Make Cordis construction and teardown ownership reentrancy-safe, then carry caller and provider ownership through reservation, setup, publication, quiescence, and sentinel retirement.
Stabilize registry carriers and factory/workflow boundaries, add adversarial lifecycle regressions, and align the rewritten RFC plus generated contracts with the enforced behavior.
Drain idle injection flushes before agent teardown, snapshot approval and subagent provider inputs, and gate subagent lifecycle events on real child readiness. Align the RFCs and generated contracts with the hardened behavior.
Master brought 50 commits (the tool-cordis group, dsh-code-runtime + worker,
the tools/execute around-dispatch seam + timeout-policy, repeat-tool-guard,
agent/session-prefix, the ui reorganization). Beyond the ten textual
conflicts, the merge reconciles master's new seams with this branch's
scoped-registration world:
- tools/execute (new waterfall around core dispatch): dispatched with the
SAME exec.agent carrier as the pre/post waterfalls — an agent.ctx wrapper
times/retries only its own agent's calls — and its base thunk resolves the
tool through the caller's visible view (get(exec.name, exec.agent)), so a
scoped/shadowed tool dispatches and a restricted-away global stays
UNKNOWN_TOOL. Declared this: Scoped<ToolRegistry> with the scope-filtered
doc sentence; invariants table + verify-scoped-dispatch pin it (21 events).
- agent/session-prefix (new waterfall, once per loop instance): composed via
the fused agentEvents dispatcher (scope-filtered like every agent-subject
event), declared this: Scoped<Agent>, table-pinned. agent/pre-step keeps
master's new sessionPrefix parameter with this branch's Scoped this.
- timeout-policy reads the budget through the caller's visible view
(get(exec.name, exec.agent)): a scoped tool's own timeoutMs governs its
calls; a global name-twin's budget is never misapplied to a shadowing
per-agent variant.
- tool-cordis: cordis_inspect's tools section lists the CALLING agent's view
(its description promises "what you can call"); the sandbox tool façade's
reads resolve through the mount's own scope, mirroring where its register
lands writes; sandboxRegisterTool's return type carries the exact-disposer
union honestly. dsh-scope declared as peer+dev with the project reference.
- doc-sync chain unions master's verify-cordis-api with this branch's
verify-scoped-dispatch; the generated catalogs, event matrix (the
zero-dispatcher guard passes over master's new events), module graph, and
the cordis api-catalog are regenerated on the merged surface.
Full gate sequence green on the merged tree: typecheck, lint, per-file 100%
coverage (2668 tests), snapshots (38), doc-sync, module graph, build,
hygiene, demo smoke.
ds-review-bot delta-round finding, verified: cordis hands the carrier to
listeners as `this`, and the event declarations type it Scoped<Agent> — so
driving the subject through it (this.send(...) in an agent/* listener) is a
SUPPORTED shape. The withProps-based carrier delegated gets with the PROXY
as receiver, so ReactLoopAgent's send/steer/cancel — which read the
native-private #carrier through a getter — threw TypeError when called that
way (private members do not exist on proxy receivers).
scopeTarget now builds its own proxy: overlay props (the composed filter and
the carrier mark) answer from a null-shadowed literal via hasOwn (`in` would
let Object.prototype's toString/constructor shadow the subject's), every
other get delegates with the BASE as receiver (getters see the real object)
and returns functions bound to the base (method calls execute on the real
receiver), sets land on the base. A proxy-invariant guard reports frozen own
function props unchanged (binding them would violate the get invariant).
This kills the class at the seam — any subject with native privates works,
today's agents and whatever carries them next — instead of patching the one
#carrier field.
Pinned both ways: a scope.spec matrix (native-#private method/getter through
the carrier mutates the real object; set delegation; frozen-own-prop
invariant; overlay non-shadowing) and the bot's exact end-to-end scenario
(an agent/session-start listener calling this.send drives a real turn) —
both fail with TypeError against the withProps carrier.
Adversarial-review findings (own reviewer agent), each verified and pinned:
B1: agents.register() returned a wrapper lambda, so the factory composite's
yield could not identity-nest it — on OWNER unload the unregistration (and
agent/disposed) disposed as a concurrent sibling, firing mid-drain while
the final turn was still closing (pre-existing on master; this branch's
docs re-assert the order, so it must be true). register() now returns the
EXACT cordis effect disposer (the Scope.rawDispose move); the composite
nests it and owner unload runs stop/drain -> unregister -> detach -> scope
like every other path. Regression test pins turn-end before disposed
before detach on owner unload.
B2: the structured two-phase commit could promote a stale stage when a
later capture call REUSED the orphaned stage's call id with a body that
never staged (denied downstream, or invalid args throwing pre-stage). The
runtime's pre-execute listener now clears any stale stage unconditionally
when a new capture call enters the pipeline — only a call's own body can
stage for its commit; the call-id mismatch guard becomes a defensive
second layer. Repro test: blocked capture then same-id invalid call.
C1: an explicit empty toolFilter config now fails at plugin LOAD (the
check is self-contained) instead of killing every delegation at child
setup. C2: Scope.dispose/ScopeHost.dispose @returns state the single-shot
repeat-call semantics honestly.
Cordis effect disposers are single-shot but not await-idempotent: when the
owning fiber's unload invokes the raw wrapper first, a concurrent
handle.dispose() got an immediate undefined and resolved before teardown
finished — violating the driver's stated one-boundary contract (Codex
implementation-review finding). The teardown chain's FIRST-yielded (so
disposed-last) disposer now resolves a shared completion promise; the
handle path awaits it after the wrapper, so tool-finally, parent-teardown,
and owner-unload all observe the same fully-torn-down state. Regression
test: owner unload begins first, concurrent handle.dispose still awaits
unregistration + session detach.
Every live agent owns a dsh-scope context (Agent.ctx, key = the agent),
minted inside the loop's composite lifecycle effect: registrations through
it are agent-visible and agent-lifetime, and agent.ctx listeners hear only
that agent's dispatches. The composite yields the scope's raw disposer
first (identity-nested, no un-nested window), then session entry (scoped
enter captures the session carrier), then registration; teardown runs
stop/drain -> unregister -> detach session -> unwind scope, keeping
store/registry rollback synchronous on every failure path.
CreateAgentOptions.setup(agentCtx) runs after the scope is minted and the
agent registered, before agent/session-start and the loop start — the slot
where a creator composes the agent's scoped world (persona sections,
restrict(), scoped tools); a throwing setup unwinds inside the rollback
boundary. Setup registers, it never drives.
agentEvents(ctx, agent) fuses the scope carrier with the injected subject
argument for every agent/* dispatch (the correct dispatch is the shortest
spelling); assembleContextFor(agent) pairs the agent DX field with the
scope layer selector. All loop/agent/registry dispatch sites converted;
agent/* event declarations carry this: Scoped<Agent>; ctx.agent is a safe
root accessor defaulting undefined, shadowed by each agent context.
dsh-tools and dsh-system-prompt gain a per-scope registration layer over
dsh-scope: a registration through a scoped context files into that scope,
shadows a same-named global contribution for that scope (per-agent persona
and tool variants), and unwinds with the scope. tools.restrict() masks the
global surface per scope (snapshot-at-registration, loud unknown-name
validation, intersection composition; scoped grants bypass). One visibility
function feeds schemas/get/execute, so prompt, presentation, and dispatch
can never disagree; out-of-view executes as UNKNOWN_TOOL.
Prompt tool providers now receive the AssembleContext and return
{schemas, knownNames}: toolOrder validates against the pre-restriction name
universe (a typo fails every assembly loudly) while ordering operates on
the post-restriction schemas (a restricted-away tool is a normal absence).
dsh-session captures each session's dispatch carrier at enter() from the
entering context's scope tag, and the new sessions.flush(session) owns the
awaited session/flush dispatch. tools/pre|post-execute and
system-prompt/assemble dispatch with scope carriers keyed by their subject;
session/created|event|flush by the owning session's scope.
A cancel/dispose landing inside the first agent/session-prefix waterfall
used to commit the listener chain's return value to the instance cache
before the interruption check dropped the turn; an abort-aware listener's
degraded fallback would then ship on every later request of the instance.
The commit now happens only after the composition survives the
interruption check — the cache only ever holds a fully composed prefix,
and the next turn recomposes under a live signal.
ds-review-bot critical (follow-up): on the first step of a resumed or
seeded/forked instance, auto-compaction ran before runStep composed
this instance's prefix, so the gate read the PREVIOUS instance's logged
prefix from the header fold — a contributor that grew across
resume/fork (skills added, AGENTS.md grown: exactly the
environment-dependent case) could under-gate and ship an over-window
first request.
The loop now composes agent/session-prefix before the instance's first
agent/pre-step (still once per instance; runStep just reads the cache),
and agent/pre-step carries the composed prefix to its listeners.
CompactService.compactIfNeeded gains the sessionPrefix parameter;
BasicCompactService.estimatePressure gates on the handed value — the
header-fold read is gone, so the estimate is exact at every step
including a resumed/forked instance's first. Composition moving before
the boundary snapshot also means a composing listener's session append
now joins the CURRENT request (documented on the seam).
New coverage: composition precedes pre-step and the seam receives the
composed prefix; cancel and disposal landing inside the composition
window drop the step cleanly; the compact gate test hands the prefix
directly.
Two ds-review-bot findings:
The seam JSDoc claimed extending 'await next()' composes in
registration order — false for the append form: the waterfall unwinds
innermost-first, so appending places later-registered contributions
first. The canonical contribution is now documented as the PREPEND
'[mine, ...await next()]' (registration order on the wire), with the
append form's reverse-order behavior stated explicitly; the ordering
test now uses the canonical pattern in both listeners.
scrubRequestHeaders tokenized only system/tools, so a fixture recording
a composed session prefix would carry its raw text (workspace-specific
churn/leak). The scrubber now maps each header/delta messagePrefix
entry to a {{messagePrefix}} token — count stays a structural fact,
absence stays absent, the empty-array transition stays visible — with
normalize.spec coverage for the header, delta, absence, and odd-shape
paths.
Review discussion converged on the industry shape (Claude Code caches
user context per conversation; Codex separates initial context from
diffs; Kimi appends at continuation boundaries to protect prompt
caching): stable openers belong in a compose-once prefix, mid-session
changes belong in append-only history — not in a per-request slot.
agent/session-prefix fires ONCE per loop instance, lazily on its first
request-building step: the composed Message[] is deep-frozen, cached on
the transmission bookkeeping, recorded as EpochHeader.messagePrefix on
the anchoring 'initial'/'resume' snapshot, and reused verbatim for
every request the instance sends — prefix stability is structural, not
a producer discipline, and a resume recomposes with attributable drift.
The request is messagePrefix + boundary snapshot.
The per-step RequestAdvice/RequestAdviceContext surface and the
messageSuffix header field are dropped: the tail slot had no consumer,
and every current update pattern (new AGENTS.md discovered, memory
update, skills change) routes through the existing append-only history
channels — inject(), tools/post-execute additionalContext,
prompt-submit additionalContext — each paid once and prefix-cached
thereafter. The messagePrefix delta arm stays for codec totality; the
loop never produces one in practice.
tianyicui's review: the seam name did not say what the event or its
types do. 'advice' reads both ways — advisory content for the model,
and AOP before/after advice woven around a join point (here the
derived history) without modifying it — so RequestAdvice.before/after
are self-describing. Types follow: RequestAdvice / RequestAdviceContext;
the logged EpochHeader fields keep their positional names
(messagePrefix/messageSuffix).
Also sharpens the core.md wording the review flagged as ambiguous:
before-advice sits in front of the ENTIRE derived history, directly
after the system slot (the conventional home for session-stable openers
— an AGENTS.md digest, a skills catalog), after-advice follows the
history's last message. Catalogs and doc graphs regenerated.
Review follow-up (#196): a listed name with no registered tool was silently
ignored; misconfiguration must block work instead. The check lives in the
assembly — the earliest moment the registered tool set exists (tool plugins
register after the service constructs) and the only universal one (cordis has
no "all plugins loaded" event; registrations change at any time). assemble()
is now async so the throw surfaces as a rejection rather than a synchronous
escape from a Promise-returning method.
Blast radius, pinned by a loop-level test: the rejection reaches the turn's
outer catch — the turn closes balanced with an `error` reason, agent/error
mirrors it, no step opens, no request/header is logged, no request reaches
the adapter, and the agent returns to idle; every turn fails identically
until the config is fixed. A boot-time validation pass was considered and
rejected (recorded in the RFC). The general principle — misconfiguration
fails loud, never a silent skip — is added to AGENTS.md.
A new waterfall near request construction lets plugins contribute
request-ONLY messages framing the derived history: RequestMessages
{ before, after } with a frozen empty seed, fired inside the open step
after the agent/request config waterfall, so the step/start boundary
snapshot and its same-sync-frame invariant are untouched. The request
becomes messagePrefix + boundary snapshot + messageSuffix.
Contributions never enter session history — deriveMessages() is
unchanged — so the request header is their durable record:
EpochHeader gains messagePrefix/messageSuffix (canonical absence for
empty arrays), request/header-delta replaces either array whole with
an empty array encoding the transition back to absence, and the
dev-mode reconstruction cross-check now expects the folded header's
framing around the boundary derivation.
This is the seam for per-request advisory context that must be
model-visible now without becoming durable history (a skills catalog,
an environment reminder), keeping the base system prompt
workspace-independent and provider prefix caches stable. The docs
carry the channel cost model: session-frozen content belongs in
before, low-frequency change notices belong in durable history via
inject() (paid once, prefix-cached thereafter), and after is reserved
for small frequently-refreshed state snapshots re-paid on every
request they ride. No shipped producer yet, so ACP snapshot fixtures
are byte-identical.
Codex diff review, round 1, two (A) findings:
- The agent/request fallback resolved the RAW seed object — on later
steps the session's cached header fold — so a delegating listener
(await next(), mutate, return) could rewrite the fold in place and
the change would compare as already-baseline: no delta logged, the
persisted log unable to reconstruct the request (the dev invariant
would fire on the divergence, but the log would still lie). One
structuredClone'd, deep-frozen seed now serves both the listener
chain and the fallback — in-place shaping after delegation throws —
and Session.requestHeader() freezes its fold on update, so the leak
class is unrepresentable from either side. Pinned by a loop-level
delegating-mutator test.
- Doc sweep for the old contract: agent README's event row (mutate
GenerateOptions / tool filtering → frozen config seed, replacement
out, logged header), compact-basic's module JSDoc (summarize routed
through agent/request → direct one-shot at llm/stream), and
architecture.md's event-domain line (request mutation → call-config
shaping).
surface.replaceGeneration gets its direct-access test (the getter folds
a pending delta itself, not only via a nodes read); the reconstruction
theorem drives maxTokens and stop through the config waterfall; the
compact-basic envelope drops a dead conditional — config.maxTokens is
required and validated positive, so this backend's envelope always
carries the cap (the return type's optionality exists for overriding
subclasses).
The loop is now transmission-stateless; a request is a pure function of
(session log, this step's rendered assembly, current AgentOptions):
- The reconstruction boundary is step/start: the messages snapshot is
taken in the same synchronous frame immediately before the step/start
append, so the request's messages are exactly the derivation over
events[0..stepStartSeq) — an inject() from an agent/request listener
(or any concurrent task) lands after the boundary and joins the NEXT
request. This changes behavior for a synchronous step/start
session/event listener that appends content (master derived after the
append, so such a listener could reach the current request):
agent/pre-step is the sanctioned seam for current-request content.
- agent/request is re-typed to config-only: (agent, turn, step,
config: LlmCallConfig, next) → LlmCallConfig. The frozen seed comes
from AgentOptions on a loop instance's first request (explicit options
beat the logged baseline — fork overrides and resume reconfiguration
stay correct) and from the log's folded header afterwards; listeners
return a replacement to switch. Content shaping through the request is
no longer expressible — model-visible content flows through the log
channels.
- recordRequestHeader appends whatever header event the request owes the
log before dispatch: an 'initial'/'resume' snapshot anchoring each
loop instance, a round-trip-verified delta on change, a 'fallback'
snapshot when the encoding cannot express it. Session.requestHeader()
is the log's incrementally-folded baseline.
- Requests are deep-frozen before dispatch (deepFreeze exempts the
AbortSignal — freezing one breaks AbortController.abort() outright);
frozen + sessionId is the loop-built marker the dev invariant keys on.
Ported from #162 and re-anchored on the log: the append-extension /
frozen-end-to-end / compaction-resend / prompt-change property tests,
plus new specs for the boundary semantics, resume anchoring, and the
end-to-end theorem (every recorded request rebuilds byte-equal from the
log alone). Live cache-hit e2e (request-cache.e2e.ts) verified against
the real DeepSeek API. Snapshot goldens intentionally stale until the
single re-record after the compact/summary envelope lands.
ds-review-bot round 2, both warnings:
- subagent/provider-removed now routes through emitLifecycle (per-listener
containment, the subagent/start|end precedent) instead of raw ctx.emit,
whose dispatch halts on the first throw: a throwing subscriber can no
longer starve a later mirror into keeping a stale tool, nor disrupt the
backend fiber's teardown mid-disposer. provider-added deliberately keeps
propagation (register-time rollback semantics, like the system-prompt
registries); the asymmetry is documented on emitLifecycle, the event
JSDoc, and the provider-lifecycle RFC.
- The documented model-via-agent/request fallback composes with a
{{model}} persona via the ownership rule itself: the plugin supplying
the model late states it early on the system-prompt/assemble waterfall.
Declined re-ordering render after agent/request — it would break the
agent/pre-step contract (compaction must measure the prompt the model
sees). New loop test pins the supply path end-to-end; the RFC's
{{model}} consequence bullet now covers supply as well as switch.
Review round 2 (tianyicui inline comments):
- dsh-system-prompt itself registers the harness:identity (-100) and
deployment:persona (0) sections — they must survive a swapped loop
plugin, so they leave dsh-agent-loop; the persona text is the plugin's
own validated 'persona' config. The model/cwd variables STAY on the
loop: runtime facts of the agents it drives.
- AgentOptions.systemPrompt is deleted with all its forwarding plumbing:
the app configs' systemPrompt keys become 'persona' routed through
dsh-agent-core (schema = z.intersect of the owners'), the ACP bridge
and tool-subagent stop carrying persona configuration, and subagent
children now render the deployment persona like every other agent.
- Example personas drop transport/interface trivia (ACP, CLI) — facts
irrelevant to the model.
- Root CONTEXT.md removed (not idiomatic); its persona definition was
wrong under the new ownership anyway.
- Docs, READMEs, the prompt-variables RFC, and generated catalogs
updated; new loop test pins the assemble-waterfall escape valve
(an emptied assembly sends NO system field).
A static harness:identity section at order -100 — the first occupant of
the documented negative band — states that the agent is powered by the
DeepSeek Harness SDK before the deployment's persona renders. Harness
attribution is a harness fact: it lives on the loop plugin, not in each
deployment's persona, so every agent (subagents included) carries it and
no YAML can forget it. A deployment that must drop it can remove the
section in the system-prompt/assemble waterfall.
Order-band docs updated in all five homes (PromptSection JSDoc, the
system-prompt and agent-loop READMEs, architecture.md, the RFC).
Codex round-1 findings, both confirmed:
- renderPrompt: variable lookup now uses Object.hasOwn (an unregistered
{{constructor}} previously resolved through Object.prototype and spliced
function source into the prompt), and a {{ that opens no complete group
while a }} still follows ({{{model}}}, {{a{b}}) now throws instead of
passing or partially interpolating. A lone {{ with no }} after it stays
verbatim; substituted values are never re-scanned.
- tool-subagent: the apply-time provider lookup assumed a load order the
cordis Loader does not guarantee (siblings start concurrently). The seam
now announces subagent/provider-added/-removed and the tool mirrors the
provider's lifecycle: registers when the provider is (or becomes)
available, unregisters when it goes away, re-derives wording on reload.
No load-order requirement remains.
- loop.spec containment test now proves live continuation: after the
contained render failure, a waterfall listener rescues {{cwd}} and the
same agent completes a real model turn.
RFC/READMEs updated to the shipped contract; cordis catalog regenerated.
One principle: every fact in the assembled prompt has exactly one owner.
- dsh-system-prompt: merge-extensible AssembleContext on assemble();
a variable(name, provider) registry; {{name}} interpolation in
renderPrompt, strict (unknown/valueless/malformed references throw);
duplicate section and variable names rejected; assembly carries
resolved section text + variables through the assemble waterfall.
- dsh-agent declares AssembleContext.agent; dsh-agent-loop registers
the agent:persona section (order 0 - identity renders before tool
guidance) and the model/cwd variables, and drops its string join:
renderPrompt(assembly) IS the full prompt.
- Tool guidance moves to its owners: descriptions carry per-tool
semantics; sections only cross-call habits (tool:bash exit-code
habit at order 105; read's not-shell nudge). todo/subagent need no
section - their descriptions already carry the contract.
- SubagentProvider.inheritsParentContext (spawn/acp false, fork true);
dsh-tool-subagent derives truthful per-provider wording and resolves
the provider at load (backend must be listed first).
- Example personas shrink to identity + behavior with {{model}} (and
{{cwd}} in the ACP tree); the welcome banner stops enumerating tools.
RFC: docs/rfc/implemented/architecture/2026-07-05-prompt-variables-and-tool-guidance-ownership.md
agent/steering was the last transient mirror of a durable session event:
drainSteering appended the durable steering/message {turn, content, source}
and emitted the identical fact one line later. Zero production listeners
existed — every steering consumer (hook bridges, goldens, deriveMessages)
reads the durable event — and the one regression test subscriber asserted
a fact the log already records.
Remove the declaration (dsh-agent types + JSDoc list + README row), the
emit in drainSteering (its ctx parameter goes too), and the emit line in
the loop-pseudocode blocks (loop.ts module doc, architecture.md); the
cordis catalog is regenerated. The regression test now pins source
preservation on the durable steering/message event. Live-notification
needs keep their surviving homes: agent/queued at enqueue time,
session/event at drain time.
RFC: docs/rfc/implemented/simplification/2026-07-04-remove-agent-steering-mirror.md
(moved from proposed/, amended to shipped reality). The three implemented
RFCs that stated the retention — the boundary-mirror removal, the
stream-chunk removal, and event-domain-semantics — are amended to point
at that RFC as the record of the removal, per implemented/AGENTS.md.
The rejected retire-mid-turn-steering RFC keeps its frozen text (it
records the declined proposal); the steering capability itself —
steer(), the durable event, continuation forcing — is untouched.
