2026-10-18 — A session with nothing owed stops only with its next look scheduled (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 planning): while the away mode holds, a stop with no owed work is allowed when the host reports a scheduled wake for the session or a background task in flight, and is then waiting; otherwise it is blocked once, asking the session to schedule its next look sooner than half its reservations' lease (under an hour for the two-hour lease) through the host's own scheduling, and the bound in the stop-check decision applies. The host documents that its Stop input carries session_crons (wakes from CronCreate, ScheduleWakeup and /loop) and background_tasks so a hook can tell a finished session from one paused for work that will wake it. abcd starts no process of its own and schedules nothing itself. The check covers the overnight gap after the two-hour watcher ended; the checklist draft's own timed wakes and trigger promises stay there. It matches the coordination prep's decision that a waiting session wakes before half its lease, and the product thinker's ruling that a waiting session records when it looks again and is never kept spinning (grounds: code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks Stop input; itd-2610170638184486 decisions; iss-2610170619247185 idle spans)

Frontmatter

.abcd/work/decisions/dcn-2610180913421109-a-session-with-nothing-owed-stops-only.md
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mentions5

• dcn-26101809365777202026-10-18 — While the person is away a session is only working or waiting, and abcd never allows a stop with work owed (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 review round 1; supersedes the bound in dcn-2610180913413137 and refines dcn-2610180913421109): while away a stop is allowed only when the session has a qualifying wake and either nothing is owed or the owed set is unchanged since this session's last block; it then reads waiting, and the wake's next fire time is kept as its next look in the session's own state file in the local tier, beside the owed-set fingerprint and a count of consecutive blocks. Every other stop while away is blocked, whatever stop_hook_active says, naming the next item, or with nothing owed asking the session to take the next ready item first and only then schedule its next look. The host's cap of eight consecutive continuations, or the cap its documented environment variable sets, is the outer bound, and the block abcd counts as reaching it records stopped with work owed in the away record. The old row that allowed an unchanged owed set once stop_hook_active was true reproduced the stall, since a reply of awaiting the person with no tool call ended the turn until morning. This matches the coordination prep's decision that while the person is away a session with work never stops and one with nothing it can do is waiting with its next look, and the draft's ruling that stopped is allowed only while the person is present (grounds: the plan review of 2026-10-18, findings 2, 5 and 12; code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks Stop input and continuation cap; itd-2610170638184486 decisions)
• dcn-26101809365794982026-10-18 — A wake qualifies only when its next fire time falls before the session's earliest renewal due, and a background task never counts (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 review round 1; refines dcn-2610180913421109): a session_crons entry qualifies when the next time its cron expression matches after now, read in the machine's local time, is no later than the earliest renewal due among the live reservations under this copy's key minus the lease skew allowance, a renewal being due halfway between a reservation's claim or last renewal and its expiry; with no live reservation it must fire within half the default lease. The next fire time comes from a small five-field cron parser of abcd's own (minute, hour, day of month, month, day of week, with lists, ranges, steps and the wildcard), since the host documents schedule as a cron expression and a new dependency would need sign-off; an expression it cannot parse never qualifies. A background task does not count on its own while the person is away, since a shell task such as a long sleep or a tail that never ends reports as in flight however distant its wake. So a cron at 09:00 seen at 21:00, or a wake that fires after a lease lapses, no longer passes (grounds: the plan review of 2026-10-18, finding 3; code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks session_crons and background_tasks fields; internal/core/lease; AGENTS.md new dependencies need sign-off)
• 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