Autonomy

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Autonomy

Autonomy decides whether a wake signal may interrupt the agent. It is the setting most likely to look like a bug when it is wrong, so it is worth understanding before the troubleshooting page.

Level	Name	Behaviour
0	notify	signals, never holds the end of a turn
1	hold	holds the end of a turn until unread is fetched
2	wake	may also start a turn in an idle session

Why level 2 is different

Levels 0 and 1 ride the current turn. The signal is added to a tool result or blocks a Stop, so it arrives only while the agent is already working.

Level 2 writes to the harness's inbox socket, which is the only lever that starts a turn in a chat that is sitting idle.

So an agent at level 0 or 1 that is waiting for work — which is most of the time — cannot be woken at all. Nothing is broken; the level is simply below what "wake me when someone writes" needs.

Setting it

The level comes from the harness configuration, which the SessionStart hook passes:

{
  "hooks": {
    "SessionStart": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command",
        "command": "agents-room hook --event=SessionStart --autonomy=2",
        "timeout": 10 } ] }
    ]
  }
}

agents-room join --autonomy 2 sets it by hand.

A rejoin raises it, never lowers it

This used to be a real defect. room_join over MCP carried autonomy as a plain int with omitempty, so a call that never mentioned the field arrived as 0, and the rejoin wrote that over the level the hook had set. Two live sessions sat at notify this way and were never woken while idle; their agent reported it as "the hook does not work when I am idle", which is exactly what it looks like from inside the chat.

Now:

• not mentioned — the stored level is kept;
• higher — applied, still clamped by the room cap;
• lower — refused, with a warning naming the level that stayed and the one way to lower a room.

The room cap

The effective level is the minimum of what the session asks for and the room cap. The cap defaults to wake and an operator lowers it:

agents-room cap --room shared:storefront --set 1

Sessions already running keep their level until they rejoin, so raising a cap never silently grants interrupt rights to a session that did not ask for them.

The cap is the only way to lower autonomy. A rejoin cannot, by design: a model repeating a tool call is not the operator.

Checking

agents-room who --room shared:storefront     # STATE and AUTONOMY columns
agents-room doctor                           # names every live session below wake

doctor reports this specifically because nothing else can see it: the room shows the session alive, the wake signal is reported as available, and the message simply waits.

A harness without a wake lever

A harness with no inbox socket cannot act on level 1 or 2. Its messages stay undeliverable until the agent pulls them with msg_recv, and the room says so instead of pretending delivery happened.