Three defects surfaced while driving the Models page.
A hand-declared model needed an explicit contextWindow and maxTokens,
but a provider listing usually returns ids and nothing else — so the
page happily wrote a profile the adapter then rejected, which took the
whole namespace down silently. Capacities now fall back to the route's
`defaultContextWindow` (262,144) and `defaultMaxTokens` (32,768). Both
are guesses by construction, which is why they are route fields a
deployment corrects once rather than constants buried in the adapter;
the fallback sizes the model and never becomes a per-request cap.
That silent failure was the second defect. A schema-valid profile the
adapter could not serve was stored and only rejected later, disabling
every route in the namespace with nothing said. `dsh-settings` gains an
optional `validate` on registration — a check for what a schema cannot
express — and `llm-pi-ai` refuses an unserviceable section at the write
that produced it. A stored section that fails keeps the namespace's last
good value, as a schema failure already did, so an externally edited
document still cannot strand the owner. The plugin's own last-good
fallback goes with it: nothing reaching it can fail any more.
Third, a model with no reasoning metadata advertised the single level
`off`, which pi-ai translates to *omitting* the reasoning option — the
same request naming no effort produces. Selecting it disabled nothing,
so a provider whose default is to think kept thinking with `off` shown
as selected. Such a model now reports no reasoning capability at all,
which is the seam's way of saying the control is unavailable, and the
per-model `reasoning` flag is gone: without a thinkingLevelMap to spell
levels it could only invent them.
The protocol table narrows to the three a hand-declared route reaches
today, most-reached first so a surface offering a choice defaults to the
one gateways actually speak.
Review found four defects in the declared-provider work.
`PiAiAdapter` reused one `Models` collection and mutated it whenever the
configuration changed. `Models.streamSimple()` resolves its provider
lazily — when the stream is first consumed, which is after the adapter
awaits the route's credential — so a configuration change landing in
that window let an in-flight request finish under a configuration it
never resolved against, or fail on a provider that no longer existed.
Each resolution now produces an immutable snapshot and every operation
captures one before its first await, which is what makes the seam's
per-step freeze (`llm.prepareCall()`) hold end to end: switching models
mid-reply takes effect on the next step, never inside the one in flight.
`defaultMaxTokens` was materialized from the catalog's `Model.maxTokens`.
The two answer different questions: pi-ai requires that field as the
model's output capability, while the seam's is a cap the deployment
chose to send on requests naming none, so every request had started
carrying a number nobody picked. Only an explicitly configured cap
reaches the seam now.
The configurable-provider directory was refreshed by disposing its
registration and making a new one. A candidate set the registry refuses
— a profile keyed `deepseek-official`, which llm-deepseek declares —
left the whole directory withdrawn and the Models page empty, silently,
because the settings callback contains the failure. The seam's
registration handle now carries `replace()` with the same
validate-first atomicity `registerAdapter` has.
The protocol table offered every pi-ai streaming API, including four
whose authentication a profile cannot express: Bedrock signs with SigV4
over AWS credentials and a region, Vertex needs a project, a location,
and ADC, Azure needs provider environment plus an api-version, and Codex
uses OAuth. Offering them handed back routes that cannot authenticate.
Catalog routes still reach them through their own provider.
A pi-ai route had to name an installed catalog provider, served that
catalog's models verbatim, and could override only the endpoint. An
OpenAI-compatible gateway, a self-hosted server, or a model newer than
the pinned pi-ai release was therefore unreachable, and a stale context
window could not be corrected without upgrading the package.
A route is now a declaration whose defaults come from the installed
catalog. `catalog.ts` merges that catalog under the profile's own model
entries, `provider.ts` builds the pi-ai Provider (reusing the catalog
provider when the route keeps its protocol, so implementations this
package cannot reconstruct keep working), and the adapter serves every
operation from one `createModels()` collection. That also retires the
`@earendil-works/pi-ai/compat` import, which pi-ai documents as a
temporary entry point it deletes with its ModelManager migration.
Credentials stay on the harness seam: the resolved key rides the request
as pi-ai's highest-priority auth override, so `Models` holds no
credential store and a named-but-missing reference still fails loud
instead of falling back to an unrelated ambient key.
A model's configured maxTokens now reaches the seam as defaultMaxTokens.
The merge staged the `--ours` consistency records before the merged prose was
re-recorded, so the committed hashes still describe the pre-merge content and
`verify-translation-pairing` rejects the pair. Re-record all three against
what actually merged.
- `relay` resolves its sender in `contextBody` like every other form. It was
the one shape whose marker could claim a form the body did not render: an
unreadable sender fell back inside the body while the row still said relay,
contradicting the contract this PR's own note states.
- `recall` requires the retained, omitted, and truncated fields. Completeness
is what the card exists to report, so a reference that cannot state it is
not a readable recall — showing the label alone presents a confident card
over unknown loss.
- The snapshot body states the supersession its producer framing line carries.
That line is the one part of the model-facing text no section contains, and
unlike an instruction context's `<system-reminder>` it states the form's own
semantics rather than wrapping content.
- `GoalMessageSource` is a discriminated pair, so `{ form: 'notice' }` without
its account no longer compiles. The guarantee this PR claims now holds at
that seam too, not only through `ContextFormed` on plugin sources.
- Goal and tool-goal summaries are bounded by a shared `boundContextSummary`,
which tool-tasks now uses as well. A goal objective is unbounded caller text
in exactly the way a task label is.
- The runtime snapshot interpolates once per request: agent-loop renders the
sections and joins them through `joinContextSections`.
- Every form's fallback branch is pinned, not only the notice one.
The rebase carried the simple-interface block from the base branch, while
this branch turned ContextFormed into a per-form discriminated union;
ContextSnapshotSection gets its own block so the page stays self-contained.
Four values complete the vocabulary, so the opaque body is reached only by
producers that genuinely promise no shape.
`snapshot` — current state a later snapshot supersedes. system-prompt now
exposes `renderContextSections()`, the named contributions
`renderContextSnapshot()` already joins for the model, so the body attributes
each part to the subsystem that produced it instead of re-splitting joined
prose. The runtime snapshot, time-context, and tmux-context declare it.
`notice` — a one-off account of what just happened, declared by tool-tasks,
goal state changes, tool-goal wrap-up, plan-mode switches, and
repeat-tool-guard. Its `summary` rides the COLLAPSED row: these five are the
majority of shipped producers and none of them needs expanding to be read.
The task summary bounds itself because its inputs are unbounded caller text.
`relay` — a message another agent addressed to this one; both subagent
sources declare it and the body names the sender above what it said.
`recall` — material lifted from another session's log. session-reference
needed no new field: its references already record retained and omitted
counts and the truncation flag, which the body shows first, because recalled
context is bounded on the way in.
`ContextFormed` is now discriminated by `form`, so a producer cannot declare
a shape without the facts that shape is presented from — a notice without its
summary, or a snapshot without its sections, fails to compile.
Only the two hook bridges stay opaque, by design: their content is whatever
an external program printed, so no shape can be promised for it. Unknown
kinds and unreadable records land there too.
- An empty replacement catalog is a real catalog: `renderCatalogUpdate()`
publishes zero entries when the last skill disappears, and falling back
would hide that every earlier name was retired.
- The opaque fallback keeps a `form` declaration this version cannot present.
It is the one place a newer or foreign log's declared shape would otherwise
vanish from the UI entirely, since the row marker is also absent there.
- An instruction change with an unrecognized `action` disqualifies the record.
The action decides the word the row shows, so an unknown one would be
presented as loaded or updated.
- The catalog list bounds itself and reports the withheld count. Entry count
is unbounded and the scrollport bounds height, not node count.
- A catalog message keeps content blocks this version does not know, instead
of dropping model-visible content the extensible union may carry.
- `core.md` defines `ContextFormed`, the interface actually carrying the
optional field, beside `ContextForm`.
- The superseded-in-part bullet states the affected clauses as one rule rather
than enumerating them; two rounds of enumeration each missed some, which is
the shape being fragile rather than the list being wrong.
- The note records the one migration case that does not self-heal: an
old-format catalog as the only one, with an empty current view, leaves a
stale catalog nothing replaces.
`contextBreakdown.messageTokens` and `measure().surfaceTokens` answer the same
question in the same heuristic vocabulary, and the panel's composition rows are
only honest while they agree. Each owner carried its own copy of the positional
fold — same pricing, same `{seq, tokens}` node list, same replace-range lookup
and guard, differing only in mutable versus immutable application — so an edit
to either one would have moved the panel away from `measure()` with both sides
still green. The duplication gate caught the shared 62 tokens.
`src/surface-fold.ts` now owns `foldSurfaceTokens`: total, allocation-fresh,
returning the event's price, the next surface, and the signed total delta. The
service assigns that result where it used to prepare a commit closure, which
keeps its validate-before-mutate replay transaction intact — the fold throws
before any state is touched, so a malformed event still fails identically on
every retry. `_prepareSurfaceMutation` and `_estimateSurfaceEvent` go away with
it, and the projection's apply drops to one call.
Covers the identity with a session that appends and then compacts, asserting
the projection figure equals the service surface at each boundary; the test
fails when either side of the fold is perturbed.
- `catalogHistory` validated its durable read. `agent.session.events` is a
JSONL/SQLite seed on resume or fork, and seed validation guarantees only a
source object with a non-empty `kind`; a `skill-catalog` record with missing
or wrongly shaped `entries` threw inside the step listener, failing every
later turn of that session. It is now skipped as an unrecognizable record,
the posture the replaced content digest had, with a regression test over six
malformed shapes.
- The headless keyless smoke still filtered catalogs by the old plugin source,
so the `built-bin-smoke` gate would not have found the catalog message.
- Entries record the published description unescaped. The pseudo-XML escaping
belongs to the `<available_skills>` frame and is applied when rendering it,
so a description containing `<` no longer reaches the card as `<`.
`escapeText` is injective, so republish semantics and the model-facing text
are unchanged.
- Adjacent text blocks join with no separator, matching how provider adapters
flatten them; the body no longer shows a line break the model never saw.
- Provenance fields are bounded like the text: an unknown producer may record
an arbitrarily large value.
- Both readers are all-or-nothing, and the row's form marker reports what
rendered rather than what was declared, so a partly unreadable record cannot
present a confident but incomplete account.
- The catalog body consumes `update` as a replacement notice; the digest
canonicalizes per entry as JSON, since every separator character is itself
legal in a description.
- `core.md` documents the form axis with a `ContextForm` type-equiv block, and
both projections assert the wiring they duplicate.
Assistant footers and the stats line gain TTFT/tok-per-second readings
folded from step timings; context occupancy moves off the stats line onto
a composer ring whose panel shows a heuristic system/tools/messages
breakdown from the new token-meter contextBreakdown session projection.
Injected context reached the transcript as one anonymous shape whose
expanded body was the whole message serialized as inline JSON, so the
escaping collapsed the only readable part — the model-facing prose —
into a single line.
`MessageSource` gains an optional producer-declared `form`, a small
semantic vocabulary of information shapes independent of `kind`: kind
says who produced the context, form says what shape it is, so several
producers may share one presentation. Two values ship.
`instructions` (workspace-context) lists the reconciled files above
their text and keeps the `<system-reminder>` framing verbatim, because
the framing is part of what the model read. `catalog` moves dsh-tool-skill
off the shared plugin kind onto a `skill-catalog` source carrying the
published name/description entries, and the body lists those instead of
re-parsing `<available_skills>` out of the prose. Catalog identity moves
with it: the republish digest now covers the durable entries, deleting
the text-slicing that recovered them from a logged message.
Everything else renders the opaque body — the model-facing text with its
real line breaks, then the remaining provenance as fields. That is the
documented default, not a leftover: a resumed, forked, or foreign log
must render whether or not its producer is mounted here, which is why
the classification lives in the durable source rather than a client-side
table keyed by producer.
