Nudge agents whose turn ends silently

Placeholder for a future grilling, not a spec.

The idea#

Detect "agent turn ended with no sendMessage (and no return value?)" and give the model one opportunity to rectify — something like: "your turn ended with nothing visible to anyone; here's an opportunity to fix that, unless you think silence was appropriate."

Motivating incident#

Prod project misha, thread mobile/2026-08-01t03-30-40-828z: a script awaited a Gmail GET held at the egress door, received the released 200 after the human approved, discarded it, and returned undefined — silent settle by contract. The user approved and saw nothing; the agent's next turn had no idea the approval had landed. The first attempted fix (relaying approval decisions into the thread) was dropped: held fetches must stay opaque to scripts, and the real gap is this more general silent-turn shape.

Needs thinking through#

• Channels differ: web chat is itx.chat.sendMessage, Slack/Telegram/email replies go through their own APIs — "no sendMessage" is not one signal.
• Some turns legitimately end silent (background maintenance, a summary-only update, mid-delegation waits). The nudge must not train agents to emit noise.
• Where does detection live — the agent processor's settle handling, the render lane, somewhere else? What counts as "visible output"?
• One nudge max per turn; a nudged turn that stays silent should stand.