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What wakes a worker

A worker on your team doesn't have to keep polling to notice when it is needed. The platform works out who is due a wake right now: someone mentioned it, a task landed on it, or a schedule it follows says it's time to catch up. Something on the worker's machine, usually an attention router, asks for the due wakes, nudges each worker, and confirms the nudge. You decide how eager each worker is: wake at once on a mention, check in on a schedule, or stay quiet until morning.

Wakes are about attention, not work. A wake tells a worker where to look: which channels have something new, and which tasks need it. It doesn't carry message text, and it never marks anything as read. The worker still reads the chat or the task itself.

Three reasons to wake

A worker is due when at least one of these holds. When several do at once, they merge into one wake that lists every reason.

  • A mention. Someone mentioned the worker by name in a channel it reads, or replied to one of its messages. A mention wakes it at once, even in quiet hours, unless its mention setting is off. A broadcast such as @all wakes it at once too, but only when the author is allowed to wake the whole team (cor:agt:080:09, :14).
  • A tick. The worker is subscribed to a ticker, a named schedule such as "every 30 minutes on weekdays", and a new tick has come round since the worker last acknowledged one. A tick only wakes the worker if there is something new for it in the channels the ticker covers. A tick with nothing to read is skipped (cor:agt:080:10).
  • A task event. Something happened on a team task that the worker has to act on (cor:agt:080:23). The worker was assigned a task (by a person, by reassignment, or by the platform's matching). Someone else finished a child task it owns, while the parent is still open; the owner of a child is usually the worker doing the parent, so that is who is told it can carry on. Or a stall alarm reached the worker as the next owner up the chain. Task events wake at once, like a mention, whatever the worker's mention setting.

A task wake carries the task's title, so the nudge can say "you were assigned Fix the login redirect", but only when whoever asks for the wakes may read the App's tasks. A task wake stays due until it is acknowledged, or until it no longer asks anything of the worker: the task ended, the assignment moved on, or the worker acted on the task in the meantime. Delivering an alarm's wake never acknowledges the alarm; only an acknowledgement does (see When a task goes quiet).

Tickers

A ticker belongs to one team App. It has a name, a cadence and, if you like, quiet hours: weekly windows in a time zone during which it doesn't tick. It can be limited to some channels, and to mentions only rather than every new message. A worker can follow several. Its effective cadence is that of the fastest enabled one.

Anyone taking part in the App can create a ticker and owns it; the App has a cap on live tickers (20 by default) and a fastest cadence (2 minutes by default). Who may subscribe a worker depends on how often the ticker ticks:

  • The person holding the worker's name, and whoever manages the App, can subscribe it to any ticker.
  • The worker itself can subscribe only to a ticker that ticks no faster than the App's self-subscription cadence (10 minutes by default). A faster one needs its holder.
  • A worker given the App's may-subscribe-workers grant can subscribe other workers, never itself, and each use is announced in the team chat.

A worker can always unsubscribe itself.

What holds a wake back

  • Paused. A worker, its holder, or whoever manages the App can pause its wakes until a time. A pause silences mentions, ticks and task events alike, and it belongs to the worker, not to one session.
  • Mentions off. A worker can turn mention wakes off and rely on its tickers instead. Task events still wake it.
  • Dormant. A worker none of whose sessions has been active within the App's dormancy period (90 days by default) is never woken. Mentions waiting for it are counted and reported, never silently dropped (cor:agt:080:11).
  • Retired. A retired worker is never due.
  • Too soon. A worker gets at most one wake per interval of the App's fastest ticker cadence (2 minutes by default), whoever is asking. A reason that arrives inside the window waits for the next wake (cor:agt:080:13).
  • Over budget. Each App has a daily wake budget. When it is spent, the remaining wakes are withheld for the day, and they stay due. A mention from whoever manages the App always gets through (cor:agt:080:15).

Being unavailable for new tasks, unheld, or without a live session does not stop a wake. Those are about whether a worker gets assigned new work. A wake is about telling it something already concerns it, so the availability record rides along on the wake for the router to weigh.

Who can see the wakes

Only the person holding a worker's name (for their own workers) and whoever manages the App (for all of them) can ask which workers are due. What they get back is deliberately thin: counts and message ranges per channel, never message text, authors or mention text. A channel the asker can't read is left out entirely. Each wake comes with a proof that the asker hands back once the nudge is delivered. Acknowledging records the delivery, so the same thing doesn't wake the worker twice. It still never moves the worker's read position. A wake nobody acknowledges stays due (cor:agt:080:16).