Reform the compaction blueprint so a runaway turn survives and the design
stops drifting across review rounds:
- Drop in-flight-turn protection ("layer 2"). Retention is a uniform tail→head
whole-unit walk; the only structural guard is step-alignment. A single turn
that alone exceeds the window now compacts its own early closed steps instead
of being retained verbatim (the failure mode that motivated this).
- Move auto-compaction off the agent/request waterfall onto a new awaited
agent/pre-request loop seam, fired before history derivation. Compaction
mutates the surface; the loop derives once from the result — no double-derive,
and a listener structurally cannot act on not-yet-derived messages.
- Tighten compactIfNeeded to required (session, system, model, signal).
- Enforce a single-pass convergence invariant in resolveConfig: reject configs
where summarizationMaxTokens + retainTokens exceeds the threshold, so a
compaction can never immediately re-trigger.
- Document the crash vs recoverable failure taxonomy; core session repair stays
compaction-agnostic (a log-only orphaned compact/start is inert).
- Wire dsh-compact-basic into examples/coding-agent and add a with-key
compaction e2e (compaction's first real-world exercise + runaway net).
- Rewrite the RFC to encode the blueprint and move it to implemented/.
The runaway-turn snapshot is a named deferred follow-up: dsh-llm-replay cannot
yet serve the interleaved summarization model call.
core/ — product API spine
The packages every harness build is assembled from: the session log, the system-prompt assembly, the tool registry, the agent vocabulary, and the one concrete loop that drives them. These are product packages — the stable surface plugins and consumers build against.
| Package | Role | ctx key |
|---|---|---|
session/ |
Event-sourced session log + in-memory store | ctx.sessions |
system-prompt/ |
Prompt-section + tool-schema assembly registry | ctx.systemPrompt |
tools/ |
Tool registry + tools/execute waterfall |
ctx.tools |
agent/ |
Agent interface, registry, agent/* event vocabulary |
ctx.agents |
agent-loop/ |
The concrete loop plugin: ReactLoopAgent + the loop driver |
ctx.agentLoop |
agent-core/ |
Bundle plugin: the providerless/executor-less/UI-less spine as code | (loads the spine) |
agent-loop is the one concrete implementation of the agent seam and lives here because it is the harness's default product loop; everything else in core/ is interface/vocabulary. Plugins depend on the agent vocabulary, never on agent-loop directly, so the loop stays swappable.
agent-core is the composition counterpart: one bundle plugin that loads the whole providerless spine (timer + llm + sessions + system-prompt + tools + agents + invariants + tool-bash + agent-loop) and forwards agent-loop's agents list as its own config. App packages (ui/stdio-agent, ui/acp-agent) consume it and add only a front door; a leaf adds only the swappable backends. It lives in core/ because it composes exclusively core/ + interface packages and ships no provider, executor, or UI of its own.