Third chord in a day, and each move was the owner naming a collision on the machine he actually uses:
ctrl-space is Brave's address bar, shift-space types a space, alt-space is the window menu — and he rebound
that rather than give up the chord.
Shift-space was the worst of the three and it is worth saying why, because it read as the safe choice.
It is a real key combination inside a text field: it types a space, and people hold shift through one more
often than they think while typing capitals. So it had to stand down whenever focus was in an input — which
is where focus usually is, the chat composer — and a launcher you have to click out of a field to reach is
not a launcher.
Alt-space means nothing in a text field, so the isTyping guard stops being the thing holding the feature up
and becomes belt-and-braces. Kept anyway: two lines against some layout delivering alt-space as a literal
character, which is cheap to prevent and expensive to discover.
`altKey` with `ev.code`, not `ev.key` — alt-space produces a different `key` on several layouts and nothing
at all on others, while the physical key is `Space` everywhere.
No second chord. Two triggers for one thing means two things to collide with, and this one has moved twice.
The TODO item's id still says ctrl-space. Ids are stable by design, so it stays; its body now records all
three moves and which guard was load-bearing for which.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The failure this prevents is specific — a sub-agent burns the end of a limit window and the session the
owner is actually sitting in dies mid-turn, because the credits went somewhere nobody was watching. So
it is a condition on spawning rather than a refinement: an endpoint that can start unattended work
without checking is wrong from its first call, and the symptom lands on someone else's conversation.
Wired into POST /command-hq/commanders/new, which — this is the finding — already IS the spawn
mechanism the sub-agents item was asking for. It starts a turn with ws: null, waits only for
session:claude, and returns the transcript id, with command_hq_sessions naming, listing and costing it.
So "commander or something lighter" answers itself: a commander costs nothing extra and a lighter thing
would need its own registry to be visible at all. What is still missing is only the agent-callable
surface.
Refuses rather than queues or downgrades. Queueing means holding work against a window Officer does not
control, and the reset it would wait for is a claim about a shared pool — every claude on the machine
spends these, including terminals and pipelines. A refusal naming the window, the percentage and the
reset is something a caller can act on now.
The floor is 15% and the reasoning is in the file: the interactive failure is not "cannot start a chat",
it is "a turn already in flight is cut off", and a turn costs a fraction of a window.
Fails OPEN, deliberately. The numbers come from an external endpoint with a credential Officer does not
own, so a blip or a signed-out CLI must not stop every spawn on the machine with an error about usage
that has nothing to do with usage. The problem is reported so a caller can say "started, but unchecked".
Seven tests on the pure rule — tightest window decides rather than the average, no limits allowed rather
than blocked, exactly-at-the-ceiling refuses. Verified against the live account, where it correctly
refuses right now at Session 90%.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TODO.md had reached 1050 lines and 72 open items across 28 sections, read mostly
on a phone. It is now a directory: todo/<theme>/<item>.md, one card per file, with
frontmatter carrying id, status, created date and order, and the prose body copied
across verbatim. TODO.md becomes a generated index (bun run todo:index).
Dates: where an item's prose stated one it is used; otherwise its old section's;
otherwise 2026-08-20, floored at the day before the split rather than invented.
date_source records which.
Shaped for a two-way Kanban board, filed as todo/tooling — a card is a file, id is
the identity, frontmatter is the machine's half and the body is the owner's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Fable 5