AFK

What is AFK

AFK, away from keyboard, describes an agent running while no human is immediately present to review its choices as they happen. This changes what a task needs to be safe: anything that would normally get a quick human check before proceeding either needs a hard rule enforced by a hook, or needs to wait for the human to come back, because there is no one there to catch a bad call in the moment.

Well-scoped AFK work tends to share a shape: a clear definition of done, guardrails that block the genuinely dangerous actions outright rather than just warning about them, and a stop condition that does not depend on the agent's own judgment about when to quit. Long AFK runs also lean harder on handoffs and logging, since the human reviewing afterward needs to reconstruct what happened without having watched it live.

AFK is not a property of the agent, it is a property of how a task is run. The same agent doing the same kind of work can be closely supervised in one session and running unattended in another. What changes is how much of the safety burden shifts from live human judgment onto hooks, guardrails, and a task scoped tightly enough not to need either.