AFK

Away from keyboard. A working pattern where the user kicks off a session and leaves the agent to run unattended. The throughput multiplier of AI coding — many AFK sessions can run in parallel while you sleep, eat, or work on something else. Usually requires a permissive permission mode plus sandboxing to be safe.

When you're not there, the agent handles ambiguity differently. While you're watching, an ambiguous decision surfaces as a question and you answer it; once you've walked away, the agent picks a default and keeps going, and every later decision builds on that guess. The characteristic failure is coming back to hours of finished, confident work built on a wrong call made in the first ten minutes. The work isn't sloppy — it's coherent, just coherent about the wrong thing.

Since you can't give input during the run, give it before and after instead. Before: resolve the ambiguity up front — a grilling session, a written spec — so there are fewer gaps for the agent to fill alone. During: automated checks and automated review stand in for the attention you're not giving, failing fast on what can be caught mechanically. After: the run ends in something reviewable — a PR, not changes already merged. AFK doesn't remove human review; it defers all of it to the end, which is why what arrives at the end has to be worth reviewing. This is also why AX matters most in AFK runs — with no one watching, the environment is the only support the agent gets.