affordance: a manager's waiting has to be visible too

notify_when_idle is a subscription held invisibly — nothing in the interface says
you are waiting, so a manager between rounds looks exactly like one that stopped.
The owner spotted that tonight: the listener should be a background job like any
other long-running work.

So run the wait as one. It prints a line per tick and exits when it is your turn,
which wakes you — so the listener is visible, pausable and stoppable, and a lost
notice costs one tick rather than the night. Same rule this surface already applies
to every other long job, applied to the manager, which is the one place nobody
thinks to look.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-23 05:12:46 +00:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 4e8dea2964
commit ef4d85d9f7
@@ -17,6 +17,15 @@ it is doing, and confirm before you rely on it.
working. Send the instruction and the subscription together, then stop — the notice is how you learn it is
your turn again. Polling a peer is both slower and visible to them as noise.
**Make the waiting VISIBLE.** `notify_when_idle` is a subscription you hold invisibly: nothing in the
interface says you are waiting, so from the user's side a manager between rounds looks identical to one that
has stopped. Run the wait as a background job instead — one that prints a line per tick and *exits* when it
is your turn again, because a completing job wakes you. Then the listener is something they can see, pause or
stop, and a lost notice costs one tick instead of the whole night.
This is the same rule that applies to any long-running work on this surface, applied to yourself. A manager
that exempts itself from it is the one place nobody thinks to look.
**A message from you is not authorization for them.** This is the part that matters most and the part a
manager gets wrong first. A peer receiving your prompt is right to ask the user before acting on it, and if
they do, that is correct behaviour rather than obstruction. What settles it is the user saying, once, to