* let an agent wait on what it already said
An agent that answers in plain text is nudged to call a tool, and the only tool
that hands control back takes a required message. So it says the same thing
twice: once as text the user has already read, once as the argument it had to
supply to stop. Seen on a run whose whole instruction was "hi" - a greeting, then
the same greeting again through respond_to_user.
message is optional now. The nudge arms the tool with the text that was
delivered and says not to repeat it, so an agent that has said its piece can park
on it with an empty call. Anything it does want to add it passes normally.
Parking still cannot leave the user on silence: an empty call is refused unless
something was actually said, and the arming is single use - execution clears it
as soon as a turn ends any other way.
The interactive prompt now also says to answer and stop in one respond_to_user
call, which is what avoids the nudge in the first place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* drop the worked example from the interactive prompt
"the user greeted you, asked something you can answer outright, or you need a
decision" was the run I had been reading, written into a rule that holds
whatever the reason. The rule is that replying and stopping is one call; listing
occasions only invites the model to check whether this is one of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* drop the arming flag; an empty message just waits
Passing the delivered text from execution into the tool, and refusing an empty
call without it, was machinery guarding against an agent parking having said
nothing. That leaves the user looking at "waiting for your reply" with a cursor
in front of them - they type. It does not need a mechanism.
What is left is the default on message, and the nudge saying the text already
landed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* only offer waiting on words that were written
The nudge told every agent its text had already been delivered, but it fires
whenever a turn leaves the agent running, and a turn can end with no tool call
and no text at all - _final_output_preview has carried <none> and <empty>
branches all along. An agent that said nothing was being invited to wait on an
answer the user never received, leaving them at a bare prompt.
It now reads the turn: waiting on what was said is offered only when something
was, and otherwise the agent is told plainly that the user has read nothing and
to send its message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* leave the continuation nudge alone
Rewording it meant asserting from the outside whether the agent had spoken, and
the nudge fires whenever a turn leaves the agent running - text or no text. The
agent knows which it did without being told, so the guidance belongs in its
prompt, where the condition is its own to read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* say it in the nudge, where the agent is reading
An agent stranded by the nudge reasons off the nudge. Told only to call
respond_to_user, it supplies a message, and since it has just answered in plain
text that message is the same answer again. The system prompt saying otherwise
sits thousands of tokens earlier and loses.
The clause goes on the line the agent acts on: call respond_to_user, with no
message if it has already said it. That reads true whatever the turn did,
including one that produced no text, because the agent is the one who knows
which — nothing here has to work it out from the outside.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One tool was doing three jobs (wait on the user, wait on other agents, and
- wrongly - wait for a long-running command), so the driver had to guess which
one an agent meant and used parent_id as the proxy: the root waits for a human,
everyone else waits for agents. That proxy is wrong, since the user can message
any agent from the TUI's agent tree.
Tool identity now carries the intent, and the coordinator records it as a
wait_kind that survives snapshot/restore:
respond_to_user -> wait_kind="user", never auto-resumed (root or not)
wait_for_agents -> wait_kind="agents", auto-resumed on a 300s timer
recovery exhaust -> wait_kind="stalled"
respond_to_user fuses the message and the yield into one call, so there is no
way to answer and then forget to stop - the two-step that gpt-4o-mini skipped
2/2 in live testing. Plain text still renders as before.
Auto-resume is also bounded now: an agent that re-parks after every timeout
burned a model turn every 300s for the rest of the scan (and, since parked
children notify their parent, spammed the parent's inbox on the same cycle).
After _MAX_IDLE_AUTO_RESUMES it stays parked until a real message arrives.
