2026-10-18 — The away mode is a record of the person's absence, set by a verb and ended only by its time or by their word (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 planning): abcd mode autonomous [--until <time>] records who set it (the holder name reservations already resolve from caller-local facts), when, and when it ends, where --until takes a clock time (its next occurrence, local time) or a full timestamp and a time already past is refused; without --until it is open-ended until abcd mode back. It sits beside the waiting-on badge, whose three words stay a closed set, and is not a fourth word. A human prompt during the window does not end it, since a brief return overrode the instruction on 2026-10-16 and a prompt from a peer looks the same. An agent sets it on the person's word in its session, and one set covers every working copy, so no peer has to relay it. This restates the product thinker's 2026-10-17 ruling that they say they are away, until a set time or open-ended, and say when they are back (grounds: itd-2610170638184486 decisions; iss-2610170619247185; brief invariant 10; internal/core/mode)

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• dcn-26101809371817362026-10-18 — The away record is changed only under a lock, read only when it is safely the account's, and capped at seven days (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 review round 1; refines dcn-2610180913399042): every read-modify-write of the record (setting, ending, queueing, a recorded stop) holds fsutil.WithFileLock on a lock file beside it and re-reads the record inside the lock, so a stop check that read away before a slow forge listing cannot write away back after the person ended it, and two queued steps cannot lose one; the forge listing runs outside the lock, and a lock not had within two seconds allows the stop and says so on stderr. The record and its lock are used only when each is a regular file this account owns that no one else can write, within 64 KiB, the checks rules.json already gets; a record failing them, or failing to parse, reads as not away, failing open, and a verb asked to change it refuses naming the file. An open-ended record ends seven days after it was set, and --until may name no later time, so a forgotten record lapses while a run of several days, such as the standing run of 2026-10-15 through 2026-10-17, still fits; a 24-hour cap would have ended that run midway, and requiring --until would contradict the product thinker's ruling that the mode may be open-ended. While the record holds, the prompt hook adds a one-line systemMessage the person sees on every prompt naming the away mode, its end, who set it and how to end it; the away block tells the agent to run abcd mode back only on the person's word in its session; and abcd mode back records who ended the mode and from which working copy (grounds: the plan review of 2026-10-18, findings 6, 7 and 13; internal/fsutil file lock; AGENTS.md rules.json ownership checks; iss-2610170619247185 standing run; the draft's ruling that the state is always shown plainly)
• dcn-26101810034564442026-10-18 — Only the person sets the away mode, its push rights are narrow, and the guard's refusal is a mistake filter (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 review round 2, choice (a); refines dcn-2610180913399042, replacing its clause that an agent sets the mode on the person's word): the prompt hook cannot tell the person's message from one another session relays, and its input names no origin, so a relayed word could let an agent grant itself, and every copy, push rights. So the guard refuses every route to setting the mode that it reads: `abcd mode autonomous` by the binary on PATH, the plugin root's binary or a built `abcd-<goos>-<arch>`; a `go run` of a package ending in `cmd/abcd`; any of them inside `sh -c` or in a script file a shell runs (adr-2610091150447054); a shell write into the away store under `~/.abcd.noindex/away/`; and an Edit or Write tool call on a path inside it. The person sets the mode with their own `!` command, which the host runs directly without going through Claude and so without the pre-tool hook, or at a terminal. A refused attempt is recorded in the store and shown to the person on the next prompt. What the mode grants is the session committing and pushing its own branches and opening their pull requests; never the default branch, a tag, a release cut, another person's pull request, a branch this copy only checked out to review, or a force push; merging follows the repository's own rule. This is chosen over the fallback, and is enough for now, because the grant only governs an agent that follows refusals: one that ignores them can push without any mode, so no shape of the mode adds a boundary inside the person's own session; the guard stops a refusal-following agent from granting itself on a relayed word; the rights are narrow, and every push is reversible and visible on the forge; and the record (who set it and from which copy) and the recorded refusals leave a trail the person reads on return. The guard stays a mistake filter (adr-42, and the decision of 2026-10-17 on the default branch that keeps the headless approver one, naming the OS fence as the boundary). That fence (spc-2610161751056096) is the boundary only for agents abcd's runner launches, whose writes to abcd's home it confines to their own worktree; it does not fence the person's own interactive session, where the stall happened, so there the narrow grant and the trail are the mitigation. The fallback (the mode grants no push rights, and the person's own standing instruction stays the authority to push) applies instead if the live capture shows that a message relayed from another session can run as a `!` command, or that an agent's tool call can reach the host's shell mode (grounds: plan review round 2, choice (a), and the coordinator's two addenda; the host's interactive-mode page, which says shell mode runs commands directly without going through Claude and outside the sandbox that applies to Claude's commands; the abcd-source-ledger-flip guard entry; adr-2610161621415708)
• dcn-26101810165101532026-10-18 — The away mode grants no push rights: the person's own standing instruction stays the authority to commit, push, and open or merge a pull request, exactly as before the mode existed (facilitator-on-delegation on the release orchestrator's ruling, itd-2610180912189125 after plan review round 2; supersedes dcn-2610181003456444, round 2's choice (a), and with it the guard entries that made setting the mode the person's act alone). The OS sandbox of spc-2610161751056096 fences only the agents abcd's runner launches, never the person's own interactive sessions, so for the sessions that actually stalled on 2026-10-16 the guard entries would never become a boundary, and their two days would buy a trust claim the plan cannot make. The fallback dcn-2610181003456444 already named is taken now, not on the live capture's evidence. Where the stop check finds owed work that needs a push (an unpushed branch, a reservation whose work no pull request carries, a behind or failing pull request once its local fix is committed), its reason tells the session to push if its standing instruction allows, and otherwise to queue the push with abcd mode queue for the person's return; a queued step that names the item's branch or record id, on word boundaries, hands that item back to the person for the rest of the window (a branch only while it holds commits its upstream lacks, so only the push waits), and the stop check stops naming it. The away mode is never treated as permission. The person-only acts gain pushing, opening or merging a pull request without a standing instruction that allows it. Who sets the mode returns to dcn-2610180913399042: the person, or a session on their word in that session; since the mode grants nothing, a mode set on a relayed word only keeps sessions working and deciding instead of asking, and the person sees who set it, from which working copy, and the literal abcd mode back on their next prompt. Making the mode the person's act alone moves to itd-2610170638184486 as named remaining work: the guard entry refusing an agent's abcd mode autonomous, its other routes (sh -c and script files), the shell-write and file-tool refusals on the away store, the refused attempts recorded and shown, the capture's checks of the person's ! command and of a relayed !, and the guard reading go run ./cmd/abcd and built abcd-<goos>-<arch> binaries as abcd for every entry, the ledger flip included, a security-relevant widening that gets its own review there (grounds: the release orchestrator's ruling of 2026-10-18 and the reviewer's addendum, both recommending the fallback; spc-2610161751056096 and adr-2610161621415708, which fence launched agents only; iss-2610170619247185, whose standing instruction already allowed pushes and auto-merge; the fallback clause of dcn-2610181003456444)
• iss-2610170619247185An agent session told to work autonomously overnight sat idle for about ten of the eleven and a half hours between 20:48 BST on 2026-10-16 and 07:13 BST on 2026-10-17, while it held owed work it could have done alone.
• itd-2610170638184486Every session keeps a checklist on disk, so no run stalls and no stall spreads
• itd-2610180912189125A session left to work on never stops while it has work
• spc-2610180914469489A session left to work on never stops while it has work