MyAiDesk/nomifun-tauri/docs/guides/intelligent-decision.md

Intelligent Decision (IDMM)

IDMM — Intelligent Decision-Making Mode — is Nomi's reliability layer for unattended work. It is a session supervisor that watches each turn and intervenes the moment it stalls, so a long, automated run reaches a terminal state instead of hanging on a provider hiccup or a model that has stopped making progress.

If AutoWork is the engine that drives work forward, IDMM is the guard that keeps each turn moving. The two are designed to compose: AutoWork claims and executes requirements; IDMM makes sure every turn it starts actually finishes.

IDMM is an optional supervisor (the nomifun-idmm crate). You turn it on per session, from the same place you toggle AutoWork — the session header.

Why it exists

Agent turns fail in boring, recoverable ways far more often than they fail in interesting ones:

• a provider returns a transient 429 / 5xx and the turn would otherwise give up;
• the model retries the same failing call in a loop;
• the model spins on a tool call and never decides what to do next;
• the turn simply goes quiet and would eventually hit a hard timeout.

For an interactive session you would just nudge it yourself. For an unattended session — an AutoWork queue running overnight, a scheduled job, a multi-agent teammate — there is nobody watching. IDMM is that watcher.

The two tiers

When IDMM detects a stall it resolves it with the cheapest mechanism that can, escalating only when it must.

Rule tier (no LLM)

A deterministic policy handles the common, mechanical stalls without calling a model at all — so it is fast and free:

• Provider faults — transient errors and rate limits are absorbed and the turn is retried under a sane backoff instead of failing outright.
• Retry loops — repeated identical retries are detected and broken.
• Tool-spin — a model that keeps re-issuing the same tool call without progress is steered back on track.

Most interventions never get past this tier.

Sidecar tier (a backup model)

When a stall is genuinely a decision problem — the main model is stuck and a rule cannot resolve it — IDMM asks a lightweight sidecar model to make the next decision so the session does not deadlock. The sidecar is a small, cheap "second opinion" model: its only job is to unstick the turn, not to take over the work.

This is the bypass model in product terms: a model that sits beside the main agent and steps in only when needed.

Session guard & keep-alive

Together, the rule tier and the sidecar form the session guard: IDMM keeps the target alive through faults and decision stalls and shepherds the turn to a terminal state. This is what "session keep-alive" means in Nomi — not a dumb heartbeat, but an active supervisor that resolves the thing that would otherwise have stalled the turn.

How it composes with AutoWork

IDMM and AutoWork are independent but complementary:

• AutoWork claims the next requirement, injects it, waits for the turn to finish, and finalises it.
• When AutoWork starts a turn, it asks IDMM (if wired) to ensure supervision of that target for the duration of the turn.
• IDMM keeps that turn from getting stuck, so it reaches done / failed cleanly instead of timing out.

The net effect: AutoWork provides forward progress; IDMM provides liveness. A queue can run for hours, unattended, and individual transient failures no longer abort the run.

AutoWork: claim ─▶ inject ─▶ [ turn runs ] ─▶ finalize (done/failed)
                                  ▲
                                  │ ensure supervision
                              IDMM guard ──▶ rule tier ──▶ (escalate) ──▶ sidecar model

See crates/backend/nomifun-idmm/ for the per-tier policy detail and the intervention log API.

Enabling it

IDMM is toggled from the session header, the same control surface as AutoWork. Turn it on for a conversation or a terminal target that you intend to leave running unattended. There is nothing to configure for the rule tier; the sidecar tier uses a lightweight model from your configured providers.

When to use it

• Use it for any unattended run: AutoWork queues, scheduled (cron) jobs, overnight batches, or long terminal-driven agent sessions.
• You may not need it for short, interactive sessions where you are watching the turn and can intervene yourself.

See also

• AutoWork & Requirements — the engine IDMM most often guards.
• Scheduled Tasks — unattended jobs that benefit from supervision.
• Terminal — IDMM can supervise long-running terminal targets.