6. ESCALATION_WAITING State for Turn-Level Routing

Date: 2026-05-05

Status

Accepted. Renamed in ADR-0030: CLAUDE_WAITING → ESCALATION_WAITING to reflect that the escalation agent is no longer necessarily Claude.

Context

When the escalation agent asks a follow-up question mid-conversation, the next user input must go back to the escalation agent rather than being re-evaluated by the router. Without special handling, the router could send a short answer (e.g., "yes") to the local model, breaking conversational continuity.

Decision

When the escalation agent's response ends with a question, transition the session to ESCALATION_WAITING state. The next user turn bypasses the router and goes directly to the escalation agent via --resume <session-id> (or the equivalent for non-CLI escalation). The state is broken only by an explicit --local flag from the user.

Consequences

Conversational continuity is preserved within an escalated session. The user retains explicit control to break the continuation via --local (--primary in the TUI). The trade-off is that the router never gets a chance to demote back to local automatically mid-conversation; this is intentional and listed as a backlog item (automatic demotion).