michi-away

The away skill is for the moment you need to step away mid-work and would rather the work keep moving. You invoke it before you leave; the agent switches to Entrusted and keeps running the Michi cycle — debrief, planning, session — on a best-effort basis. Where it would normally ask you, it makes its best guess and writes it down. Where it would normally wait, it logs the block and moves to other work. When you’re back, the log is the agenda.

It is an overlay, not a new process. It drives the existing skills and swaps their ask-and-wait points for guess-and-log. Everything else in those skills still applies — including the Iron Law. Away changes who decides while you’re gone, not how the work is checked.

When to use

• You’re mid-session and need to step away
• There’s more cycle to run in the current epic: a milestone to finish, debrief, or plan
• You’d trade some tokens, and some rework on guesses you’d have made differently, for progress while you’re away

Don’t use it to open new work. It stays inside the epic you were in.

What it does

1. Entry — the last Paired moment. Before you leave, the agent confirms the epic and where the cycle stands, reads your git rules (asking if they’re ambiguous), and creates the away-log at docs/epics/<epic>/away-log.md with your instructions quoted verbatim. A separate branch is recommended; which one is your call.
2. The posture swaps. Ask → best guess, logged with alternatives, reasoning, and whether it’s reversible. Wait → log the block, move on. Plans are marked drafted while away; debrief judgments are marked pending review.
3. The cycle. Session → debrief → planning → session, using the skills as written. Verification is not relaxed.
4. Stop. When something is unrecoverable, or when nothing unblocked is left. The agent writes a return briefing and ends — no idle polling.
5. Return — lights back on. You walk the log together: blocks first, then guesses, then what’s done. Each gets a disposition — confirmed, revised, or revisit.

Key things to know

• Some things are never guessed. Contract changes, trades against the epic’s north stars, and anything destructive or that leaves the machine (including sending messages) are always logged as blocks, however confident the agent is.
• The away-log is the state. It holds your instructions, the current position, and every guess and block. The agent re-reads it at each phase boundary, so the run survives context compaction; where memory and log disagree, the log wins.
• Git follows your rules. Some operators run all git themselves; others let the agent commit. The skill reads what your project’s instructions and settings allow, and asks at entry if it can’t tell.
• Guesses are the review surface. A guess that isn’t in the log is an assumption you can’t review. The log is sized to what you’d plausibly decide differently — design choices, scope reads, interpretations of your words — not every implementation detail.

For the full agent instructions, see the SKILL.md source.