cao-session-liveness

# CAO Session Liveness Companion to `cao-session-management`, which covers the mechanics of launching and messaging sessions. This skill covers a single question that mechanics alone cannot answer: **is the session actually alive, and is the status telling me the truth?** ## Why this matters Every CAO provider infers agent state by pattern-matching the rendered terminal screen. There is no structured protocol between CAO and the provider CLI. A provider that has exited, crashed, or stalled on an unanswerable dialog can leave a screen that still matches an `idle` or `processing` pattern. The consequence is specific and it is the failure this skill exists to prevent: **reporting progress on a session that is already dead.** ## The two-signal rule Never report readiness, progress, or completion from a status value alone. Always corroborate with output before you tell a user anything: 1. Read the status (`get_terminal_status`, or `cao session status SESSION`). 2. Read the output tail (`read_session_output` / `get_terminal_output`, or `cao session status SESSION --json` and inspect `last_output`). 3. If the two disagree, **the output wins.** A status of `idle` with an output tail showing a shell prompt means the CLI exited. Report the session as dead, not as ready. ## Dead-session discriminators Treat any of the following in the output tail as proof the provider is no longer running, regardless of the reported status: | Signal | Means | |---|---| | `Session ended.` /...