Waiting holds one item, never a session

The rule. When a piece of work cannot go on until something outside it happens (a person's answer, another change landing, a credential being renewed, a slot coming free), only that piece waits. The session holding it records what the item waits for and when it will look again, then works on the next item it can do. A session is never idle because one of its items is. Two consequences follow:

• A dependency holds only its own step. A branch that waits on another change is held only from being queued: its fixes, its review, its merge from the default branch and its preflight go ahead now, and only the landing waits.
• Waiting is a state, not a stop. A session whose items all wait on something outside says so, names each wait, and sets when it next looks, so it reads as waiting, never as stopped, and it comes back on its own.

Why. On the night of 2026-10-16 one session sat idle for about ten of eleven and a half hours while it held work it could do alone, and the coordinating session held three finished, reviewed steps behind a merge order that mattered only when they landed (iss-2610170619247185). Each wait was real, and each held far more than the thing waited for. On 2026-10-22 the product thinker ruled that this be written up as a standing principle.

Bounds.

• It governs how work is held, not whether a question is asked: a question only the person can answer still waits for them, and only the item it belongs to stops.
• It does not make a session start work it is not allowed to do while it waits; what it may decide alone is set by the person's standing instructions and the away mode.
• An item that can never be unblocked (a dependency closed without merging, a cycle) is not a wait: it is refused and named, so nothing waits on it.
• Composes with enforcement-claims-are-facts: the state shown for a waiting session follows what the machine can see, not what the session says about itself.

Live instances. The stall fix's stop check (itd-2610180912189125) counts a stacked branch with an open base as owed work, and the coordination intent's decision that a declared dependency constrains only the landing (dcn-2610180905291297). The checklist intent (itd-2610170638184486) gives every item its own wait.

Promotion. The stop check is the first mechanical gate on half of this rule; once the checklist's per-item waits ship, the whole of it is enforced and it becomes a discipline.