Being away — /afk

An agent may stop mid-turn to ask you something. /afk is where you say there is nobody to ask.

An agent that wants to ask, with /afk on, is told nobody answered and carries on — rather than waiting on a reply that is not coming.

What it is not

/afk governs whether an agent may ask you a question. It does not govern whether an agent may act: humanize runs every agent with permission prompts disabled, and there is no setting that turns them back on. See Security and Permissions.

At the prompt

/afk            flips it
/afk on         you are not here
/afk off        you are

Asking starts allowed. An agent that really needs a person gets one unless it has been said that none is there.

While a question is up, the status line says enter answer, and the next line you type is the answer rather than a word put into the turn. What the agent offered is shown with it; an answer is not held to those options — every backend that offers them takes something else too.

A question still up when the flow ends or is stopped ends with it, so stopping a flow is never blocked on one.

On a command line

There is nothing to switch. hmz exec has nobody at a prompt, so it behaves as /afk on always: an agent that asks is told nobody answered and carries on.

hmz exec -f ralph_loop -a claude/claude-opus-4-8:high "$(cat TASK.md)"

This is the whole reason the setting exists. A nine-hour unattended loop that blocked forever on Which approach would you prefer? is a run that did nothing.

From Python

agent.ask is the hook. Set it and questions reach you; leave it unset and the backend is told nobody answered:

agent.ask = lambda question: input(f"{question.text} {question.options} ")

agent.ask = None          # /afk on, in other words

A Question has text and options. Whatever happens, the question also reaches anything watching the agent, as an asks event — so a flow can log that its agent wanted to ask without answering it.

When to turn it on

• Overnight, or over a weekend.
• Any run started from a script, a cron entry or CI — though there it is already the case.
• When you are watching the transcript but do not want to be interrupted; the agent gets on with it and you read what it decided afterwards.

When to leave it off

• The chat flow, where a question is the point.
• A flow that drives the person as an agent — that side of it is you, and /afk makes it answer nothing, which ends the conversation.
• Any flow that asks you for an answer in a shape: a questionnaire nobody filled in comes back as None.

See also

• Questions — what an agent asking actually looks like
• The person as an agent
• TUI › Questions, and being away