2026-10-18 — While the person is away no question waits for them (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 planning): while the away mode holds, the guard refuses every question on the host's question tool, abcd's or another tool's, because a question nobody is there to answer stalls the session. A product or technical question is refused with a reason telling the agent to decide it, record it with abcd decide marked as decided on delegation with its grounds and how to reverse it, and carry on; a step only the person's hands can do (a browser step, a secret, a new App) is refused with a reason telling the agent to queue it with abcd mode queue "<step>" and carry on with other work. abcd mode product-thinker or facilitator is refused the same way. Decisions in the window are not asked first, technical trade-offs included, since the product thinker ruled on 2026-10-17 that in an autonomous run the agent decides and records and only steps that need them on the website wait (grounds: iss-2610170619247185 remedy; itd-2610170638184486 framing; internal/surface/cli guard question check)

Frontmatter

.abcd/work/decisions/dcn-2610180913431493-while-the-person-is-away-no-question.md
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mentions6

• dcn-26101809371775022026-10-18 — While the person is away a question is routed by the act it asks about, not by its chip (facilitator-on-delegation, itd-2610180912189125 review round 1; supersedes the chip routing in dcn-2610180913431493): the guard still refuses every question on the host's question tool while the away mode holds, now with one reason whatever the chip. It tells the agent to queue with abcd mode queue, and carry on with other work, a question about any act only the person may approve: an approval the repository binds to the person per act (an embargo close's --approve digest, which commands/embargo.md says is never supplied unless the person has read the text and said yes in that session; a release sign-off); publishing anything or changing a repository's visibility; adding a dependency; a secret, a credential or an App; a step only a website or a browser can do; a destructive act (deleting what the session did not create, overwriting uncommitted work, a force push, discarding a peer's work); and anything that spends money. Every other question is decided and recorded with abcd decide, with its grounds and how to reverse it. The away mode, set on the person's word, is their ask for the session to commit and push its own branches and open their pull requests, which is the owed work itself; merging follows the repository's own rule. The Setup chip marks the setup interview's questions (visibility, keys, oracles), not a step only the person can take, so routing by chip would have sent an embargo approval, or the creation of a new App asked under a Product chip, to be decided by the agent (grounds: the plan review of 2026-10-18, finding 4; commands/embargo.md approval one per act; brief invariant 22; AGENTS.md new dependencies and commits; internal/surface/cli guard question chips)
• dcn-26101810170563072026-10-18 — The overnight-stall slice is trimmed to what closes iss-2610170619247185 and nothing else (facilitator-on-delegation on the release orchestrator's ruling, itd-2610180912189125 after plan review round 2; refines dcn-2610180937181929): it keeps (i) a session with owed work cannot end its turn silently, through the Stop hook stop check with the ownership rules, the qualifying wake and the cap handling the reviews required; (ii) questions rerouted by the act, every other question decided with abcd decide and the person-only acts queued; and (iii) the away record set, ended, lapsing after at most seven days, re-injected at start, compaction and every prompt, under its lock. Moved to itd-2610170638184486 as named remaining work: the person-only guard step (dcn-2610181016510153), with the guard's reading of go run ./cmd/abcd and built binaries as abcd; the ten-minute reuse cache of the away forge listing and its stale-cache fallback, so each away check makes at most one listing under its ten-second deadline and a failed read judges from disk naming the pull requests as not read (adr-2610181003541997, still proposed, amended to match); abcd mode back printing more than one plain line per queued step and per recorded stop (any grouping, formatting or window summary); and the refused-attempt lines on the prompt. Kept despite the trim, because a review finding's fix rests on each: the created-branch list recorded in any mode (round-2 blocker 3, the drain's stacked branches, instance 2 of the issue); the Refs rule and word-boundary matching (blocker 4); the stale-ownership bounds (blocker 5); the wake deadline with the host's lateness and the cron cases (blocker 1); the forge's merge state for behind, with the one bounded listing and invariant 7's clause (blocker 2); the person-only acts list (blocker 6); the every-prompt line and the lapsed-window line naming abcd mode back (blocker 7); the block count and its possibly-forced label (round-2 (b)); the clearing rule's review and receipt terms (round-2 minors); the record's lock, ownership checks and seven-day cap (round-1 findings 6 and 7); the recorded ender (round-1 finding 13); the StopFailure record and the prose-question block (round-1 finding 11); and the badge verbs refused while away, which keeps a question from waiting on the person through the badge (dcn-2610180913431493). Re-estimated at 5.75 working days over seven steps, down from eight; about four is not reachable without reopening blockers 1 to 5, since the owed-work reading and the stop verdict with its cron parser carry 3.5 days between them and every rule in them answers a finding; the verdict is pure over the owed set, so two lanes could bring the elapsed time to about four days if the release orchestrator chooses (grounds: the release orchestrator's ruling of 2026-10-18 and the reviewer's addendum listing what stays; the spec's review rounds 1 and 2; AGENTS.md wired or it isn't done)
• 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