J. Servo LLC Builds Deterministic Human-Absence Tracker for AI Agents Without LLMs

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Software firm J. Servo LLC has developed Sundial, a locally-run tool designed to keep AI agent workflows moving when a human user becomes unresponsive. Rather than tracking time directly, Sundial measures user absence by reading OS-level signals — such as HIDIdleTime on macOS and xprintidle on Linux — to classify presence into three states: HERE, ELSEWHERE, and AWAY. A lightweight Python daemon then escalates notifications through timed intervals, capping at a hard 40-minute ceiling that forces a final resolution from the agent. The system operates entirely without large language model calls, using atomic file writes and inter-process locking to maintain state reliably. Sundial also includes a math-based estimation engine that tracks actual versus predicted task durations, applying a conservative multiplier when historical data is limited to avoid overconfident projections.

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