Supervisor Wake Principles

State Is Truth

Use deterministic state files, terminal result markers, and explicit policy as the supervisor’s inputs. A user interface snapshot may help delivery but should not be the sole record of work or authority.

Wake Gate

Wake only when all required conditions hold:

• unattended delivery is explicitly armed;
• the exact recipient is present, idle, stable, and safe to receive input;
• an approved goal exists;
• new evidence requires a decision or continuation; and
• the same evidence has not already been delivered.

No active goal or no new actionable evidence means no action.

Suppression

Record delivered evidence and suppress duplicates. When the same hard blocker repeats, stop waking until new input or state changes. Fail closed on uncertain recipient identity, nonempty input, active work, missing approval, or unstable state.

Delivery Is Not Authority

Send one short file-backed pointer and perform at most one bounded acceptance check. The supervisor may observe and notify; it must not expand scope, approve work, or perform the controller’s state-changing decisions.

Validation

Test arming, wrong-recipient, active-state, nonempty-input, deduplication, no-action, blocker suppression, and approved-goal cases. Start new deployments in observe-only mode and prove that they leave an active controller untouched.