 9 language and in its own order: supervisor health across the away window first (any gap leads), then the captain's instructions verbatim with the away session's account of every action it took under them, then what is waiting on the captain, then what was tried and failed or could not be fixed, then what was handled, then cost. The gate keeps every open blocked: event until that blocker's own resolution is proven: remediate each immediately through the normal lifecycle, or explicitly reclassify it with a durable reason and close its decision key with resolved [key=...], then run bin/fm-afk-return.sh check. Captain-verdict outcomes are listed under "waiting on you", but do not exempt open blockers: per-blocker provenance is deferred with no owner, and the gate fails safe by keeping every open blocker. Once the record is archived, resume full per-wake responsiveness through the emitted primary-harness supervision protocol while blocker handling proceeds, so the gate never creates a blind wait. A Bearings request may be answered while the gate is open, and the digest surfaces the catch-up state as a Charted Next (return-catchup) warning row naming what still holds it. Acting on the fleet - dispatching, steering, merging, or any other ordinary captain work - still waits until the check exits successfully.
• A message with the current operational prefix (FM_OPERATIONAL_PREFIX, U+2063 INVISIBLE SEPARATOR followed by FIRSTMATE_OP: ), or a legacy bare FM_INJECT_MARK daemon escalation -> stay away and process it.
• Re-invoking /afk while already away -> stay away (refresh); this does not trigger an exit.

Bias ambiguous cases toward exit: a present captain beats token savings, and a false exit is self-correcting (the captain re-runs /afk). When the captain wants this same token-saving supervision while staying present and chatting - ordinary messages should NOT exit it - that is /quiet (kunchenguid/firstmate#2356), not /afk.

Orthogonal to approval authority

afk changes how the captain is informed and what happens at a captain-owned decision point, not who approves what. "Away" never means "approves more" or "approves less." A PR ready for merge keeps the merge authority from AGENTS.md section 7, and a needs-decision finding keeps the ask-user-authority policy; anything requiring the captain still waits for the captain's explicit word. While the away-posture record exists, any pull request green at its live head may merge under away authority; which one the captain's words meant is the away session's reading, and a merge the words do not call for holds for the return. Away authority never releases a captain hold, and it expires when the away record is archived. --allow-red remains attended-only and is refused while the record exists. A merge under away authority must be synchronous; fm-pr-merge.sh refuses auto-merge and any GitHub queue state that cannot prove an immediate merge while the record exists. The same gates bind whichever actor performs the action: on Pi the parked main's standing authority relocates to the supervision branch, which meets exactly these rules, and the spend cap recorded at entry is enforced by fm-spawn.sh for both actors while the record exists. The captain's away words are their explicit instruction given before leaving, recorded verbatim and acted on by the away session's judgment at the moment an event makes them relevant; the words cover nothing they do not say, are never applied by analogy, and die at archive. Destructive, irreversible, and security-sensitive actions are never pre-authorizable whatever the words say.

The daemon, where it still runs

On the harnesses that still launch the daemon (every verified harness except Pi and pi-signed), the mechanics below are unchanged.

Operational prefix contract

The daemon constructs every current injection as the away-supervisor kind owned by bin/fm-operational-input.sh, beginning with FM_OPERATIONAL_PREFIX: FM_INJECT_MARK (U+2063 INVISIBLE SEPARATOR) followed by the stable FIRSTMATE_OP: label. The bare FM_INJECT_MARK form remains accepted for legacy daemon escalations during rollout. U+2063 has no normal keyboard keystroke and survives terminal transport as UTF-8 text. This is how firstmate tells a daemon escalation apart from a real message in the same pane. The operational prefix travels with the message text; it does not rely on harness-level typed-vs-injected detection, which is not portable across claude, codex, opencode, grok, and kimi.

Busy-guard and composer guard

The daemon never injects into an in-use pane. Two checks run before every injection, dispatched through bin/fm-backend.sh for the supervisor's own backend (tmux or herdr; see "Auto-discovered supervisor pane" below):

• Primary-pane busy guard - pane_is_busy trusts Herdr native busy when available, otherwise matches rendered output against only the detected primary harness's signature. This narrow delivery guard never classifies a recorded worker task and never uses a global union of vendor patterns.
• Composer-state guard - inject_msg reads the full empty/pending/pending-unproven/unknown verdict from fm_backend_composer_state and injects only when it is affirmatively empty. Every other or future verdict defers, including an unreadable pane, ambiguous geometry, a blank unidentified row, and a bare shell prompt left after the agent exits. Each adapter contributes only capture and capability facts to the fleet-wide screen classifier in bin/fm-composer-lib.sh, which owns every shape and verdict. It preserves proven idle composers as empty but requires a genuine container around shell glyphs; see docs/herdr-backend.md "Composer and injection safety" for the operator contract. pane_input_pending is the tested fail-closed predicate for callers that need to know whether the composer is unsafe: it treats every result except exact empty as pending.

A busy primary pane, or any composer verdict other than empty, defers the injection; the buffered escalation survives in state/.subsuper-escalations and is retried on the next housekeeping tick. In afk mode the composer guard is belt-and-suspenders (no human is typing), but it protects against the race window between the captain returning and their message landing, a dead shell, and the daemon's own previous injection sitting unsent.

Max-defer escape (the daemon must never silently wedge). If anything stays buffered past FM_MAX_DEFER_SECS (default 300), the daemon attempts one normal flush, which still requires an idle pane and an affirmatively empty composer. The alarm is defense in depth rather than a substitute for keeping every genuinely idle supported composer injectable. If that submit cannot be confirmed, it raises a loud, rate-limited wedge alarm: an ERROR in the daemon log, a durable state/.subsuper-inject-wedged marker (the return brief's health line carries it), a tmux status-line flash when applicable, and a configurable backend-independent active alert. docs/wedge-alarm.md owns the alert channel setup, and docs/verification/supervision.md "Wedge-alarm channels" owns active evidence. So a guard false-positive becomes a visible stall, never an unbounded silent no-op.

Submit model

The digest is typed once (send-keys -l on tmux, pane send-text on herdr - both literal, non-submitting sends), then submitted with Enter and verified through the selected backend's submit primitive. Enter is retried (Enter only, never a retype) until the backend confirms the submit landed. For tmux that confirmation is normally a proven cleared composer from the shared classifier; an idle baseline transitioning to busy across this submit's own Enter also confirms that the turn started when a working harness hides its composer. Without that baseline, busy state never converts an unknown composer into confirmation. For herdr, idle-baseline submits first seek native agent-state showing a real turn started, then use the shared classifier when native state remains idle: a cleared composer confirms delivery, while pending text retries Enter and reaches the shared busy-queue verdict only after the retry budget. A bordered-empty or ghost-only composer is recognized as empty where that backend uses composer confirmation, rather than mistaken for a swallowed Enter. fm-send.sh uses the same primitive only on its typed plane and exits non-zero when that plane's Enter is positively swallowed; ordinary local text steers use the durable inbox and do not treat doorbell submission as delivery proof.

Busy-queued Enter exception (opencode 1.18.4). OpenCode keeps queued text visible while it is mid-turn, so tmux and herdr delegate the final delivery decision to fm_composer_queued_enter_verdict in bin/fm-composer-lib.sh rather than treating visible text alone as a swallowed Enter. The daemon still clears its buffer only on the backend's empty success verdict; docs/tmux-backend.md and docs/herdr-backend.md own the backend-specific confirmation signals.

Classification policy

The daemon wraps fm-watch.sh, runs the watcher as a child, presents every durable wake after each actionable watcher close, classifies each presented record in bash, and acknowledges the presented generation only after routing completes. It self-handles the routine majority without consuming a firstmate turn. Captain-relevant events, plus a bounded recheck of a declared external wait that is still declared, escalate to firstmate's context as one pre-read, single-line, batched digest. The captain-relevant verb set, declared-wait vocabulary, status-span classifier, and presentation-marker contract live in shared bin/fm-classify-lib.sh, while each supervisor owns its routing and fleet scan as a consumer of that policy. While state/.afk exists the daemon owns the watcher, so the watcher reverts to one-shot and lets the daemon do the triage - the two never run their triage at the same time.

Classify each wake this way:

• signal whose newly classified status span contains captain-relevant events -> escalate every event in source order. A nonterminal progress verb remains nonterminal even when its prose contains a legacy free-text token such as PR ready, checks green, ready in branch, or merged; only a bare legacy line with such a token escalates. Other signals with no captain-relevant event in the span -> self-handle.
• signal or stale whose latest status declares a wait, either a paused: external wait or a verified captain-held transfer, tracks the pause rather than a wedge whether its pane reads idle or busy. An unreported captain-relevant event in the newly classified span still escalates immediately while the current declaration independently keeps the pause cadence. With no unreported actionable event, the wake self-handles, and the current declaration outranks an enriched possible-wedge reason so it never escalates on the FM_STALE_ESCALATE_SECS cadence. If a declared external wait is still declared past FM_PAUSE_RESURFACE_SECS (default four hours), housekeeping sends one recheck and resets the pause window; a captain-held transfer is never rechecked while the posture record exists. The window ages against the crew's own latest status line, so only a status append that stops declaring the wait ends this routing and restores wedge detection.
• check -> always escalate. Check scripts print only when firstmate should wake.
• stale with a terminal status or bare legacy captain-relevant line -> escalate. Nonterminal progress remains transient even when its prose contains a legacy free-text token or its seen-status marker already matches, so record a marker and self-handle. If the pane is still idle past FM_STALE_ESCALATE_SECS (default 240s), housekeeping escalates it as a possible wedge. This bounds wedge-detection latency to the threshold plus a tick: a delay, never a loss. Healthy crewmates are autonomous and do not wait on firstmate mid-task.
• heartbeat -> self-handle. The daemon runs its own cheap bash fleet scan every FM_HEARTBEAT_SCAN_SECS (default 300s) as the catch-all for captain-relevant events still unread by the per-wake classifier.
• An unknown wake reason escalates fail-safe, while status-read uncertainty follows the shared one-report-without-position-advance contract referenced under Dedupe below.

Escalations are buffered up to FM_ESCALATE_BATCH_SECS (default 90s; 0 = immediate) and flushed as one single-line digest prefixed with the current operational prefix, carrying pre-read status summaries and a recommended action. The single-line format makes the submission unambiguous across harnesses, and the operational prefix lets firstmate distinguish it from a real captain message.

Injection hardening

• Single-line digest - embedded newlines are collapsed to a literal separator before injection, so submission is unambiguous regardless of harness.
• Busy and composer guards on the supervisor pane - before injecting, the daemon runs the detected-primary-harness rendered busy guard and reads fm_backend_composer_state directly. Only empty permits injection; pending protects half-typed or swallowed input, and unknown protects unreadable panes and bare dead-shell prompts. Every other result preserves the buffer for retry, so the daemon never merges its digest into the captain's half-typed line or types it into a shell.
• The active backend passes its capture plus declarative styled, cursor, identity, and row capabilities to the shared screen classifier; all structural recognition and verdict logic remains in bin/fm-composer-lib.sh. Styled captures let that owner remove dim/faint and dark-TRUECOLOR ghost or placeholder text while shape detection uses the ANSI-stripped screen, so a dark border is not lost with ghost content. A ghost-only or idle bordered composer such as claude's │ > ... │ therefore reads empty without allowing an unbordered shell prompt to do the same. FM_COMPOSER_IDLE_RE overrides the shared idle-placeholder regex, but a match alone never bypasses the classifier's shape-specific position and ANSI de-emphasis safety gates. FM_BUSY_REGEX overrides the rendered delivery guards plus Grok's isolated task-state fallback. A blank or otherwise unidentified input row carries no positive container proof and defers injection, so a modal dialog or a mid-redraw pane is never an injection target.
• Max-defer escape - the daemon must never silently wedge. If anything stays buffered past FM_MAX_DEFER_SECS (default 300s), the daemon attempts one normal flush, which still requires an idle pane and an affirmatively empty composer. If that cannot confirm a submit, it raises a loud, rate-limited wedge alarm: ERROR log, durable state/.subsuper-inject-wedged marker, a tmux status-line flash when applicable, and a backend-independent active alert. A composer false-positive surfaces as a visible stall, never an unbounded silent no-op.
• Verified type-once submit model - the digest is typed once (send-keys -l on tmux, pane send-text on herdr), then submitted with Enter and verified. Enter is retried, Enter only and never a retype, until the backend submit primitive reports empty as its caller-facing success verdict. For tmux that verdict normally means the shared classifier proved the composer cleared; a baseline-gated idle-to-busy transition may instead prove this Enter started the turn. For herdr's idle-baseline path it means native agent-state observed a turn start, the shared classifier proved the composer cleared, or the shared queued-Enter verdict proved delivery while busy. This lets ghost-only or bordered-empty composers count as empty where a composer read is the active confirmation signal.
• Marker strip - strip_injection_marker removes the current operational prefix or legacy bare marker before classification or relay, so the digest text firstmate sees is clean.
• Portable singleton lock - the daemon uses the repo's portable lock helper (fm-wake-lib.sh) instead of flock, which is absent on macOS.
• Dedupe across signal/stale/scan - all three paths use the shared status presentation markers defined by bin/fm-classify-lib.sh, so a successfully classified span is not re-escalated by another path in the same digest. Never treat a reported unreadable state as classified; the shared library header owns that marker contract, and the marker does not clear or suppress possible-wedge aging for a nonterminal progress line.
• Auto-discovered supervisor pane - the daemon resolves its own BACKEND (tmux vs herdr) and TARGET independently, mirroring bin/fm-backend.sh's own runtime auto-detection. Backend: FM_SUPERVISOR_BACKEND override, then $TMUX_PANE set (tmux), then $HERDR_ENV=1 with $HERDR_PANE_ID present (herdr), then a tmux fallback. Target: FM_SUPERVISOR_TARGET override (a tmux target or a herdr "<session>:<pane-id>" target), then $TMUX_PANE, then "${HERDR_SESSION:-default}:${HERDR_PANE_ID}" under herdr, then a firstmate:0 fallback with a warning. Both resolution sources are logged at startup so a wrong-but-resolving fallback is detectable. Other runtime backends, including zellij, orca, and cmux, are not yet supported as supervisor backends; the daemon refuses loudly at startup instead of misapplying tmux primitives to a pane that isn't one (docs/herdr-backend.md "Away-mode supervisor support").

Stale-artifact lifecycle

Treat state/.subsuper-escalations, its .since sidecar, and state/.subsuper-inject-wedged as session-scoped delivery artifacts, not as the durable work record. Always enter through bin/fm-afk-launch.sh, which clears prior-session artifacts only for a fresh entry and preserves the current session's buffer on refresh. Always exit through bin/fm-afk-launch.sh stop, which keeps state/.afk present through the daemon's shutdown flush, clears it, and archives the posture record last. docs/herdr-backend.md "Away-mode supervisor support" owns the current mechanism, and docs/verification/runtime-backends.md "Away-mode transport" owns active evidence.

Reliability properties

These properties must hold:

• Nothing is lost after queue publication. The daemon leaves every presented wake durable until routing completes and post-handling acknowledgement succeeds, so interruption replays the same work to the daemon or its successor.
• Wedge detection is bounded-latency, not lossy.
• Declared external waits are rechecked on a separate, bounded, condition-aware cadence rather than being mislabeled as wedges; items held for the captain are not rechecked while the posture record exists.
• The catch-all scan backs up the keyword classifier.
• The daemon preserves a single-instance portable lock, crash-loop backoff, a pane-gone guard, and a signal-trapped shutdown that flushes buffered escalations before exit.

FM_INJECT_SKIP (default heartbeat) force-self-handles matching kinds, overriding classification. Use it sparingly.