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fix(engine): history keeps its provenance and its session — the false confession and the blank stare

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DESIGN FIT: three of round 7's five defects share ONE root — the conversation-history
layer persists only {role, content}, discarding tool provenance, session scoping, and the
distinction between a real user turn and an internal utility call. Fixes A and B RESTORE
Will's design rather than extend it: his agentic path already scopes history per session,
the plain path never got it, and his own source carries the TODO admitting the resulting
race (chat.el, handle_chat: "process-global key; concurrent /api/chat requests without
session_id race on this read-append-write"). Fix C repairs one join Will wrote that was
correct for a year and one we added last week. E1/E2 are ours.

FIX A — tool provenance in history (kills the FALSE CONFESSION)
  Root cause, EXECUTED-verified: handle_chat_agentic recorded turns via hist_append, which
  emits {"role","content"} only. server_tool_use blocks, web_search_tool_result blocks and
  every citation were discarded, then replayed as text. On the next turn the model saw a
  data-rich answer with zero evidence a search had happened, and its own permanent rule
  ("never describe a search you did not perform") left one conclusion available: that it
  had fabricated the data. It apologised for a search it HAD run — four independent lines
  of evidence confirm the search was real. The defect is not the model's honesty. It is
  that we deleted the evidence and then asked it to account for itself.
  Change: agentic_loop accumulates the source URLs it already walks past (citations and
  web_search_tool_result content) and returns them as "sources"; handle_chat_agentic folds
  tools_used + sources into a receipt line stored WITH the assistant turn. Receipts are
  unconditional — a negative receipt ("no tools ran") is the other half of the guarantee,
  because "no evidence of a tool" and "evidence of no tool" were previously identical in
  the transcript. conv_history_block splits the receipt off before snipping so a long
  answer cannot truncate away the evidence. The user never sees it: it is appended to the
  history copy, not the reply.

FIX B — one history key for both paths (kills the BLANK STARE)
  Root cause, EXECUTED-verified: the agentic path keyed history on session_hist_<id>; the
  plain path was hard-wired to the process-global conv_history and never read session_id.
  One conversation, two buckets. Proven in the guest engram: the scoped node held exactly
  two turns starting at "Try again" while the earlier exchanges sat unscoped.
  Change: conv_hist_key/conv_hist_label are now the single definition, used by BOTH paths;
  session_id is threaded route -> layered_cycle -> layered_generate / conv_history_record.
  The 2-line fallback (plain path reads the agentic key) was REJECTED: it keeps the
  process-global bucket as a live write target, which is the bleed the TODO describes.
  Also found and closed while threading: layered_cycle read session_id from the state key
  "current_session_id", which is read here and WRITTEN NOWHERE in the entire source. It
  was unconditionally "", so TODO(reliability #4) — per-session steward continuity — was
  dead code that could never fire. It fires now.
  LAZY SESSION, decided explicitly: we create the session EAGERLY at the door (app half,
  ui#223) rather than migrating orphaned turns. Migration would copy the CONTENTS of a
  process-global bucket, possibly another conversation's, into a named session — the bleed,
  performed deliberately. Eager creation makes the situation impossible instead. Migration
  is deliberately not implemented and must not be added without solving provenance first.

FIX C — the two text-join seams ("to.Good", byte-verified 0x77 0x2e 0x47)
  Two bare `+` joins, written a year apart, had drifted into two answers to one question:
  within-response block joins (Will's, 2026-05-03, latent until server-side web_search
  began interleaving non-text blocks) and across-round joins (ours, 62af564).
  Change: one named rule, text_join_sep, at both sites. NOT a blanket separator — a cited
  answer splits MID-SENTENCE ("The current temperature is " + "86°F" + ", with "), so a
  blanket separator shatters every sourced sentence. The rule takes the one bit that
  distinguishes the cases: whether a NON-TEXT block intervened. Hoisting it also makes the
  fix verifiable in the shipped binary, which an inline `+` is not.

FIX E1 — utility generations stay out of the transcript
  Title generation ("Write a 3-6 word title...") and insight passes ran down the same plain
  door as a real message and were recorded as if the user had typed them; the same calls are
  the "model":"unknown" rows in usage.jsonl. is_utility_request reads an explicit utility
  flag from the app, with the __title__/__insight__ id prefixes as a fallback for older
  clients. Answered normally, never recorded.

FIX E2 — OPERATOR IDENTITY is scoped to tool-capable turns
  The block (env USER/HOME, closing "This is a hard rule") was prepended to EVERY system
  prompt including chat mode. On a Tools:Off turn there is no filesystem in reach, so it
  governed nothing and merely supplied the loudest fact in the prompt — which is why the
  model opened a fresh conversation with "You're test, on your machine at /Users/test".
  Hoisted to operator_identity_block() and gated on !chat_mode. Unchanged wherever a file
  or command tool can actually be reached.

ALSO: agentic_loop's per-session history persist had a second hand-rolled copy of
conv_history_persist with a different label expression, different salience scores and
different tags for the same node. Since both now derive the label from conv_hist_label and
engram_node_full upserts by label, two score policies were writing one node. Collapsed to
one writer.

BUILD NOTE: dist/elp-c-decls.h is force-included by the documented link recipe and carried
the OLD C arities, so it is updated here. This is the build-support header, NOT the stale
generated dist/soul.c — no dist/*.c was read or edited; all engine changes are .el source.
chat.elh/soul.elh are committed because a first-pass build against the old signatures FAILS
(measured); the other regenerated headers are reverted as unrelated churn.

BUILT: 887,000 bytes, sha256 d632b061ad75269d6adeb52578d030eaf49e895d91289d7f946b19c08450d728
Zero el_str_concat(<int>, str_len(...)) sites (the BUG-PLAINCHAT-1 miscompile guard).
web_search_20250305 and disable_parallel_tool_use both still present — PR #108's web search
and the ADR-0005 stopgap are intact.

Refs neuron#109 (builds on it), neuron#78 (Receipt Contract — the real fix A is a stopgap for)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Tim Lingo
2026-08-05 22:59:54 -05:00
parent 635f6febe4
commit ff421d39f6
6 changed files with 476 additions and 83 deletions
Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files
dist/elp-c-decls.h
Generated Vendored
+15 -3
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@@ -5,6 +5,13 @@ el_val_t add_punct(el_val_t s, el_val_t intent);
el_val_t add_to_seen(el_val_t seen, el_val_t node_id);
el_val_t aff_try_slot(el_val_t slot_json, el_val_t aff_7d_ts, el_val_t acc_key);
el_val_t affective_context_prefix(void);
el_val_t is_utility_request(el_val_t body, el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t operator_identity_block(void);
el_val_t provenance_add_sources(el_val_t block, el_val_t btype, el_val_t has_cit, el_val_t cit_raw, el_val_t acc);
el_val_t provenance_names(el_val_t tools_used);
el_val_t provenance_scan_urls(el_val_t arr, el_val_t acc);
el_val_t text_join_sep(el_val_t accumulated, el_val_t incoming, el_val_t after_interruption);
el_val_t tool_receipt(el_val_t tools_used, el_val_t sources);
el_val_t agent_number(el_val_t agent);
el_val_t agent_person(el_val_t agent);
el_val_t agent_workspace_root(void);
@@ -151,8 +158,12 @@ el_val_t cmd_abs_escape_at(el_val_t cmd, el_val_t root, el_val_t needle);
el_val_t connectd_get(el_val_t suffix);
el_val_t connectd_post(el_val_t suffix, el_val_t body);
el_val_t connector_tools_json(void);
el_val_t conv_history_load(void);
el_val_t conv_history_persist(el_val_t hist);
el_val_t conv_hist_key(el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t conv_hist_label(el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t conv_history_block(el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t conv_history_load(el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t conv_history_persist(el_val_t session_id, el_val_t hist);
el_val_t conv_history_record(el_val_t session_id, el_val_t user_msg, el_val_t assistant_msg, el_val_t receipt);
el_val_t cop_article(el_val_t gender, el_val_t number, el_val_t definite);
el_val_t cop_bwk_future(el_val_t prefix);
el_val_t cop_bwk_perfect(el_val_t prefix);
@@ -782,7 +793,8 @@ el_val_t lang_profile_uga(void);
el_val_t lang_profile_zh(void);
el_val_t lang_profile(el_val_t code, el_val_t word_order, el_val_t morph_type, el_val_t has_case, el_val_t has_gender, el_val_t script_dir, el_val_t agreement, el_val_t null_subject);
el_val_t lang_word_order(el_val_t profile);
el_val_t layered_cycle(el_val_t raw_input);
el_val_t layered_cycle(el_val_t raw_input, el_val_t session_id, el_val_t utility);
el_val_t layered_generate(el_val_t prompt, el_val_t imprint_id, el_val_t session_id);
el_val_t lex_class(el_val_t entry);
el_val_t lex_form(el_val_t entry, el_val_t idx);
el_val_t lex_pos(el_val_t entry);