Tool and prompt-section visibility is inherited along dsh-scope's parent
chain, and an agent's scope key is minted with no parent. Per-session agent
presets moved every model-facing row onto the agent plane and made
AgentPresets.mount() the one thing that binds that link, from the api-proxy's
session create, resume, and fork paths. The two in-process subagent drivers
installed only the per-child persona and tool filter, so a child's scope chain
had length one and its registry view resolved the global layer alone — which
is empty wherever a preset roster is composed. One-shot children reached the
model with no tools, continuable ones with only the host-plane `report`, and
neither carried its parent's persona, workspace context, or skill catalog.
AgentPresets.composeFrom() joins one agent to the standing composition another
already runs on. It is a bind, not a mount: the child gets its parent's exact
generation, so a composition edited since the parent started cannot fork it
onto another one, and it is synchronous, which is what lets a child creation
window use it. applyChildComposition() now takes the parent and performs the
join first, making a child composed without it unrepresentable at the call
sites. childSessionMeta() records the joined id so a cold read rebuilds the
composition the child actually ran under.
The audit that followed found two api-proxy readers on the wrong authority:
presenterScopeFor() and the live-agent branch of assertPresetUnchanged() both
read header.agentPreset, which goes stale the moment a blank session switches
preset. A switched session's cold transcript resolved presenters in the older
composition's layer and silently degraded to generic cards, and the gateway
refused to adopt a live session under the preset it actually runs while
accepting the one it left. Both now resolve through resolveSessionPreset(),
matching the resume branch fifteen lines above. The owning architecture Agent
Note carried the stale claim that the header records what a session runs; it
is corrected to name the header/log pair and its three readers.
Fixes#2165
Deleting the preset a user default names left the setting pointed at an id
nothing will ever supply again, and every session created without an explicit
pick then failed to start — the delete dialog called it 'new sessions cannot
select it', which understates a hard creation error. `remove` now clears the
user layer when it named the preset just deleted, exposing the deployment's own
default underneath. Storing a default that does not exist YET stays deliberate:
the roster is a live directory, so a name absent now may exist by the time a
session asks, and `resolve` still reports that case.
`agentPreset.select` also leaves the loopback set. It was pinned as a real
escalation — one preset mounts the toolset that edits the live runtime — but
`session.create` already takes an `agentPreset`, so pinning only the switch left
the same capability one method over. The deeper reason is that the capability is
not the preset's to grant: the deployment's own default already carries `bash`
and the filesystem tools, so any caller that may start a session at all can
already run commands as this process. `read`/`write`/`remove` stay pinned on
their own footing — those touch files, not sessions.
The README and the note each restated which presets ship. `code` was added a
layer later and neither followed, so both said three where the directory holds
four — the drift the review predicted, arriving on schedule. They point at
`apps/cli/config/agent-presets/` now: one directory per preset, and the
listing is the answer. The real-composition test still pins the exact set,
which is where a roster change should be felt.
Review asked whether composing a preset per session compounds memory.
Measured against the shipped compositions: it does not compound — growth
is strictly linear at ~0.17 MB per agent on `minimal` and ~1.31 MB on
`standard`, the first agent of a process pays ~7 MB more for module
imports every later mount shares, and disposal returns essentially all
of it.
What the measurement did find is that nothing disposes. The api-proxy
discards the handle it creates, archiving only edits the workspace
registry, the registry has no eviction, and the sole disposal site in
the host is the JSON-RPC server's shutdown. A preset did not introduce
that; it raised the per-session price from ~0.2 MB to ~1.3 MB and made
it visible.
Recorded as a remaining TODO rather than fixed here: eviction belongs to
the host that owns the handle, not to this seam.
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.
`dsh web` failed to boot: the aggressive plane split moved `subagents` and
its spawn/fork backends into the preset's entry-local realm, but
`dsh-host-apiproxy` is a host row that injects `subagents` to answer the
browser's cross-session queries, so it waited forever for a service only
sessions now provided. A per-session copy is wrong twice over — a provider
name registers once, so the second session would have collided anyway.
The registry and its backends go back to the host composition; the presets
keep the delegation TOOLS, which resolve that host registry. `workflows`
stays entry-local: nothing outside an agent reads it.
The web real-composition test could not have caught this, because it
disabled `api-gateway` — the very row whose pending injection names the
break. It now boots with the api-proxy enabled and the browse directory
picker substituted, so the boot audit covers the whole host-plane injection
graph. Re-introducing the old split makes it fail with the three pending
entries, which is how this was verified.
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.
The Agent Note was written when only the seam existed and never caught up.
Rewritten in place, per the implemented-note contract, with the four facts the
later work established:
- a preset file is an INPUT: `EntryTree.write()` persists a tree whenever the
Loader thinks the config changed, and a self-disposing plugin is enough, so
the inherited behaviour truncates a shipped preset to `[]` the first time a
session ends
- a plugin that looks itself up in the global registry breaks inside a preset,
because `register()` files into the calling context's scope — the general
rule behind the `dsh-tool-skill` fix
- an entry-local `isolate` realm is invisible to the agent's own scope too, not
only to the host, which is what makes a preset's registry that agent's own
and also why a consumer left outside the group silently contributes nothing
- switching is blank-only, and why it swaps the subtree rather than the session
`docs/architecture.md` gains an Agent Presets section: the map has to carry a
new architectural concept or it is wrong, and the root layout gains the group.
Both budget ceilings are raised rather than the content cut. `AGENTS.md` sat at
1774/1775 — one word of room, already far under the 5% headroom the standard
asks for — so no group line could be added at all; `architecture.md` was in the
same shape. Raising restores headroom instead of encoding "the map may not grow".
`config.default` becomes the composition base of an `agent-presets` settings
namespace, so the user document layers over the deployment's engineering
default and a person can change which preset new sessions get without a
restart.
The value is read per resolution rather than snapshotted: a hot-reloaded
document takes effect on the next session created, and every running session
stays on the preset it was composed from — which is the same rule the
session-header guard enforces from the other side.
`resolve()` read `config.default` directly, which would have made the whole
setting inert; it now goes through `defaultId` like every other caller.
The write-protection test is rewritten against a temp profile root. It was
passing vacuously: the un-overridden Loader REWRITES the composition it read —
stamping `disabled: true` onto the self-disposing row — so the committed
fixture had been mutated by the very run that proved the bug, and every later
run compared against the damaged file and passed. Building the preset in a
temp directory makes the assertion immune to its own failure mode, and it now
fails with a visible `+ disabled: true` when the override is removed.
Review follow-ups on this layer. The exported schema is
`AgentPresetSettingsSchema`, symmetric with the `AgentPresetSettings`
interface it resolves and self-describing at an import site. The `session.create`
JSDoc promised "the deployment's default preset" for an omitted `agentPreset`,
which this layer makes false — it now names the effective default. The
constructor records why it does not use `installSettingsSection`: that helper
re-judges what a consumer DERIVED across attach and detach, and nothing here is
derived. The provider-unload test disposes the fiber `ctx.plugin()` handed back
instead of reaching into `ctx.reflect.store`, and the write-protection wait says
why slack is the right shape for an absence assertion.
The real composition covers the layering too. `apps/cli` boots the shipped
`cordis.yml`, stores `agent-presets.default`, and asserts an unnamed session
composes from it — the package suite proves the layering against a hand-built
context, this proves the roster and the settings provider are wired to each
other. That test also pins the settings row at a temp file: it defaulted to
`$DSH_HOME/settings.yaml`, so a developer's own stored default decided the
outcome of a file whose whole point is that only the shipped root does.
The Agent Note records the per-resolution read and its correspondence with the
session header, and the vacuous-test finding above.
A composition that shares one `isolate` realm across rows needs a
`cordis:group` row, and a preset living outside this workspace — the
authored ones under the Harness home — cannot resolve
`@cordisjs/plugin-group` by name: Node's upward `node_modules` walk
never reaches the harness from there. Registering it as a loader builtin
beside `cordis:include` loads both through the ambient module pipeline
instead.
Record it in the preset Agent Note, which leans on the realm vocabulary
without saying where the group row comes from, and drop the preset
README's limitation claiming this builtin is unavailable — it described
the state this change ends.
The test's assertion had a vacuous escape: `provide` mints the root
symbol unconditionally, so the `rootKey === undefined` disjunct could
never hold and the comment claiming the root realm never learned the
name was wrong. Pin both halves — the symbol exists, nothing is stored
under it — and clean up the global the fixture writes.
A preset is a directory holding one `agent.cordis.yml`. Mounting it under an
agent's scope context during `setup(agentCtx)` gives that one session its own
tools and prompt sections while every other live session keeps its own.
No registry gains a tier. `dsh-tools` and `dsh-system-prompt` already file
registrations into the calling context's scope layer, and entry contexts chain
to the context a subtree was plugged into, so a composition mounted under
`agent.ctx` is that agent's alone and unwinds with it.
The mount audits itself because a directly-plugged subtree is absent from
`ctx.loader.entries()` and no boot audit covers it. It rejects an unscoped
target, a row that never became usable, and a row that published a service into
the root service realm — that last one is process-global rather than
per-session, and its collision with the next session surfaces as an unhandled
rejection `setup` never observes, leaving a half-composed agent that looks
healthy. The package invariant re-checks that rule on every service
notification, since a row publishing from a timer would escape a one-shot audit.
Raises the `packages/README.md` word ceiling from 920 to 980: the group table
must enumerate every group, and the new `preset/` row is necessary content.
Design: .agents/notes/implemented/architecture/2026-08-03-per-session-agent-presets.md
