Watchdog

Continuity checks are timed or evidence-triggered interventions that keep an agent workflow from going idle, drifting, or entering needless bureaucracy. They operationalize the refocus doctrine.

Use this when

• Authoring a watchdog policy for a long-running rig (artifact-pool edges, stale-owner detection, periodic reminders).
• Choosing the intervention level for a stale-owner situation: is this a wake, a refocus, or an alignment checkpoint?
• Drafting wake/refocus/alignment-checkpoint message text that prevents cadence pollution and bureaucracy theater.
• Deciding cadence, scan vs wake intervals, conservative vs aggressive nudging.

Don't use this when

• The agent is actively working and closing artifacts. Prefer no-op.
• The intervention is masking bad startup or workflow design, fix the underlying cause, don't compensate via watchdog.
• The work has a clear next-action handoff already in queue. Use queue nudges instead of a watchdog policy.

The 3-level intervention stack

Level	Goal	When	What it does
Wake	Restart motion	Owner appears idle, stale, blocked, or missing a next handoff	Small liveness nudge, does NOT reframe the work
Refocus	Correct drift	Output shows mode drift, approval regression, weak stop-condition reasoning	Medium alignment nudge, re-centers on role, north star, current approved workstream, coordination mode, stop conditions; does NOT interrupt valid work
Alignment checkpoint	Rebuild shared map	Phase boundary, lifecycle mutation, product-intent decision, confusing contradiction	Larger deliberate pause, agent runs full refocus before proceeding

cron, timers, and rig watchdog are scheduling substrates. They should NOT imply that every tick means the same semantic action. The intervention level is chosen by evidence, not cadence.

Current best practice for refocus message text

A well-shaped refocus message: