escalate

Escalate

Send one escalation to the operator through the Slack gateway's channel. Use the bundled script; it is the only supported path and it works with no live agent and no attached terminal.

bash .oh/skills/escalate/scripts/escalate.sh \
  --summary "<what happened, in one or two sentences>" \
  --needs   "<the decision only the operator can make>" \
  --tried   "<what you already attempted and why it was not enough>" \
  --key     "<stable-slug>" \
  --link    "<issue, PR, or log URL>"

When to escalate

Escalate only when the session is blocked on a human. The bar is a decision, not a status.

Escalate	Do not escalate
A guard, cap, or permission refuses and only the operator can lift it	A task finished, or is progressing normally
An action needs consent the session cannot give — restart infrastructure, spend budget, publish externally, change identity	Something the session can fix, retry, or route around itself
A finding will silently rot if nobody sees it before the next run	A finding already captured where the operator will see it

An escalation that names no decision is a log line. --needs is required for exactly that reason: if you cannot state what the human must decide, you are reporting, not escalating.

Rules

1. Say what you already tried. An operator who cannot tell what was attempted has to redo the diagnosis before they can act. Use --tried.
2. Pass a --key for anything recurring. The same key is suppressed for 12 hours (ESCALATE_QUIET_HOURS). A repeating session that escalates the same finding every run trains the operator to ignore the channel — the prompt-miner cron sent the same escalation nine times before anyone acted. Use --force only when the situation genuinely changed.
3. Never assume delivery. Exit 0 is not proof. An unavailable channel is a no-op, not an error: the script exits 0 so a blocked session is not itself broken by a dead channel, and prints {"ok":false,"skipped":true,...}. Read .ok. When it is false the operator was not reached, and the session must surface it where a human will look — a PR comment, evidence.md. The script has already written the record for you (see below); it has not made anyone read it.
4. One escalation per blocker. Do not narrate a session in Slack.
5. Read the reply channel honestly. This is one-way. The script delivers a message; it does not wait for or receive an answer. A session that needs an answer must stop and leave durable state, not poll.