contact-supervisor

Contacting the Supervisor

When you need human input, hit a blocker, have significant findings to report, or achieved a milestone, send a notification via ntfy.sh.

How to Notify

curl -s -d "Your message here" "ntfy.sh/$CLAB_NTFY_TOPIC"

The CLAB_NTFY_TOPIC environment variable must be set. If it's not configured, ask the user to set it.

When to Notify

• Blockers: Something prevents progress and you need guidance
• Decision points: Multiple valid approaches, need human judgment
• Significant findings: Results that warrant immediate attention
• Milestones: Major milestones or experiment completion

Message Format

Keep messages concise but informative:

• State what happened or what you need
• Include relevant context (experiment name, file path)
• Suggest next steps if applicable

Example:

curl -s -d "exp003 complete: Found 3 attention heads with consistent activation patterns. Ready for colleague review." "ntfy.sh/$CLAB_NTFY_TOPIC"

Default Behavior

By default, notifications are fire-and-forget. Send the message and continue working — do NOT wait for a reply unless you have nothing left to do.

Idling for Supervisor Input (only when blocked)

If you've sent a notification because you're blocked and cannot make any further progress (e.g. you need a decision, or all tasks are done and you're awaiting next instructions):

1. State clearly in your output that you're idling until the supervisor responds via ntfy
2. Launch a background polling job to fetch the reply:

   while true; do msg=$(curl -s "ntfy.sh/$CLAB_NTFY_TOPIC/json?poll=1&since=10s" | tail -1 | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin).get('message',''))" 2>/dev/null); if [ -n "$msg" ]; then echo "Supervisor replied: $msg"; break; fi; sleep 10; done
   

   Run this with run_in_background: true.
3. Idle until the background job returns with the supervisor's reply, then act on it.