Clarify the child-ordering invariant (Codex review follow-up)

The createdAt+recordedId child sort comment over-claimed "tie-safe". Codex
flagged that a same-millisecond sibling tie would be broken by random session
id, which does not recover first-call order. In the current synchronous cut that
tie is unreachable — the subagent tool awaits one child's result and disposes it
before the parent starts the next, so siblings' createdAt values are strictly
ordered and match first-call order. Restate the comment to that real invariant
(at both the replay sort and the harvest sort), note that the id tiebreak only
makes a degenerate collision deterministic, and flag the concurrent-subagent cut
that would need a real first-call ordinal with XXX(concurrent-subagents). The RFC
records the same limitation. Comment/doc only — no behavior change.
This commit is contained in:
Tianyi Cui
2026-06-22 09:01:09 +08:00
parent e68496fd79
commit 413db68008
3 changed files with 21 additions and 6 deletions

View File

@@ -29,6 +29,8 @@ Live session ids are freshly random every run and never equal the recorded ones,
This keys by WHO calls, not by global call order — so it stays correct even if subagents ever run concurrently or in the background (a global cursor would interleave them). A call carrying no `sessionId` (a direct unit-test `stream()`) is treated as one anonymous session bound to the primary script, so the single-session path is byte-for-byte the old behavior. More distinct live sessions than recorded scripts is a fail-loud error (an unrecorded subagent appeared), never a silent mis-route.
The ordering key is the session header `createdAt`. In the current synchronous cut this is sound because sibling children are created **strictly sequentially** — the subagent tool awaits one child's result and disposes it before the parent's next tool call starts the next child — so their `createdAt` values are strictly ordered and match first-call order exactly. A same-millisecond sibling tie is therefore unreachable; the `recordedId` tiebreak only keeps such a degenerate collision deterministic, it does not recover first-call order. A future cut that runs siblings concurrently/backgrounded WOULD be able to create two children in the same millisecond, and must then thread a real first-call ordinal (the order live sessions first stream) rather than leaning on `createdAt` — flagged with `XXX(concurrent-subagents)` at the sort site.
The alternative considered and rejected was a **call-ordered merge of the parent and child logs** into one global script (sound only because in-process subagent execution is strictly nested — the parent blocks on the child). It is simpler for today's synchronous cut but bakes in the parent-blocks-on-child invariant that a future backgrounded/concurrent subagent would break; per-session keying does not.
### 3. The harness harvests every log, primary-first