attend: remaining work from ADR-113/114 implementation

[aaronsb]

Context

Branch feat/adr-113-114-attend-active-awareness shipped the core attend implementation across 28 commits. The sensor loop, peer messaging, focus groups, context tracking, and ways integration are all working. Two Claude instances + a human terminal successfully collaborated through attend in a live session.

This issue tracks the remaining work that emerged during implementation.

Audit 2026-04-12: re-checked every item against the codebase. The vast majority of what was "remaining" has since shipped across PRs #1, #3, #4, #7, #10, #11, #14, #18. Only a handful of genuinely unstarted items remain — see "Still open" below.

Still open

Signal model / awareness

• Build event batching — process sensor reports cargo/rustc start+exit as individual events. A higher-level "build started → completed (pass/fail)" observation would be cleaner for peer observers. Candidate: aggregate in the process sensor or as a derived sensor.
• Consequence model / projection — context sensor does velocity + projection, but the general consequence model (ADR-113 consequence/ module) isn't built. Needed for non-context consequences like "branch is diverging from main at N commits/day."
• Insistence tracker — unacted observations should re-surface with escalating urgency. Currently observations are fire-and-forget. ADR-113's insistence emitter + acknowledgment tracking is not started. (ADR-119 shipped the action-potential model that replaces part of this — revisit scope before starting.)
• Emission modes — ADR-114 defines silent/informational/affordance/insistent/critical. Currently attend has magnitude-based priority but no formal mode system. (ADR-119 may subsume this; check.)

Operational

• Signal TTL and cleanup subcommand — signals older than 5 minutes are cleaned up by the peer sensor during polls, but there's no periodic cleanup for dirs nobody is polling. An attend cleanup subcommand or cron-based cleanup would help.
• Way vocabulary tuning — attend way scores 0.44 on "attend focus group" but only 0.31 on "send signal to another claude". More test prompts and threshold tuning via /ways-tests would improve matching.

Shipped (formerly "remaining")

ADR-113

• Self-reload on binary change — PR feat: attend — active awareness module with peer signaling #1
• State persistence / checkpoint — PR feat: attend — active awareness module with peer signaling #1
• Config file (ADR-115 pattern) — PR feat: attend — active awareness module with peer signaling #1 / PR Declarative config module for ways-cli #8
• Permissions audit implementation (ways permissions audit, ADR-116) — PR feat: ADR-116 declarative permission requirements #10
• Script sensor runner (tools/attend/src/sensors/script.rs) — shipped

ADR-114

• trigger.type: attend in ways schema
• Affordance strings in notifications
• Linter attend-awareness
• Signal handler ways: context-pressure, build-complete, reflection-overdue — all exist under hooks/ways/meta/attend/

Infrastructure

• agent-fmt crate — PR Extract agent-fmt crate, lint infrastructure, peer CWD fix #3
• Peer CWD display — PR Extract agent-fmt crate, lint infrastructure, peer CWD fix #3
• Dead code cleanup / lint infra — PR Extract agent-fmt crate, lint infrastructure, peer CWD fix #3
• Makefile build path fix
• Declarative config for ways (tools/ways-cli/src/config.rs) — PR Declarative config module for ways-cli #8
• ways lint --fix for requires: field — shipped, auto-populates from macro.sh
• CI workflow for attend (.github/workflows/build-attend.yml) — PR Attend CI workflow, signal handler ways, build affordances #7

ADR-118 follow-ups (from PR #14 review)

• See attend: focus group dirs not updated mid-session #15 (focus group dirs mid-session) and attend: _groups.yaml needs atomic writes #16 (_groups.yaml atomic writes) — tracked separately

References

• ADR-113 Accepted · ADR-114 Accepted · ADR-115 Draft (code shipped) · ADR-116 Accepted · ADR-117 Accepted · ADR-118 Accepted · ADR-119 Accepted · ADR-120 Draft

[aaronsb]

Config + Script Sensor Design (from session discussion)

Two-layer config (mirrors ways scoping)

~/.config/attend/config.yaml          # user scope — always loaded
{project}/.claude/attend.yaml         # project scope — layered on top

Project config uses +/- to modify sensor set

# project/.claude/attend.yaml
sensors:
  +hardware:
    script: .claude/sensors/check-hardware.sh
    interval: 120
    threshold: 2.0
  -processes:  # not relevant here

Script sensor contract

Scripts are polled on schedule. Output magnitude|description lines to stdout. Empty = no change. Same adaptive interval and delta accumulation as built-in sensors.

Cross-project signaling

Project-local sensors feed into the existing broadcast/focus signal system. A hardware sensor in one project can broadcast a critical signal that any attend instance picks up.

Trust model

Same as way macros: user-scope config is trusted, project-scope scripts get the same scrutiny as project-scope way macros. .claude/attend.yaml with script: is code that runs on poll.

Sensor ideas from temp session (via attend signal)

High value: disk pressure, memory pressure, load average
Medium: network state, clipboard contents
Lower: thermal throttling, battery state

[aaronsb]

Path targeting issue discovered

attend send --to requires the exact cwd of the target session. When temp sent --to /home/aaron/Projects/game-ai-pro but the actual cwd was /home/aaron/Projects/data/game-ai-pro, the signal landed in the wrong directory and wasn't delivered.

Fix: attend peers should show full cwds (not just project name) so senders can target accurately. Could also add fuzzy matching on project name as a convenience.

[aaronsb]

Sensor crate extraction direction

The built-in sensors (git, context, peers, processes) should be extracted into individual workspace crates with a shared sensor-trait crate defining the interface. attend becomes a thin orchestrator that depends on sensor crates via Cargo features:

[features]
default = ["sensor-git", "sensor-context", "sensor-peers", "sensor-processes"]
sensor-git = ["dep:sensor-git"]

This gives two sensor paths:

• Script sensors (shipped in this PR) — extensibility without recompiling
• Crate sensors — compiled-in performance, feature-flaggable, config-controlled

Both paths are controlled by the same declarative config (user scope + project overlay). Warrants its own ADR and branch.