Most waits find nothing almost always: a daily release check says no 360 days a year, and a branch
watcher wakes on every push including everyone else. So the number to optimise is the useless wake
times how many there will be.
The fix is not a cheaper wake, it is pushing the relevance test into the wait condition so that firing
implies relevance. Wait on a push THAT CONTAINS a COMMS file, not on a push. Wait on a version string
that differs, not on a page that changed. Both are shell tests with no model in them.
Three tiers, most events dying at the first: shell condition (free), fresh minimal agent (one small
cold read), escalate with real context (a full read of a long session). A context-inheriting fork that
returns nothing to the parent is tier two done well, but it is still a read, so it is the fallback for
when relevance needs judgement rather than the default.
For the platform this means a condition belongs in the declaration, not in the agent that wakes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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