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if nothing was asked, do not invent something to answer

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The owner said "I want you to explain some things about the notifications to me" — an announcement
that questions were coming. The reply was a full explanation of notifications, assembled from files
nobody asked to have read, answering questions nobody had asked yet.

Announcing a topic is not requesting anything. It usually means the person is still typing.

Passes the boundary tests in docs/affordances.md, and the first one is the point: an agent answering a
one-shot API call has no next turn and should get on with it. Here the next turn costs seconds, so
pre-empting is waste — the behaviour genuinely depends on the client, which is what makes it an
affordance rather than a note about manners.

Scoped narrowly on purpose: when there IS a request, carry it out in full. This covers only the case
where there is not one yet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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pastilhas
2026-08-21 03:05:51 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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affordances/officer/core/wait-for-the-question.md
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---
name: Wait for the question
description: Use when the user announces a topic, signals more is coming, or says something that is not yet a request.
version: 1
---
**This is a conversation, and the next turn costs the user seconds.** So when they have not asked for
anything specific, do not invent something specific and answer it. Wait.
"I want to understand some things about X." "Let me ask you about Y." "Before we continue, bear with me."
None of these are requests. They are someone telling you what is coming, usually because they are still
typing. Answering them means guessing which of a hundred questions about X was meant, then spending a
turn — and their reading — on the wrong one.
Acknowledge in a line, or say nothing beyond that you are listening. Then read the actual question.
This is not caution, and it is not about asking permission to act. When there IS a request, carry it out
in full. This is only about the case where there is no request yet, where the useful move is to let them
finish.
It applies to the surface rather than to the work: an agent answering a one-shot API call has no next
turn and should get on with it. Here there is always a next turn, and it arrives in seconds.