A hand-damaged preset was silent until the worst moment. An unparsable
composition listed as an ordinary selectable row and failed only at the
next session start — set as default, every new session failed. A
directory whose composition file was deleted vanished from the roster
while still occupying its id: copy answered "delete the existing preset
first" while remove answered "not found", a dead end.
Discovery now owns health: every id-shaped directory is a roster slot,
broken when its composition is missing or unloadable, checked with the
loader's own entryListSchema dialect (!!js included) so health never
rejects what the loader accepts. `broken` rides AgentPreset, the
agentPreset.list entry, and the UI row; mount/recompose/standingKeyFor
refuse broken up front with the discovery-reported reason, while
resolve/read/remove still answer. The section renders marked red cards —
unselectable, uncopyable, deletable, location kept on custom rows — and
both pickers drop broken rows entirely.
The cordis preset's persona now forbids editing the shipped install
(corrupting cordis would disable the mode itself) and points authoring
at $DSH_HOME/.agent-presets; its skill teaches preset.yml metadata, the
copy-first workflow, the one-escalation sandbox reality, and honest
verification. Exercised live: asked to edit the shipped composition the
composed agent refuses citing both rules; asked for real presets (simple
and complex) it lands them under the user root with one approved
escalation each and self-checks with the loader dialect.
The shared picker's id fallback on both trust levels, the chip refusing an
unrelated settings namespace, a refused `settings.describe`, and a blank
draft that names no source. Drops the picker's `title`, which this layer's
one caller never passes.
Six review findings on the select surface, all reachable from the wire:
**Resume read the header, not the log.** The switch was recorded as
`agent-preset/selected` and every projection resolved from it, but `agentFor`
still composed from `inspected.meta.agentPreset` — the value written once at
creation. A blank session that switched and then ran turns came back after a
restart under the ORIGINAL preset, restoring that history under the tool set it
was not produced with, which is the mismatch this feature exists to prevent.
`inspected` already carries the events.
**Cold summaries dropped the preset entirely.** `summarizeCold` hand-copied
three header fields and omitted the fourth, so a restored session reported no
preset and the picker showed the deployment default. It now uses the same
projection the attached path does.
**`select` had no gate.** Two concurrent selects both passed the blank check;
the second `unmountPresetFor` then found no record, because the first had
already removed it, and both mounts installed into one agent layer. Selects on
one session now queue, and the blank check is re-read inside the queue. This is
not turn admission — a `session.prompt` racing a switch is the agent loop's to
reserve — but it closes the select-versus-select tear-down.
**A same-id restore was skipped.** The roster is a live directory, so "the same
inputs that worked a moment ago" does not hold: a changed file is exactly how a
same-id reselect fails, and skipping the restore left the agent with no
composition at all.
**`writable` was dead state**, initialized true and never set, so the row could
never disable. It now carries `settings.describe`'s bit — a browser that may
not write settings sees the current default and no control, rather than one
whose write answers `settings-not-exposed`.
**`list` was documented as id-ordered.** It is root-precedence order with each
root's own presets sorted, first root to supply an id winning.
The composer seat spent nearly all its life disabled: a session's
composition is fixed once a turn has run. Move the choice to the
new-session screen beside the workspace picker, where it still works,
and let the session header report what a running session runs.
The hero pick is staged rather than applied — that screen precedes the
session it belongs to. It lands when a session becomes current and is
still blank, which covers both the session a workspace connect creates
and the blank one it reuses; riding `sessions.create` would miss the
second. It is spent on first use, matching the workspace picker.
Fix the durability the header field claimed but never had: `agentPreset`
was declared on `SessionHeader` and dropped by the JSONL header line, the
SQLite sessions row, the derived query index, and the cold list
projection, so every resumed session came back composed from nothing.
Add the web e2e lane that would have caught it — the one lane that mounts
the shipped roster, which needed `cordis:group` in the scaffold's Loader
builtins, as `mountRootInclude` already registers.
`core-web` said neither of the things that matter about it. The `-web`
suffix is a leftover from the whole-process `core-web.cordis.yml` overlay,
and presets are per-session and not web-specific. `core` reads as "the
foundational one" when it is in fact the one with the fewest capabilities.
`minimal` says what it is and orders the shipped set legibly by capability:
minimal, standard, cordis.
Breaking: a session created under `core-web` records that id in its header
and will fail to resolve it on resume. Nothing outside this repository has
shipped, so no migration path is offered.
The identically named `config/core-web.cordis.yml` — the legacy
whole-process overlay behind the web snapshot test — is a different thing
and keeps its name.
A composition is a file, but "edit it on the filesystem" is not a browser
affordance. The roster gains `read`/`write`/`remove` beside `select`, and
the browser gains a settings section over them: the presets as rows, one
composition open in a YAML editor at a time, and per-row default, duplicate,
and delete.
All four authoring methods are loopback-pinned. A composition names the
plugins a session runs, so reading one is reconnaissance, writing one is
arbitrary capability, and selecting one can move a session onto a preset
that edits the live runtime. `agentPreset.list` deliberately stays ordinary
and now reports `authorable`, so a surface knows whether creating is
possible at all rather than offering a button whose save always fails.
Authoring starts by duplicating: a shipped preset opens read-only because
the deployment's copy is what a broken local one is compared against. Ids
are contained before they become directory names, and the text is parsed
with the loader's own schema, so a save cannot leave a file no session
could load.
Fixes a defect the real-composition test found: a preset written under the
user's home could never mount, because the loader resolves a row against the
composition's own directory and Node's `node_modules` walk from there never
reaches the installed harness. The mount now records the host base and sends
bare specifiers there, leaving relative paths resolving from the preset.
Also closes the coverage the earlier surfaces in this stack shipped without —
the General row, the composer seat, and the plugin halves now have tests.
A seat in the composer tool row, left of the model select, showing the preset
THIS session runs — its own recorded one, not the deployment default, because a
resumed session runs what it was created with. `SessionSummary` carries
`agentPreset` for that, alongside `cwd` and `origin`.
The switch exists only while the conversation has not started. After the first
turn the seat becomes a plain label rather than a disabled menu: a greyed
control reads as "temporarily unavailable", when in fact the choice is gone for
good. The seat never asks in that state, and the host refuses independently
with `agent-preset-locked`, so a stale client cannot slip one past it.
A rejected switch restores the previous value and surfaces the host's message
rather than leaving the seat showing something the session is not running.
One settings row picking which preset new sessions are composed from.
It is deliberately a new-session preference, not a live switch: a session's
preset is fixed at creation and the host refuses to adopt an existing session
under a different one, so the row says "applies to sessions you start from now
on" rather than implying it can retune a running agent.
Options and the current value come from one `agentPreset.list` call — the
roster already reports which id an unspecified session gets, so the row needs
no settings-schema introspection, unlike the permission row it is modelled on.
The write targets only the namespace's `default` field.
The menu marks `user` rows: a locally authored preset is exactly as privileged
as the plugins it names, and presenting it identically to a shipped one would
hide that.
An empty roster reads as `unavailable` and renders nothing, because composing
no presets is a valid deployment rather than a failure — distinct from a
roster call that failed, which surfaces its message.