Temporal context as a first-class GSD signal

Source: #2756 Decision: wontfix — closed without further engagement Date: 2026-05-02

Proposal summary

Reporter proposed treating idle-time-between-turns as a first-class context signal in GSD. Three flavors floated across the issue:

1. Passive — block at session resume injecting "you've been idle Nh, here's what was open" into the orchestrator prompt.
2. Active — /resume-context slash command.
3. Retrospective — HANDOFF.json written at session end, read at next start.

Framed initially as a claude-inject-idle-time plugin, with a request that GSD treat the pattern as core.

Why GSD does not own this

• Subagent gap unsolved. Passive injection lands in the orchestrator's context only. Subagents (the workers that actually do GSD's planning, execution, verification) spawn fresh and never see the temporal signal. The proposal does not solve this, and any GSD-core integration would inherit the gap. Until the subagent boundary is addressed, "first-class temporal context" is at best a partial feature.
• HANDOFF.json duplicates existing artifacts. GSD already persists session continuity through .planning/state/* and per-phase artifacts (PLAN.md, RESEARCH.md, REVIEW.md, VERIFICATION.md). A separate handoff file would either drift from those or redundantly mirror them. The right primitive for "what was I doing" already exists.
• Statusline / TUI re-entry is platform-level, not GSD-level. A statusline showing idle time belongs in Claude Code itself or in a thin user plugin, not in GSD's phase machinery.
• Scope is unstable. Reporter agreed with the narrowed minimum ask ("doc mention only, rest opt-in"), then partially retracted it in a follow-up comment ("very integral to myself"). The maintainer asked which version of the ask should move forward; reporter did not respond.

Re-open criteria

This may be revisited if a reporter:

• Engages with the subagent-gap problem and proposes a concrete mechanism for temporal context to reach subagents (not just the orchestrator).
• Demonstrates a use case .planning/state/* provably cannot serve.
• Commits to a single stable scope (doc mention OR core integration OR plugin reference) rather than oscillating between them mid-thread.

A drive-by enhancement request that the author does not return to engage with after maintainer questions is not actionable. Future proposers: please plan to participate through to a triage decision rather than dropping an issue and moving on.

Related

• .planning/state/ — existing session-continuity artifacts
• get-shit-done/references/ — where any future plugin-interface doc would live