An agent may put a deadline on the item it asks

Why an agent posting a question or an approval may say how long it can wait, why the hub then resolves that one item as itself, and why this is not retention.

Context

A question or an approval waits on the human (ADR 0007). When the human is away, the agent that asked is stuck: it can wait, poll, or give up and guess, and none of those leaves an honest record of what happened. Many asks have a natural deadline: a maintenance window, a release train, a job that is cheap to skip. The agent knows it; the hub did not.

The hub ships no automatic expiry, and the human is the garbage collector (ADR 0004). A feature that resolves items without the human has to stay clear of that rule rather than wear it down.

Decision

An agent may pass expires_in_seconds, from 60 seconds to 30 days, when it posts a question or an approval. An approval may name on_expiry as approve or decline, and declines when it names nothing, because going ahead unasked is the outcome that costs more to undo. A question closes with no answer.

If the item is still open when the deadline passes, the hub resolves it: it appends an answer on the item's thread with hub as the actor and expired: true in the payload, and resolves the inbox entry in the same transaction. hub is reserved, so no agent can enrol under it. Every reader of a resolution, the agent's inbox read, its wait, the notification trailer, the feed and the PWA, sees this one as it sees a human's, marked as expired.

The decision path and the expiry take the same immediate transaction on the item and check that it is still open, so an item resolves once and whichever lands first wins. A decision that arrives after the deadline is refused even before the sweep records the expiry. The serving hub sweeps every few seconds through an index on the deadline, and the reads that show whether an item is open settle due items first.

Consequences

• An agent that cannot wait forever has a way to say so, and the record says that the hub, not the human, made the call.
• The human can still act at any time before the deadline. A late decision is refused with a conflict rather than overwriting an outcome the agent has already acted on.
• This is not retention. Nothing is deleted and no other row expires. A deadline is one agent's statement about one item it asked, so ADR 0004 stands: the human remains the garbage collector.
• The resolution is exempt from the project's event ceiling, so a full feed cannot hold an item open past the deadline its agent set.
• Migration 24 adds expires_at and on_expiry to the inbox, with an index for the sweep. A self-enrolment request cannot carry a deadline: it has its own window.