back — end the away grant

The explicit counterpart to away: revoke that session-scoped grant right now and hand the user a scannable record of what happened while it was active, instead of leaving them to reconstruct it from the transcript.

away itself already says the grant is “revocable immediately” on any “stop”/“ask me from now on” — back is the named form of that revocation, worth its own trigger so it’s easy to invoke without recalling the exact wording away documents.

When this fires

  • “back”, “I’m back”, “I’m back now”
  • “stop away mode”, “end away mode”, “cancel away”, “turn off away”
  • “ask me again”, “you can ask me questions again”

Procedure

  1. Check whether away is actually active this session. If it was never granted (or was already revoked), say so in one line and stop — nothing to cancel, no decision log to show.
  2. Revoke the grant immediately. From this point on, a judgment call that away would have resolved unattended goes back to being a normal blocking question (or an AskUserQuestion prompt), exactly as if away had never been invoked.
  3. Surface the decision log away’s procedure asked you to keep — every judgment call resolved on the user’s behalf (what the question was, what you decided, why, whether a stronger model was consulted) and every candidate skipped or deferred as too ambiguous to guess at. This is the whole point of back: hand back a reviewable list, not just a “done, trust me.” If the log is empty (no judgment calls actually came up while away was active), say that plainly instead of padding the report.
  4. Point out anything still open. A skipped/deferred item from the log is now fair game to resolve normally — ask about it, or use prompt-me/prompt-me-all if there are enough of them that a single inline recap would be unwieldy.
  5. Leave mwc (or any other separately-granted permission) untouched. back only cancels away’s question-suppression grant. If the user also wants to revoke merge authority or another standing permission granted separately this session, that needs its own explicit phrase (mwc’s own “stop merging on your own”) — don’t silently bundle it in.

Relationship to other skills

  • away — the grant this cancels. Read that skill’s Scope and limits and Procedure sections for exactly what was suppressed and what log format to expect; back doesn’t duplicate that content here.
  • prompt-me / prompt-me-all — the right tool once back has surfaced a skipped/deferred list longer than fits in a quick recap; back’s own job is producing that list, not re-implementing the sweep-and-restate mechanics those skills already own.
  • mwc — a separate, narrower session-scoped grant (merge authority only) with its own revocation phrase; back deliberately doesn’t touch it, per Procedure step 5.

Anti-patterns

  • ❌ Treating back as a no-op status check — it must actually revoke the grant, not just report on it.
  • ❌ Reporting “done, all clear” with no decision log when away was active and judgment calls did come up — the log is the deliverable.
  • ❌ Silently also revoking mwc or another unrelated grant because it happened to be active alongside away.
  • ❌ Fabricating log entries when nothing was actually decided unattended — an honest “nothing came up” beats padding the report.
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