At any moment the task-tracker project is in one of three states, and you can name which. Work is continuing. One thread is waiting on you. Or nothing can move at all. The autonomy gate is the boundary where the loop lands in one of those three, and this page is about telling them apart.
The gate controls whether work continues. It does not decide what the project should do.
Scroll sideways for the rest of the diagram
What each position permits
Proceed means selected work can enter a fresh coding session. The coding agent supplies the work and authors the result; the driver advances the lifecycle after the result is recorded. This is where the search-shortcut thread spent its time.
Park this thread means the coding agent reached a real decision. A blocking card holds that thread at its fork and waits, which is what the archive thread did. Parking is scoped to the thread that raised the card, not to the project.
Idle is the honest stopping state. It means nothing runnable remains: the queue is empty and every thread has either parked on a card, finished, or blocked. ROOK does not invent a task to keep the machine busy, so an idle machine is usually telling you something true about the project.
| State | The archive thread | The search thread | What you should do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proceed | Running or queued | Running or queued | Nothing |
| Park | Waiting on your answer | Still running | Answer when you can |
| Idle | Waiting on your answer | Finished or blocked too | Answer, or add work |
A fair manual comparison
Watching a terminal gives you the same three states for free, because you are looking at them. The session is running, it is asking you something, or it has stopped. Nothing is clearer than that, and for one session it needs no explanation.
What does not survive is the combination. Two threads across several sessions produce states that are not visible in any one terminal, and "is anything waiting on me right now" becomes a question you have to go and check. Naming three outcomes at one boundary is what makes that question answerable from a phone.
Limits
These three positions are the public continuation behavior. This page does not describe ROOK's internal gate configuration or per-device defaults; those are implementation, and reading the outcomes here should not be taken as a description of how they are configured.
The gate is also not a scheduler, a reviewer or a second model. It cannot tell whether a task is wise, rank competing work or make an outcome succeed. It routes the loop to one of three states based on what already exists.
And proceeding is conditional on real queue state. If the archive thread parks and nothing else is runnable, there is no continuation to be had; the machine waits for an answer or new work.
The middle position is the one that does the most work in practice, so it gets its own page.
Next
Follow the middle path in detail: park and proceed.