Why waiting on a prompt does not count

Time spent waiting for you to answer a permission prompt does not count against how long a turn takes in any meaningful sense, since tCode is genuinely paused during that time, using no time or resources at all until you respond.

A turn where you stepped away for ten minutes before approving a write is not meaningfully "slower" than one you answered instantly; the actual working time, the parts where tCode is reading, reasoning, and running things, is identical either way.

There is no time pressure built into the prompt itself and no limit on how long a session can sit waiting at one before you respond, which is worth knowing if you are ever comparing how long two sessions took.

This is one of the reasons a fair comparison of "how long did that take" between two turns should really be comparing active working time, not wall-clock time from send to finish, since the latter includes however long you personally took to review and answer any prompts along the way.

A turn with several approval prompts you answered slowly is not evidence tCode itself was slow; the actual computation happening on tCode's side during that stretch was exactly zero.