# Adaptive session restart Automatic Flow startup care has shipped since v1.10.0 on top of the v1.8.1 restart protocol. Invoke nobrainer-tech-flow with resumable, long or delegated work. Flow runs startup naming and health assessment without a separate restart command; the quick path skips it. Flow entry enables observation only: restarting MAIN or archiving needs separately recorded owner consent. It preserves an existing `off` policy and obeys stricter host consent rules. Installation or incidental skill loading alone authorizes no mutation. Explicit automatic-restart consent remains valid for later rotations in scope; archival needs its own recorded authorization. Ordinary delegation uses native subagents; creating a separate visible conversation requires an explicit owner request or an explicitly authorized MAIN restart. On entry, supported clients name the session ` | started DD-MM` using its actual creation timestamp and owner/task timezone (recorded UTC fallback). Resume preserves that date; a successor receives its own creation date. Missing metadata is unavailable, never replaced with today's date. Supported mutations are read back. Session IDs, goal identity and checkpoint digest remain authoritative. Flow assesses available context measurements and the complete next startup, including required skills, metadata, tools, checkpoint and necessary re-reads. It records measured versus estimated inputs and keeps missing values unknown. The agent performs the check at entry, after compaction and accepted milestones; there is no new daemon or timer-only model call. Health and economic benefit are independent reasons to rotate. A current pressure signal or at least 70% observed context occupancy, together with a complete fresh startup at most 80% of current input, qualifies the health path. Those are policy heuristics, not measured optima. Remaining work, progress since the last restart, verified checkpoint and safe native ownership transfer are still required. Two compactions and optional daily age of 24 hours trigger assessment only. A small post-compaction context or equally large startup can make continuing wiser. Routine care stays quiet. Report one successful continuation or an actionable capability failure. After takeover, compare observed startup and missing-context rework with the estimate in the same task state. The core is the [Sessions protocol](../skills/nobrainer-sessions/references/session-restart.md), usable as instructions in any capable client. An optional deterministic helper can be invoked by hooks. There is no universal hook event or universal archive API: adapters must verify capabilities and map their actual lifecycle events. A client without safe native transport prepares a manual continuation packet. For the independent economic path, the helper calculates a conservative raw token proxy over at most three future calls. Its defaults are heuristics, not an optimum or a billing forecast. Current input, fresh startup and restart overhead can be observations or explicitly labelled estimates. Missing metrics remain unknown. Large fixed instructions, cache reuse and necessary re-reads may make restarting more expensive. Quality is protected by checking the handoff before transfer, not by assuming fresh sessions are smarter. Do not restart if acceptance, decisions or required evidence cannot be reconstructed reliably. Do not archive the old session after mere creation or a read-only ACK. Verify takeover first; archive failure never returns implementation ownership to the old session. ## Proof and remaining limits The shipped helper is tested with real CLI invocations and deterministic failure cases. It only chooses actions from supplied observations. It does not collect usage, authenticate an ACK, implement a lock, run a model, create sessions or archive them. Native transport requires separate adapter runtime evidence. No all-client automation, token-saving percentage or quality improvement has been measured for this feature. No new permanent module, scheduler, background service or global hook is added. Existing `nobrainer-sessions`, `session-handoff` and manual recovery stay available. Disable further rotation with policy `off`; a committed transfer never permits both old and new sessions to resume writing.