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docs/adr/0119-the-room-is-heard-the-floor-is-who-he-answers.md

ADR 0119: The room is heard; the floor is who he answers

Status: accepted (2026-08-18). Amends ADR 0057: the realtime session still owns the mouth, and the floor still owns response.create. Hearing the room is no longer the same decision as spending a turn.

Context

ADR 0057 built a group floor so 1:1 realtime defaults would not answer every voice or let crosstalk cut him off. That machine treated the floor holder as a private conversation: every further line from Alice was a hold and a response.create, even after she had turned to Bob. Bob's undirected talk was written into the overheard ring and withheld from the open session, so he could not follow a side thread unless it was already in the ring at wake. Utterances were labeled with Discord user ids only, so person memory said user 123 and he could not naturally say "Alice". Overlapping finals were applied in commit order, not who started speaking.

Consent is not part of this amendment. Unconsented speakers stay unsubscribed.

Decision

An open session hears every consented utterance. holderId is who may barge in, not who forces him to speak. Silence is a real floor outcome.

A 12-second follow-up window was rejected: people pivot in the same breath ("yeah thanks. Bob, did you finish that thing?"), and that line is still inside any clock measured from his last word. Grammar rules that scan you across the whole sentence reopen the same hole ("bob can you ask clankie"). hold plus createResponse gives the model no way to stay quiet.

So:

  1. Nothing forces a spoken reply. A clean hail, an ambiguous mention, and a nameless holder line all create a turn he may leave empty. Autonomy is the same; the matcher only decides whether to ask.
  2. addressed (vocative, name-first that is not a third-person report, name-last) opens or keeps the session and moves holderId.
  3. mentioned (name hit that is not clearly about him — including "clankie did you see that", "alright clankie go ahead") also opens or offers, from anyone, dormant or engaged. Word lists never drop these.
  4. none (possessive, or an ask/tell object — "that is clankie's job", "ask clankie about it") is listen or the dormant volition gate. It is the only bucket he is never offered a turn on, so it demands positive evidence the room is talking about him. A second addressee cannot be inferred from word order: no other name is in evidence, and every discourse marker people open a sentence with reads as a hail. "so what do you think clankie" is a direct question.
  5. Holder nameless speech is still offer. Occupant display names label utterances; identity stays speakerId.
  6. replyPolicy: all offers every dormant utterance without manufacturing an engagement. If he speaks, that speaker takes the floor; if he stays silent, the next utterance receives a fresh offer.
  7. A running ask_clankie holds the floor, for a bounded time. Looking something up is work, and a 90-second lookup must not decay mid-answer, so a heartbeat refreshes the floor while the handoff runs. It stops after FLOOR_WORK_MAX_MS, matched to the captain's own stall watchdog: past that the handoff is not slow, it is gone. stopFloorWork runs in a finally, which a promise that never settles never reaches — and decay is the only self-heal the session has, since release arms the hold window, the hold window closes the conversation, and the close drops the stale call.

Overlapping captures flush in startedAtMs order. Addressed speech is never held for reorder, so a re-address can still barge in. Other finals wait at most 400 ms for an earlier-started capture.

Options weighed

  • Keep holder-continues-as-hold and tell the model not to answer. Rejected: a forced createResponse cannot be silence.
  • A follow-up clock instead of an offer. Rejected: the common pivot is same-breath, inside any honest window.
  • Tighten address so about-him mentions never wake. Rejected: once silence is a real outcome, the matcher's only job is opening a session. A missed "hey clankie" is worse than a declined "ask clankie".
  • Offer a turn on every overheard line. Rejected on cost, not on principle: a createResponse per heard line is real money and real latency, and conversationOps serializes, so a lively room would queue him behind itself. Injection is enough; volition covers a genuine jump-in. If the economics change, this is the first thing to revisit — listen is a budget decision, not a claim that he should have no opinion.
  • Infer a second addressee from word order. Rejected: it manufactured none — the one bucket with no appeal — out of sentences with no other name in them at all. Ambiguity resolves to mentioned, where he decides. A wrong mentioned costs one declined turn; a wrong none drops an address.
  • Transcribe unconsented speakers so the group is complete. Rejected: consent (ADR 0071) is the hearing grant, not a group-conversation defect.

Consequences

  • A side conversation no longer looks like a private 1:1 with the last person who said his name.
  • An open session bills overheard text. Existing truncation is the bound.
  • A nameless holder line costs a realtime turn opportunity. Silence is cheap compared with speaking, and cheaper than answering Bob.
  • A display name is what the gateway had at read time. Missing names stay ids.
  • A name mention while talking about him still opens a session and spends an offer. The model is expected to produce no audio. That is cheaper than missing a real wake.
  • Offer settlement is per pending turn. A session-wide flag would drop the second of two quick offers and emit a volition receipt on every addressed turn.
  • holderId moves on a clean hail, or when he takes a mention or all-policy offer. A silent offer does not manufacture a conversation or steal barge-in.