ADR 0263: A ninth bundled skill routes wait-shaped asks to await

Status: accepted; the second owner-approved growth of the set ADR 0173 capped, landed with the raise-then-pin ceiling sequence ADR 0191 established. Builds on the await contract of ADR 0213 and the operating-policy registry of ADR 0181.

discern await carries its contract on more surfaces than any comparable verb: the always-loaded guidance bullet, the MCP server instructions, the tool description, the met/refusal hints, and the map's fleet-awaiting page — with a parity guard holding the calling conduct identical across the authored ones. Yet every one of those surfaces activates only after an agent has decided the verb is relevant. The tool description is read when the tool is considered; hints fire after a call; the guidance bullet is conduct-dense — resume handling, reporting discipline — with no vocabulary connecting it to the moment a user says "wait for the other agent to finish."

Field evidence said that routing gap is real. Unless the owner typed discern_await literally, agents met wait-shaped asks with status polling loops, shell sleeps, or a request that the human relay readiness — precisely the relays the verb exists to delete — or executed the watch with improvised conduct. This repository's own staged planning briefs re-spelled the calling procedure by hand in every dependent brief rather than trusting the always-loaded bullet. And discern-delegate-work §4 pointed dependent briefs at "the receiving agent's built-in guidance" for the wait procedure — a surface that carries the conduct rules but not the condition choice or the composition steps a dependent stage actually needs, which is consistent with delegated agents rarely awaiting well.

ADR 0173 fixed the bar for bundling: a skill must teach what a frontier model would not do unprompted, and skills answer asks while hints answer verb moments. The failing moment here is an ask — "wait for X", "when it lands, carry on" — that arrives before any verb runs, so no hint can reach it: a hint cannot fix a call that is never made. Skill descriptions are the one discern surface indexed by conversational intent.

discern-await-the-fleet ships as the ninth bundled skill: a router from wait-shaped asks to one well-formed watch, plus the composition procedure that follows it.

The body teaches what the other surfaces don't carry at the routing moment: choose the one condition from the need (build on the tree → green; need it in the trunk → landed; any movement → trunk moved), await the literal returned branch rather than a guessed suffix, hold one longest-safe call quietly, follow the met hint's composition step and verify the arrival, route refusals forward, and recognize the waits that don't warrant a watch — your own branch, sub-agents inside the caller's own session, things only a human can supply. The calling-conduct paragraph quotes the canonical operating-policy statement verbatim, and the await calling-surfaces parity test enrolls the SKILL.md as a fifth surface, so the skill is structurally unable to drift from the policy: a reworded policy updates all five surfaces or fails the gate.

The name takes the map page's established vocabulary ("Awaiting the fleet") and the set's imperative verb-phrase convention. The working title — "wait your turn" — was rejected for routing on the wrong vocabulary: it reads as queueing and politeness, colliding with discern queue, while "await" in the name means even a terse ask fuzzy-matches the skill. The description carries the trigger phrases ("wait for", "watch", "check back on"; polling, sleeping, relayed readiness) and one scope boundary: not for sub-agents inside the agent's own session, the nearest neighboring intent a harness offers.

discern-delegate-work re-points rather than duplicates: a dependent brief carries the dependency facts — exact returned branch, readiness condition, composition move — and names discern-await-the-fleet as the owner of the mechanics. Its contract test moves the pinned sentence and keeps the leaked-procedure blocklist that already banned wait mechanics from briefs.

The owner raised the standards on main before this implementation: skills_count from 8 to 9 and skills_words from 795 to 900. The change adds 97 frontmatter words, bringing the measured total to 892, and pins the ceiling back down to 892.

• "Wait for the sibling", "when it lands, carry on", and their variants route to await without the verb being named literally, and arrive with the condition-choice and composition judgment the contract surfaces defer.
• Every agent session in every installed project pays 97 additional ambient frontmatter words; the pinned ceiling holds the price, and [skills].exclude remains the opt-out for projects that never run parallel worktrees — the same trade discern-delegate-work already makes.
• The conduct paragraph is a fourth authored copy of the watch policy by count, but the first added under enrollment: parity now spans guidance, MCP instructions, the tool description, and the skill as one checked set.
• Staged briefs shrink: delegate-work's briefs state dependency facts in one line and inherit the procedure by reference, removing the per-brief hand-restatement this repository's own planning documents had normalized.
• The catalog and canon guards enrolled the ninth member on addition — map tables, feature canon, registry atlas, desk tip — so rename or removal drift fails the gate, as designed.

• Trigger vocabulary in the guidance bullet. Rejected: the guidance ceiling is an always-loaded budget with words of headroom, and the genuinely missing content — condition choice, branch resolution, composition — is a procedure, not a clause.
• A richer tool description. Rejected: it is already the contract's best single statement, and it is read only after the routing decision it would need to influence; CLI-only installs never see it at all.
• A hint. Rejected on ADR 0173's own line: hints answer verb moments, and the failing moment precedes any verb.
• Ship the skill without parity enrollment. Rejected: an unenrolled restatement of the watch policy is a copy free to drift — the exact defect class the operating-policy registry exists to prevent.
• Fold the procedure into discern-delegate-work. Rejected: delegation is one producer of waits, not the only one — a user's direct ask and a coordinator session watching a landing route through no brief — and the delegate-work contract test deliberately bans wait mechanics from that skill's body.