afk

name	afk
description	Enter away-mode supervision. Use when the user invokes /afk (e.g. "/afk", "/afk back in an hour", "going afk"). Sets a durable away-mode flag so the sub-supervisor daemon can self-handle routine wakes and escalate only captain-relevant events as one batched digest, cutting supervision token cost during walk-away stretches. Exit is automatic; any real (unmarked) message returns to full per-wake responsiveness.
user-invocable	true
metadata	{"internal":true}

afk

Away-mode supervision. When invoked, /afk makes the daemon's token-saving tradeoff consented and explicit: the captain is stepping away, so the sub-supervisor may triage routine wakes in bash instead of waking firstmate's LLM for each one. Escalations still reach the captain, but as one pre-read, batched digest rather than per-wake injections.

What it does

1. Set the durable away-mode flag:

   date '+%s' > state/.afk
   

   This file survives a firstmate restart: recovery re-enters afk if the flag is present.

2. Ensure the sub-supervisor daemon is running. Check the pid file; start the daemon only if it is dead or absent:

   if [ -f state/.supervise-daemon.pid ] && kill -0 "$(cat state/.supervise-daemon.pid)" 2>/dev/null; then
     : # daemon already alive - it picks up the flag on its next cycle
   else
     nohup bin/fm-supervise-daemon.sh >/dev/null 2>&1 &
   fi
   

   The daemon is presence-gated: it injects escalations only while state/.afk exists, and stays quiet otherwise.

3. Do not separately arm fm-watch.sh. The daemon manages the watcher as its child; the singleton lock no-ops a stray arm harmlessly.

4. Acknowledge to the captain that away-mode is active: the daemon will self-handle routine wakes, escalate only captain-relevant events, and the captain can exit by sending any real message.

How to exit afk

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

• A message without the sentinel marker and not starting with /afk -> the captain is back. Clear state/.afk, stop the daemon, flush one distilled "while you were out" catch-up (drain state/.wake-queue, summarize any pending escalations from state/.subsuper-escalations and any state/.subsuper-inject-wedged marker), and resume full per-wake responsiveness (arm bin/fm-watch-arm.sh).
• A message with the sentinel marker (FM_INJECT_MARK, ASCII 0x1f) -> it is a daemon escalation; stay afk and process it.
• Re-invoking /afk while already away -> stay afk (refresh the flag); 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).

Orthogonal to approval authority

afk changes how aggressively firstmate surfaces things, not who approves what. "Away" never means "approves more." A PR ready for merge, a needs-decision finding, or anything destructive still waits for the captain's explicit word - the daemon just batches the notification.

Sentinel marker contract

The daemon prefixes every injection with FM_INJECT_MARK (ASCII unit separator, 0x1f), invisible and untypable. This is how firstmate tells a daemon escalation apart from a real message in the same pane. The marker travels with the message text; it does not rely on harness-level typed-vs-injected detection (which is not portable across claude, codex, opencode, pi, and grok).

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):

• pane_is_busy - the harness shows a busy footer (agent mid-turn) on tmux (shared with fm-send.sh via bin/fm-tmux-lib.sh); on herdr, tries the native agent.get-backed busy state first, trusts only busy outright, and corroborates every non-busy verdict with the same regex-over-capture reader.
• pane_input_pending - the composer holds real unsubmitted text (a human's half-typed line, or a previous injection whose Enter was swallowed). On tmux, the cursor-line detector strips the harness's composer box borders first, so an idle bordered composer (claude draws │ > … │) is correctly read as empty, not pending. Without this, every idle claude pane looked like pending input and the daemon deferred 100% of escalations (incident afk-invx-i5). FM_COMPOSER_IDLE_RE still overrides empty-composer matching after border stripping. On herdr, the equivalent structural border-row classifier (fm_backend_herdr_composer_state, docs/herdr-backend.md) plays the same role.

Either condition 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, and against 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 empty composer. 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 (surface it on the "while you were out" catch-up if present), and a flash on the supervisor client's status line. 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: Enter is retried (Enter only, never a retype) until the composer clears. A submit "landed" only when the composer is confirmed empty afterward, using the same corrected, border-aware detector as the composer guard. A bordered-empty claude composer is recognized as submitted rather than mistaken for a swallowed Enter. fm-send.sh uses the same primitive and exits non-zero when a steer's Enter is positively swallowed, so firstmate learns an instruction did not land instead of leaving it unsubmitted.

Classification policy

The daemon wraps fm-watch.sh, runs the watcher as a child, classifies each wake reason in bash, and self-handles the routine majority without consuming a firstmate turn. Only captain-relevant events escalate to firstmate's context, and even then as one pre-read, single-line, batched digest. The classification predicates (the captain-relevant verb set, the signal/stale tests, and the fleet-scan) live in the shared bin/fm-classify-lib.sh, the same library the always-on watcher uses for its own triage when afk is off, so the two modes apply one identical 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 status content has no captain-relevant verb (done:|needs-decision:|blocked:|failed:|PR ready|checks green|ready in branch|merged) -> self-handle. Captain-relevant verb -> escalate.
• check -> always escalate. Check scripts print only when firstmate should wake.
• stale with a terminal status -> escalate. Non-terminal stale is transient: 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 a captain-relevant status line the per-wake classifier might miss.
• Unknown reason, or any uncertainty -> escalate fail-safe.

Escalations are buffered up to FM_ESCALATE_BATCH_SECS (default 90s; 0 = immediate) and flushed as one single-line digest prefixed with the sentinel marker, carrying pre-read status summaries and a recommended action. The single-line format makes the submission unambiguous across harnesses, and the marker 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.
• Composer guard on the supervisor pane - before injecting, the daemon checks both pane_is_busy (harness busy footer means agent mid-turn) and pane_input_pending (real unsubmitted text on the cursor line means human mid-typing or previous injection with swallowed Enter). Either condition defers injection and preserves the buffer for retry. The daemon never merges its digest into the captain's half-typed line.
• The composer detector, shared with fm-send.sh in bin/fm-tmux-lib.sh, drops dim/faint ghost text, then strips harness composer box borders, so a ghost-only or idle bordered composer such as claude's │ > ... │ reads as empty, not pending. Without these filters, idle bordered composers and dim ghost suggestions can look like pending input and stall supervision. FM_COMPOSER_IDLE_RE still overrides empty-composer matching after dim-ghost and border stripping, and FM_BUSY_REGEX overrides busy footers.
• 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 empty composer. If that cannot confirm a submit, it raises a loud, rate-limited wedge alarm: ERROR log, durable state/.subsuper-inject-wedged marker, and a status-line flash. 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 composer is confirmed empty. That empty composer is the acknowledgement that the submit landed, using the same dim-ghost-aware and border-aware detector (tmux) or structural border-row classifier (herdr) so a ghost-only or bordered-empty claude composer counts as submitted rather than a false swallowed Enter.
• Marker strip - strip_injection_marker removes the sentinel prefix 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 - classify_signal and both check the seen-status marker before escalating, so a status escalated by one path is not re-escalated by another in the same digest.

Reliability properties

These properties must hold:

• Nothing is lost. The durable queue plus fm-wake-drain.sh recover any missed or crashed injection.
• Wedge detection is bounded-latency, not lossy.
• 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.