todo: urgent — an affordance for scope, and for the request that assumes another chat's context

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-25 04:49:00 +00:00
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+---
+id: affordances/an-affordance-a-scoped-agent-warns-on-the
+title: 'An affordance: a scoped agent warns when a request lands outside its scope'
+theme: affordances
+status: open
+priority: urgent
+created: 2026-08-25
+date_source: stated
+order: 2
+---
+
+**An affordance: a scoped agent warns when a request lands outside its scope.** Wanted 2026-08-25,
+urgent. Born from a real miss the same day: a commander-coordination thread landed in the standing todo
+chat, and the agent acted on it instead of noticing it was not its job. The owner keeps many sessions
+open with different roles, and a message in the wrong one currently gets executed by whoever receives
+it.
+
+One affordance, two triggers, both ending in the same move — **one line, "this may be meant for another
+chat?", then wait for the confirm; on a confirm, do it without further protest**:
+
+1. **Named scope.** The session has been named or tasked with a specific thing — a commander's task, a
+   chat the owner titled, a role stated in conversation ("you are my todo guy"). A request outside that
+   scope gets the warning first. Filing or noting something ABOUT another subject stays in scope;
+   DOING the other subject does not.
+
+2. **No name, but the request assumes a context this conversation does not hold.** Mid-work, a message
+   arrives about something the agent has never heard of — and the phrasing assumes it knows exactly
+   what is meant ("as I explained", "the change we agreed", a "he" with no referent here). That
+   assumption is the signal: the context exists in SOME chat, and it is not this one. Warn the same
+   way.
+
+The second trigger is the one that earns the affordance: it needs no configuration at all, only the
+observation that the owner is speaking to a shared history the transcript does not contain.
+
+Notes for whoever writes it: affordances live in `capabilities/affordances/` and reach every Claude
+session per turn via `affordanceBlock` — hot, no restart. "What am I named or tasked with" already has
+partial answers — a commander gets its identity in the `commanderBlock` preamble, and a chat's title
+lives in the transcript's own `summary` entries — but trigger 2 deliberately works without either.
+Keep the warning cheap and single-shot: a wrongly-suspicious agent costs one line; a wrongly-obedient
+one costs what the todo chat paid on 2026-08-25 — work done in the wrong place by the wrong agent.