Question cards: per-question and whole-card skip, skip ≠ blank answer, Slack parity (OPE-153) - #600
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Question cards: per-question and whole-card skip, skip ≠ blank answer, Slack parity (OPE-153)#600devikaverma wants to merge 2 commits into
devikaverma wants to merge 2 commits into
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Questions were the only Inbox item kind with no way out. Approvals have Deny,
directory requests have Deny, plans have Reject, notifications have Dismiss —
a question had nothing, so a user who couldn't answer had to invent an answer
that misleads the agent or abandon the session. Worst on a card with exhaustive
options and allow_text:false: literally no control but the options themselves.
The card now carries Skip, and a grouped card carries both "Skip question" (this
one, advance) and "Skip all" (resolve the rest). Skip all KEEPS answers already
given — it means "don't ask me the rest", not "discard". Skip is present whatever
allow_text says, since that's exactly where the user was stuck.
The button was the easy half. answer_result() returned {"answer": ""} both for a
blank resolution and for anything unparseable, so a skip could not be told from an
empty answer. A skipped question now answers null — never "" — alongside `skipped`
naming what was declined. Two consequences in the engine: an all-skipped card reads
"denied" rather than "ok" (a non-empty answers map is no longer proof anyone
answered), and _note_ask_replies drops nulls, else str(None) files the literal
"None" as something the user said.
What the agent is told about a skip is deliberately asymmetric. "Do not put this
question back to them" is absolute — that anti-loop guarantee is what the skip is
for. "Pick a default" is conditional: the same note fires for "you choose the chart
colour" and for "Staging or Production?", and a model that follows instructions
literally would deploy off a shrug. Opus 4.8 refused that guess on its own; smaller
models are likelier to comply, so proceeding without deciding is offered as a third
path rather than left to whichever model is driving.
Verified against a live model, not just fixtures: the options-only card skipped
cleanly, and a grouped card kept its answered step while reporting the skipped ones
as skipped. Four e2e specs and four Python tests cover both surfaces.
An unattended session mirrors its questions to a bound channel, and buttons_for() rendered one button per option and nothing else. So the dead end this issue closed in the app was still wide open in Slack: a reader whose answer wasn't on the list could only click a wrong option or leave the agent suspended. Skip now trails the options, carrying the sentinel answer_result() already maps to a null answer — that text-only-surface branch was written for exactly this caller and had a test before it had a sender. It grants nobody new authority. Anyone who can click an option in that channel can already decide the question; this only adds declining to what they could already do, which is the gentler of the two. Grouped questions stay button-less on purpose. Any button at all flips the mirror from the plain-text path to the interactive one, which would cost them the "(Open the app to respond.)" hint — and the app is where their per-question skip lives anyway.
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What
allow_text: a card with exhaustive options and no free-text escape was the one place with no control on screen but the options themselves. Both surfaces inherit it — the inline attended card and the parked Inbox card are the same component.