Always-on & proactive agents

Most sessions are reactive: they wait for you. This page is about the other kind — sessions that start their own turns, long after you closed the window. The mechanism underneath is the wake; the built-in example is Aida, your chief of staff.

A session is idle until something addresses it — your turn, a peer message, a steering note. Making it proactive needs one primitive: schedule a future turn. A wake is durable (it lives in the session, not in a running process), it delivers itself as a normal user-attributed message, and the turn it starts has the full tool surface — files, commands, web, everything.

The agent can arm wakes itself (tell it "check the build again in 30 minutes" — the wake tool schedules it), and you can schedule from outside a session:

lop wake list     # every scheduled wake on this machine, soonest first
lop wake status   # is the supervisor installed, what fires next, what is owed
lop wake create <session> "in 2h" "re-run the deploy smoke tests" --every 1d --until 2026-10-10

Caps keep wakes sane: a 60-second minimum recurrence, up to 16 schedules per session, and a 2,000-character message. The wake panel in the TUI lists a session's schedules — a wake fires with no keystroke, so the panel exists to make a session's autonomy visible before it fires.

Close the terminal. Close the desktop app. Wakes still fire, because of the wake supervisor: a small always-on process that reads the schedule index and starts a runtime when a session's wake comes due. It is installed on demand — arming a wake sets it up; if you never schedule one, it never runs. On macOS it is a launchd agent (com.local-operator.wakes), on Linux a systemd user service, on Windows a Task Scheduler task.

The honest details:

• Missed occurrences are skipped, not replayed. A laptop asleep for six hours owes one hourly check, not six; the late delivery says how many occurrences were skipped.
• A fire that cannot be delivered is owed, not lost. It is recorded and retried with backoff, and lop wake status (and the TUI's wake panel) shows what is owed.
• Unattended turns respect approvals. If a wake fires while you are away and a tool needs approval, the turn waits at the prompt until you answer — from the phone or /resume. Turning on /approvals auto (or --yolo) is how you opt into unattended execution.

When a background completion lands and no surface is focused, it is announced — an OS notification from the desktop app, or the terminal's own notifier (desktop notification, cmux, libnotify). A privacy setting gates whether the notification carries the session name or any content. Either way, the result waits in the session, unread, until you come back.

Aida ships with Local Operator — there is no setup step. She is one long-lived conversation you reach with /aida, and her job is to orchestrate rather than do the work herself: hand her a request and she delegates to teams and specialist agents, tracks the work, and reports back. She is an ordinary session in every other way — /resume lists her, the sidebar shows her, and every runtime feature (tools, teams, projects, subagents, wakes) works normally.

Once a day she wakes herself and reviews what is in flight — sessions, projects, scheduled wakes, usage signals — then reports only what needs your action. A quiet day gets exactly (no action needed). The check-in time is yours to set:

aida:
  cadence:
    at: "09:00"            # daily check-in, local time
    max_extra_per_day: 2   # escalation budget
    min_gap_minutes: 90    # spacing between her wakes

She can also ask for an extra check-in on a day that needs one, and that escalation is bounded by the budget above — she cannot wake you twelve times because a morning was busy. If the machine was off at her check-in time, she checks in late (on the next wake or runtime) and then re-arms for the next day.

Pausing is the everyday control — the receipt below is what you get back, and /aida resume re-arms the cadence.

To turn Aida off entirely, either switch works — and it is a zero-footprint switch: no session is created, no state file is written, no wake is armed:

• aida.enabled: false in configuration, or
• the environment variable LOCAL_OPERATOR_NO_AIDA=1

All of Aida's settings live in /settings → Aida (or lop config):