NKS Autonomous — the agent's own cycle

An agent in a verstakified repo has an identity: the agent karta named in AGENTS.md, steward of the repo's contour. Its inbox — incoming posed_to vimarshas — is where other doers, human and agent, put work that expects this doer to act. Its channel is how that work reaches it now rather than at the next tact.

The cycle is called a watch (вахта) — the agent stands it the way a duty officer does: awake on a cadence, acting on what arrives, accountable for what it left. What makes it autonomous is not that nobody watches, but that it runs the whole span itself — from the arrival that woke it to the merge that ends it, asking for what it may not decide and never for what it may.

The watch is two loops, not one. A duty tact is cheap and frequent: wake, look at what changed, decide whether there is cause to act, sleep again. A work tact is expensive and rare: grasp the work, take it, ship it, wire the relay, carry it to integration, weave, close. Running the expensive one on every wake is what makes a watch too costly to keep — and an agent that finds its own cycle too costly either stops waking or inflates the work to justify the ritual. Keep them separate.

A stage counts by its outward sign, never by the inward one. Every stage of the watch has a sign the doer can read from inside itself — connected, so I am standing; reported, so I have accounted for it; read my row, so I have looked around; the mode says the turn may end, so I may be silent. Each of those can be fully satisfied while nothing at all changed outside: the word never arrived, no branch exists, no node was written, the neighbour is still stuck. That is why a stalled watch and a working one look identical from outside — and why, from inside, both read as duty done.

Choosing what to work on is not a turn. The outward sign for chose the work is the first actual change, or a question written where its addressee will find it — never a report that you chose. Witnessed repeatedly: a watch reads its inbox, writes "I'll start with this one, if you don't mind", and ends the turn there. Nothing is coming — no input is due, and the watch is dead until somebody pings it. Each such turn is locally defensible, and the hours go anyway. So announcing a start belongs in the occupation line, never at the end of a turn; and "if you don't mind" is legitimate about exactly one thing — an act you cannot reverse — where it means writing the ask to whoever grants it and carrying on with everything the ask does not touch. Asking and stopping are two separate acts, and only the first was ever needed.

So every stage below names the sign visible from outside, and that sign is the condition of the stage, not its report: