A turn that doesn't end until the thing you're watching is actually done.
July 2026
“I'll keep working on it and let you know when it's done.”
Then the turn ends. The prompt sits there. Nothing is watching anything. You come back forty minutes later to find out the agent has been waiting on you the whole time.
The model says it will follow up when a build, a CI run, or a deploy finishes.
The turn completes immediately. There is no timer, no background process, no callback.
Nothing in the loop was ever wired to keep that promise. It was never a capability — it was a habit.
Wait your interval in short bounded waits.
Narrowest shell command that answers the question — exit code, status code, grep -c.
Not yet → loop again. Otherwise stop and report.
The turn ends on exactly three conditions: the thing is DONE, it has FAILED, or it genuinely needs you. Because Amplifier's notification fires on turn completion, holding the turn open is what makes the ping land at the right moment — desktop, terminal, or phone via ntfy. Walk away.
Anything checkable from a shell: CI runs, log files, HTTP endpoints, background jobs, long builds, deploys.
The skill is model-invocable. When the agent is about to promise a follow-up on something bounded and checkable, it can reach for /monitor instead — turning a hollow promise into a real one without you asking.
The notification body is the first ~100 characters of the final message — everything past that is invisible on a phone. So line one is a state token plus the single most decision-relevant fact.
PAUSED means it stopped watching — not that it stopped the thing being watched.
By default the polling loop is delegated to a sub-agent with clean context on a fast model, so each check pays the bundle's system-prompt floor rather than re-sending your whole session. Prompt caching holds that input flat. It can also run inline when you want to watch progress happen or steer it mid-flight.
No new module. No new code. No new mechanism. It uses the existing bash tool and the orchestrator's normal turn behavior — the same primitives that were already there.
The missing piece was never capability. It was discipline.
Data as of 2026-07-28 · Status shipped, active · Source microsoft/amplifier-bundle-skills, skills/monitor/SKILL.md — one file, 276 lines, PR #46.