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>
Officer shows a live panel per background job carrying that job's output, and the user watches it. A
command that writes nothing until it finishes leaves that panel reading "Nothing written yet." for the
whole run, which is exactly what a hung job looks like.
Written after doing it twice in one session: plugin installs driven from a script printed nothing for
two minutes, and the owner asked whether I was stuck. Both times the work was fine.
So: verbose flags on, echo around each step when the tool has none, per-item output in a loop, and the
result on the last line — that is the line still on screen when the panel stops. Plus the buffering
trap, because a program that prints steadily still shows nothing through a pipe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
reported after it happened repeatedly: commands rendered as inline backticks,
which the user then has to select by hand — on a phone especially.
it passes the tests in docs/affordances.md rather than being a defect worn as
one. a terminal client would not care; this one has a copy button on fenced
blocks and none on inline code, so it is a fact about the surface. and the
partial code fix available — click-to-copy on inline code — would not make it
right anyway: a command still wants its own line and unambiguous boundaries.
the deciding argument is that this already existed as a private memory, in one
project, for one agent. it has never helped another agent and never would. an
affordance is how a fact like that stops being one agent's note.
says not to include a `$` prompt, because that gets copied too and then it
does not run — which is the specific way a well-meant fence still fails.
AskUserQuestion renders real buttons the user can really click, and returns
"The user did not answer the questions." every single time — it resolves
before the buttons have painted, because the SDK has no answer channel. the
choice comes back as the next user message instead.
an agent cannot discover that. what it sees is a tool that always reports
failure, so the readings available to it are "the user refused" or "the tool
is broken", and both are wrong. the cost is asking again, or waiting for a
turn that already ended.
second on the same page because it is the other thing invisible from the
filesystem: markdown renders in BOTH directions now, so a table beats
hand-aligned columns.
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5