quiet

Quiet supervision mode (kunchenguid/firstmate#2356): the same token-saving daemon tradeoff as /afk, made explicit for a captain who is staying, watching the session, and does not want to exit the mode just by chatting.

This skill is a thin wrapper. Every mechanism below - the daemon, its injection, its busy/composer guards, its classification policy, its reliability properties - is owned once by the afk skill and is IDENTICAL in quiet mode; nothing here restates it. The only things quiet mode changes are which mode the flag declares and what exits it.

What it does

1. Enter the lifecycle through bin/fm-afk-launch.sh, exactly as /afk does, with FM_AFK_MODE=quiet set first. Follow the afk skill's "What it does" steps 1-3 verbatim (terminal- backed vs harness-native entry, daemon-already-running refresh, never arming a separate fm-watch.sh) with one addition: export FM_AFK_MODE=quiet in the shell that invokes bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start (or start-native), so state/.afk's first line reads quiet instead of away. Leaving FM_AFK_MODE unset on a bare refresh of an already-running quiet daemon is also correct and does nothing wrong: fm_afk_flag_write preserves the on-disk mode when no explicit mode is given, so a plain /afk-shaped refresh call never resets quiet back to away underneath the captain.

2. Acknowledge in AGENTS.md section 9 language: "Captain, quiet mode is active; I will batch routine updates and surface only decisions, failures, credentials, or review-ready work - ordinary chat will not exit this, say /quiet off when you want normal per-wake responses back."

How to exit quiet mode

Unlike /afk, ordinary chat is never the exit signal - that is the entire point of this mode (AGENTS.md section 8's away-mode stub, quiet branch).

• Only an explicit /quiet off (or the captain plainly asking to leave quiet mode / resume normal supervision) exits it: run bin/fm-afk-return.sh unchanged, exactly the procedure /afk's "How to exit afk" section documents for its own return path (correct-ordered daemon shutdown, durable wake presentation and acknowledgement, escalation/wedge evidence, and the return-catch-up gate). That script does not read or care about the flag's mode, so it needs no quiet-specific variant.
• A marked daemon escalation, or a message beginning /quiet while already in quiet mode (refresh, not exit) -> stay in quiet mode and process it, the same two carve-outs /afk documents for away mode.
• Every other message while in quiet mode is simply answered as ordinary work; the flag and daemon are left untouched.

Orthogonal to approval authority

Identical to /afk: quiet mode changes how aggressively firstmate surfaces things, never who approves what. A PR ready for merge keeps the merge authority from AGENTS.md section 7, and a needs-decision finding keeps the ask-user-authority policy.

Must not hide a decision or a failure

Per the issue's own author triage: quiet mode is presentation only. Progress, retries, and internal mechanics stay below deck exactly as in away mode, but review-ready work, findings, decisions, failures, and credentials escalate every time, through the same classification policy /afk owns. Quiet mode is opt-in and never the unconsented default; only an explicit /quiet invocation enters it.