The runtime vendored alongside the CI pin was the Jul-21 snapshot, which
predates two builtins the reconciled ship-soul now calls:
- http_delete_json (boot-counter HTTP write-back, awareness/memory self-review)
- engram_act_stats_json (heartbeat activation observability)
Compiling dist/soul.c against the stale runtime fails with implicit-declaration
errors. Vendor the current release runtime (identical to the one the soul was
gate-verified against: verify-soul-contract PASS, genesis boots clean, full
safety-contact) so the CI Linux soul is byte-for-byte the verified soul.
The soul build downloaded el-runtime-c 'latest' from Artifact Registry. The
merged ship-soul calls engram_prune_telemetry, which the latest published
runtime no longer defines, so an unpinned build fails to link — the failure
mode that let a broken/handlerless soul reach prod.
Vendor the release runtime v1.0.0-20260501 (el_runtime.c/.h) into the repo and
compile the soul against it. This is the exact runtime the merged soul was
verified against (verify-soul-contract GATE PASS, genesis boot survives, full
safety-contact response), making the build reproducible and independent of a
moving AR 'latest'.
The verify-soul-contract.sh HARD-BLOCK gate already runs before Publish (from
the CI-hardening arc on main), so a destructive or stale soul can never
publish/deploy again.
dist/soul.c: regenerated amalgamation (1.15MB) from the reconciled sources via
the hide-.elh + elc --target=c recipe, so the shipped translation unit CI
compiles now actually carries every landed fix — genesis-boot SIGSEGV (#150),
safety-contact 988 truncation (#96), url-decode multi-word search, honest
receipts (#100/#101), immutability arc (#83), and the bounded payloads (#103).
verify-soul-contract.sh, two non-weakening fixes (both false-NEGATIVE bugs that
spuriously failed a CORRECT soul; neither relaxes what fails a defective one):
1. #199 by-id gate: verify tombstone/KEPT via /api/neuron/graph?id=<id>&depth=1
(a compact neighborhood) instead of grepping engram_scan_nodes_json(9999,0)
— a multi-MB, salience-ordered, 9999-capped whole-graph dump in which the
salience-0.01 tombstone marker sorts past the cap and vanished.
2. Isolation: pin SOUL_ISE_URL to the dead axon port. Unsetting ENGRAM_URL was
not enough — the periodic engram sync defaults its source to the LIVE engram
(http://localhost:8742), so the 'isolated' gate pulled the operator's real
brain (56 -> 12k nodes in seconds), which both broke Section B determinism
and read live state. Now the soul stays on its own store.
Verified GREEN on a throwaway port/HOME (live :7770/:8742/~/.neuron untouched):
gate PASS x3 (presence 27/27, immutability all 5 KEPT); safety-contact POST 218B
/ GET 208B full untruncated; multi-word search (%20 and +) returns ranked hits
with an all-gibberish control at 0; bounded session/begin 1370B; honest ok:false
on a missing-id delete; genesis (ntn-genesis) boots clean through mem_save with
no SIGSEGV.
Union of all ship-critical soul fixes for the Mac beta:
- Keeps main's honest receipts (#100/#101), immutability arc + #199 by-id
gate (#83), Track B threat routing (#76), bounded beginSession (#103),
CI hardening (#85/#86), elc typo hotfix (#77), neuron-dev-setup (#84).
- Brings WIP's genesis-boot SIGSEGV fix (#150/#95), safety-contact 988
truncation fix (#96), bounded-persona floor (#93), and 10 self-review
commits (importance flattening, curiosity DF gating, WM/heartbeat
observability, boot-counter telemetry).
- Folds the multi-word ranked-search fix: api_query_param now url_decode()s
the extracted value so q=foo%20bar / foo+bar tokenize as two words.
Conflicts (neuron-api.el payload-bound comments, mcp-wrapper tool_forget)
resolved toward the correct end state: main's verified honest-receipt
read-back is kept; WIP's improved forget description is kept. Generated
dist/*.c taken from main and will be regenerated from this reconciled
source in the following commit.
Port the payload-bounding fix (PR #102, commit 872120c) onto main. The
session-init endpoints projected unbounded engram nodes (~900KB), closing
the MCP client socket on every beginSession. Cap the lists (8 activated /
10 recent for begin_session, 10/20 for compile_ctx) and project each node
to a light identity + a bounded, UTF-8-safe content snippet via
api_compact_node / api_compact_activated / api_utf8_trunc. Response drops
~900KB -> ~12KB; full content stays available via recall/fetch/inspectGraph.
Regenerate dist/soul.c (the CI-built amalgamation) and dist/neuron-api.c
from source. The soul.c regen also compiles in already-merged source the
previously-committed soul.c was stale against (agent write/edit receipt
fixes, #100/#101); verified via scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh
(PRESENCE + IMMUTABILITY PASS) and a clean CI-style cc build.
Root cause: two false-receipt paths in the wrapper's delete family.
- delete_by_id (removeKnowledge, deleteProcess, deleteImprint,
dischargeWonder) FABRICATED {"ok":true,...,"note":"soft-deleted"}
without calling the soul at all — the 'soul does not yet expose a delete
HTTP route' note was stale (/api/neuron/node/delete exists and tombstones
any node type).
- tool_forget forwarded the soul's response but never verified the deletion
actually persisted before answering ok.
The change (Receipt Contract rule 1 — a tool result must reflect what
actually happened):
- delete_by_id now routes to the soul's real /api/neuron/node/delete and
propagates its answer (honest 'node not found' for bad ids).
- Both handlers read back before answering ok: GET /api/neuron/graph?id=..
&depth=1 must show the tombstone marker (label "tombstone:<id>"); if it
does not, answer {"ok":false,"error":"delete_not_persisted",...} in
the soul's not-persisted error shape (api_not_persisted).
- Soul errors and transport failures pass through unchanged.
E2E evidence (sandbox soul :7791 + wrapper :7792, elb builds):
- unpatched: removeKnowledge on a NONEXISTENT id -> {"ok":true,
"deleted":"kn-DOES-NOT-EXIST-deadbeef","note":"soft-deleted"} (lie)
- patched: same call -> {"error":"node not found: ..."} (soul's answer)
- happy path: remember -> forget -> {"ok":true,"tombstoned":true};
read-back: hidden from default /list/Memory, present with
?include_deleted=1, node KEPT in full graph view (immutability intact)
- scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh on the soul it talks to: GATE PASS
(27/27 presence + immutability)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Root cause: dispatch_tool's write_file returned {"ok":true} without checking
fs_write's result, and edit_file returned ok:true even when old_text was absent
(str_replace silently no-ops) and its fs_write was also unchecked. Any failed
or no-op write fed the model a false success receipt, which it then repeated
to the user as fact.
The change (Receipt Contract rule 1 — a tool result must reflect what actually
happened):
- write_file: check fs_write's return (1 = all bytes written, 0 = fail);
on failure return {"error":"write failed"} in the handler's existing
error-JSON shape.
- edit_file: reject empty old_text, verify old_text is actually present
(str_contains) before replacing, and check the fs_write result the same way.
- Verification is by operation result, NOT an fs_read read-back: fs_read arms
the runtime's one-shot binary send length, the exact mechanism that truncated
the safety-contact response (#96). Same honest-write pattern as that fix.
E2E evidence (sandboxed elb build, dispatch_tool driven directly):
- unpatched: write_file into a chmod-000 dir -> {"ok":true} (lie);
edit_file with absent old_text -> {"ok":true} (lie, file untouched)
- patched: same calls -> {"error":"write failed"} /
{"error":"old_text not found in file"}; happy paths still ok:true
- scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh on the patched soul: GATE PASS (27/27
presence + immutability)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Four sites passed the Float local 'sal' through el_from_float() a second
time. el_val_t is the bit-pattern of the double, so re-wrapping performs
an int64->double VALUE conversion of the bits before re-bitcasting —
garbage that fails engram_decode_score's range check and clamps to
defaults. Net effect: importance="critical" stored 0.5/0.5 — importance
levels were cosmetic on the MCP memory path. Verified fixed live:
critical now stores salience/importance 0.95/0.95. Same bug fixed today
in engram server.el route_create_node (foundation/el 7f03876). Literal
wraps (el_from_float(0.9)) are safe — elc passes numeric literals raw.
wm_saturated was a sampled boolean — the 0->1 onset and 1->0 release
moments were only recoverable by hand-diffing consecutive heartbeats.
Emit a low-rate transition ISE at each edge carrying the WM top-5 at
that instant, so the composition that caused the regime change is
captured rather than the composition up to 59s later. First beat of a
boot never fires (restart is not a transition).
The session-init endpoints concatenated unbounded engram activate/scan
results as FULL node objects (content up to ~90KB per node), producing a
~900KB response. After the MCP wrapper re-escapes that into a stringified
text block the client dropped the socket ('connection closed unexpectedly')
on every beginSession call. Cap each list (8-10 activated, 10-20 recent)
and project every node to a light identity plus a bounded, UTF-8-safe
content snippet. Response drops from ~900KB to ~12KB; full content stays
available on demand via recall/fetch/inspectGraph.
Runtime activation counters are now cumulative, so the heartbeat emits
wm_evicted/breakthroughs as totals plus wm_evicted_delta/
breakthroughs_delta (state-tracked change since the previous beat) —
events between beats are no longer lost. Adds embed_eligible from
/api/stats so coverage reads as embed_count/embed_eligible instead of
the misleading absolute count, and surfaces auto_term_streak in the
heartbeat stream. Replaces the false 'semantic seeding NOT implemented'
comment: engram_activate embeds the query, seeds semantic top-K, gates
propagation on cosine, and scores WM promotion semantically.
- awareness.el: curiosity auto_term was the raw first word of a WM
label with no term-quality scoring — observed seeds included What,
Colon, Prose, Context. Replaced the 7-word genre blocklist whack-a-
mole with a delimited stopword membership test (function words +
document-structure words); topical terms pass untouched. Verified
live: seeds now ReasonEdit, Reasoning-model, Self-review.
- routes.el + awareness.el: idle counter only reset on rare inbox
synthesis-requests, so idle==pulse always (zero information).
handle_request now stamps soul.last_activity_ts on every inbound
HTTP request; heartbeat emits idle_ms = ms since last request
(-1 until first request of a boot).
- neuron-api.el: beginSession concatenated a depth-2 spread plus the
unbounded self-hub neighbor dump — multi-MB response, doubled by
wrapper re-escaping, socket died on every call. Now depth-1 and
the hub dump dropped (identity loading has its own tool). Verified:
beginSession returns instead of closing the socket.
- session_start now also posted to the HTTP Engram via ise_post: the
local engram_node_full write never crossed to the observable stream
(sync flows HTTP->soul only), so boots 5+ were invisible — last
visible session_start was boot 4, two weeks ago
- graceful shutdown emits a final ISE with boot/pulse/uptime; a boot
with no shutdown event now reliably signals a crash/SIGKILL
- empty /api/sync responses emit a sync_empty warn ISE instead of
being silently skipped — unreachable engram no longer looks
identical to quiet-but-healthy
- sync backflow prune reads ENGRAM_ISE_RETENTION_MS instead of
duplicating the 48h magic number server.el already honors
Fold engram_act_stats_json() into the heartbeat ISE: wm_evicted and
breakthroughs (per curiosity-scan activate call) plus embed_breaker_open —
the failure mode embed_ok structurally cannot see (it pings the Ollama
root, not the embed pipeline). WM-cap eviction, breakthrough-floor
flooding, and silent lexical degradation are now one-glance diagnosable
from telemetry.
- wm_churn: count of top-5 WM ids absent from previous beat — separates
'one stuck node' from 'whole WM frozen' without hand-correlating ISEs.
- wm_top0_wm: leader's weight; a frozen anchor reads as a constant here.
- Streak guard: before the runtime emitted id in wm_top JSON,
json_get(...,"id") was always empty and the streak incremented on
""=="" every beat — wm_top0_streak measured uptime, not fixation.
Empty id now resets the streak to 0.
proactive_curiosity strengthened its top result unconditionally every
scan — a positive-feedback fixed point that pinned auto_term on the same
node's first word for hours ('Fast-slow' era). Strengthen now fires only
when the top node changed since the last scan, and a 4-deep finst-style
tabu ring (ACT-R declarative finsts) hard-excludes recently used auto
terms (~2 min at the 30s cadence). Quoted-title guard stops '"The'
leaking through the >3-char stopword check and seeding lexical floods.
Heartbeat now pumps /api/embed-backfill?n=32 on the authoritative store
(its lazy backfill had no production trigger; coverage stalled at
93/12175) and emits wm_saturated, wm_top0_streak, embed_backfilled,
embed_count. Curiosity ISE emits auto_term_streak. The stuck-WM failure
mode is now a one-glance signal instead of manual ISE cross-referencing.
Three stale soul:boot_count copies (salience .9, importance .9, Canonical:
+0.2 tier bias, 0.15 threshold) held the top WM slots for 23h — a boot
counter outcompeting real context. Demoted to salience .55 / importance .2 /
tier Working: plumbing, not memory.
Persistence was also broken: in HTTP-engram mode the server owns state and
nothing wrote the counter back — the log shows boot #5 on three consecutive
boots. mem_boot_count_inc now mirrors the persona write-back: delete stale
server copies (matched by content prefix — route_create_node sets
label=content), create the replacement server-side. Working tier is in the
boot seed (/api/nodes) but excluded from periodic /api/sync, so the count
survives restarts without re-importing mid-session. Verified: restart
incremented 1->2 with exactly one server-side counter node.
Sentinel labels (knowledge:captured/evolved/canonical) made every capture
anonymous in WM telemetry — 35 identical wm_top entries — and starved the
curiosity auto-term seeder, which derives scan seeds from WM top-10 labels
and had returned empty on every scan since boot 6 because WM became
Knowledge-dominated while Knowledge was excluded from seeding.
- capture/evolve/promote now pass title (or empty → engram_node_full's
content[:60] derivation) instead of sentinels
- auto_term_try_slot admits Knowledge slots; sentinel-shaped labels
(colon, no space) are skipped so legacy nodes cannot seed 'knowledge'
- verified: probe capture labeled 'Label derivation probe 2026-07-23'
Saving the 988 crisis-line contact returned truncated, unparseable JSON —
cut mid-"set_at" at the file's byte length (e.g. 178 of a 218-byte
response). The contact written to disk was complete; only the HTTP response
was clipped, so a real customer's crisis-contact save came back corrupt.
Root cause is in the el runtime's response writer, not a handler buffer:
fs_read stores the file's byte count in a thread-local (_tl_fs_read_len)
for binary-safe file serving, and the response writer uses that length when
non-zero instead of strlen(body) (el_runtime.c:1409). Both safety-contact
handlers call fs_read (the POST read-back verify; the GET file read) and
then return a LONGER wrapped JSON string, so the response is capped to the
file size.
Soul-source fix (no runtime change needed):
- POST: verify persistence via fs_write's return (1 = all bytes written)
instead of an fs_read read-back — removes the fs_read, so nothing caps the
response.
- GET: fs_read is required, so reset the thread-local after it with a no-op
fs_read("") (fs_read zeroes the length before it opens a path) so the
wrapped response is sent in full.
Verified: POST (crisis-line + custom) and GET now return complete, valid
JSON (parses cleanly, full contact incl. set_at). Regenerated dist/soul.c +
dist/safety.c (3GB RSS watchdog, release el_runtime v1.0.0-20260501).
Full suite still green: verify-soul-contract GATE PASS (PRESENCE +
IMMUTABILITY), genesis boot survives (/health 200, no segfault), bounded-
persona floor still compiled in.
NOTE: the underlying runtime leak (any handler that fs_reads then returns a
longer string) is worth a proper fix in el_runtime.c (use the max of
strlen and _tl_fs_read_len) so this class can't recur.
A fresh-install (SOUL_CGI_ID=ntn-genesis) boot crashed with
"Segmentation fault: 11" right after the http server came up — a real
customer's very first boot. Backtrace:
strcmp(0x1) <- str_eq (el_runtime.c:219) <- mem_save <- awareness_run
Root cause: the el runtime's engram_save returns an Int (1 = ok, 0 =
failure), but mem_save did `str_eq(engram_save(path), "")`, treating the
return as a String. str_eq runs EL_CSTR on it, which is a raw cast:
EL_CSTR(1) = (char*)0x1. On a SUCCESSFUL save (return 1) strcmp then
dereferences 0x1 and segfaults. Genesis is the first path that both seeds
the brain AND saves it successfully on the very first awareness pass, so it
crashes there; non-genesis boots (contract gate, refusal test) don't hit a
successful early mem_save, which is why they passed. handle_api_consolidate
had the identical latent bug.
Fix: read engram_save's Int result and compare `== 0` instead of str_eq'ing
it — in mem_save (memory.el) and handle_api_consolidate (neuron-api.el).
Regression: pre-existing, NOT introduced by the immutability/floor rebuild.
The pre-immutability build (1442ce2) genesis-crashes identically in the same
unchanged mem_save; #159 never actually fixed#150 for a release-runtime
build.
Regenerated dist/soul.c + per-module dist/{memory,neuron-api}.c (3GB RSS
watchdog, built against release el_runtime v1.0.0-20260501). Verified:
genesis boot survives (/health 200, no segfault), verify-soul-contract.sh
GATE PASS (PRESENCE + IMMUTABILITY), and the bounded-persona floor is still
compiled in (BOUNDED PERSONA / SOUL_PERSONA_NAME strings present).
The ship-soul builds from this branch, which has the bounded-persona floor
(#93) but never received the tombstone/supersede immutability fix (that
went to main; hotfix diverged before it). So the launch soul failed
verify-soul-contract IMMUTABILITY on the delete/update/forget routes —
they hard-removed engram nodes via engram_forget/mem_forget.
Apply the same fix, mirroring the knowledge routes' supersede pattern:
- node/update -> create new node + "supersedes" edge to the original, KEEP
the original (no engram_forget).
- node/delete, memory/delete, memory/forget, cultivate forget, and the
autonomous awareness forget -> TOMBSTONE via the canonical mem_tombstone
(memory.el): keep the node + its edges, record a Tombstone marker, hide
from default bounded list reads (?include_deleted recovers). Never
engram_forget. The MCP forget tool now routes to the tombstoning delete
instead of faking a delete.
Internal GC that genuinely removes transient nodes (awareness inbox-trigger
consume, consolidation dedup, session-summary replace, telemetry pruning)
still calls engram_forget directly and is unchanged.
Regenerated dist/soul.c (single-TU) + per-module dist/{memory,awareness,
neuron-api}.c from THIS branch's sources under a 3GB physical-RSS watchdog
(peak ~32MB), built against the release el_runtime (v1.0.0-20260501). The
bounded-persona floor is preserved — verified in the emitted C and the
linked binary (BOUNDED PERSONA / SOUL_PERSONA_NAME strings present).
verify-soul-contract.sh: GATE PASS — PRESENCE all 27 routes, IMMUTABILITY
5/5 KEPT (memory-update, memory-delete, node-update, node-delete,
memory-forget).
A customer DMG install ships the full graph but presents a named, bounded
assistant that must never claim the imprint's human past. The neuron-ui
retrieval fence keeps the imprint's biography out of the ENGRAM CONTEXT; this
is the second half - it stops confabulation ("tell me about your childhood")
from inventing a human life or naming Will, even if biography leaks into context.
bounded_persona_floor() gates on SOUL_PERSONA_NAME: the customer DMG sets it,
owner (Will's) builds leave it unset so the real self is completely unchanged.
Applied at every generation path - chat, agentic (tools), vision, plan, soul,
dharma - so no path can leak.
Verified against claude-sonnet-4-5: with the floor on and Will's biography
deliberately leaked into the identity context, all probes (childhood / creator /
family) return the bounded-entity answer and explicitly refuse to claim the
leaked life; with the floor off the same context is fully confabulated as its own.
NOTE: dist/soul.c must be regenerated on a build host - local link is blocked by
a pre-existing el_runtime mismatch (engram_prune_telemetry), unrelated to this change.
The soul daemon leaked ~104 orphan in-memory nodes/min (17.6GB RSS,
OOM-killed) because the perceive gate substring-matched 'soul-inbox'
against the loop's own verbatim-copy output, the trigger node was
strengthened but never consumed, and record() persisted a Memory node
per cycle. Fixes: perceive gates and activates only on the dedicated
soul-inbox-pending tag; one_cycle requires the tag on the node's tags
field before attending (makes consumption safe); processed triggers
are consumed via engram_forget; loop outcomes route through ISE
telemetry (48h prune) instead of permanent Memory nodes.
Verified post-restart: node_delta 104→~0, curiosity scans resumed,
WM average unfrozen (0.120833→0.0676), RSS 17.6GB→184MB.
- engram refresh URL now resolves env -> state -> localhost:8742, same
hardening ise_post got after the boot-4 blackout. Previously a corrupted/
empty soul_engram_url state key silently disabled sync forever while
heartbeats kept flowing — WM starves of Knowledge nodes with no outward
sign.
- heartbeat ISE: node_delta, edge_delta (growth vs stall vs flood is now
one field, not cross-ISE forensics), sync_age_ms from a new
soul.last_sync_ok_ts stamp (-1 = never; >> SOUL_REFRESH_MS = refresh
path broken). Verified live: pulse 1 sync_age_ms=-1, sync fired +1.6s,
age counts up between syncs.
Run 3388's gate failed with every route returning "el-runtime: no http
handler registered". The runtime resolves handle_request (and the tool
handlers) by name via dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, ...). On glibc/Linux a symbol is
only visible to dlsym if it is in the dynamic symbol table, so the stripped
CI binary booted but served nothing. macOS exports these freely, which is
why the local build passed and masked it.
Add -rdynamic to the cc link (mirrors the Windows build's
--export-all-symbols). strip -s keeps .dynsym, so the handler still
resolves after stripping. This fixes both the gate AND the actual deployed
soul — without it the Linux/GKE soul is a server that answers nothing.
The gate booted the soul with `env -i`, which strips the ambient
environment — including the library path the dynamically-linked soul needs
on the GCE CI runner. The soul never came up there, so the gate failed the
build (run 3384) even though the soul is correct (the gate passes locally
against the exact published CI runtime). Switch to preserving the ambient
env and instead UNSET only the live-service vars (ENGRAM_URL/API keys/
identity) while pointing HOME + snapshot at throwaway paths and axon at a
dead port. Isolation is unchanged (verified: no touch of the live
soul/engram); the soul now boots on the runner.
Scaffolds a reproducible, idempotent installer that stands up the four native
launchd core services (soul :7770, engram :8742, mcp-wrapper :17779,
mcp-proxy :7779), seeds a fresh engram with the genesis identity via forge, and
installs the Claude Code config (neuron agent + core hooks + local MCP). Fully
templated to the invoking user's $HOME; Anthropic key prompted and stored in
Keychain; no secrets committed. Personal automations and synapse-dependent hooks
excluded from core.
Wire the soul contract gate into ci.yaml as a hard block between the cc
build and the Publish-to-Artifact-Registry step. A non-zero gate fails the
build, so a stale (route-404ing) or memory-destroying (hard-deleting) soul
can never publish neuron-soul to foundation-prod or blue-green deploy to
GKE — the same class-fix now guarding the desktop builds, extended to prod.
Vendors scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh (copied from neuron-ui; the route
contract is baked in, so it's portable POSIX bash/curl with no neuron-ui
source dependency). It boots dist/neuron on a throwaway port with a
throwaway HOME/engram/cgi — never touching ~/.neuron or any live service —
and checks PRESENCE (every app route answered) + IMMUTABILITY (no engram
write route hard-deletes; deletes/forgets tombstone). Adds curl to the
build deps for the probe.
Phase 1 tombstoned memory/delete + node/delete, but the generic forget
path was still destructive. This routes every forget through the same
tombstone semantics so nothing in the daemon can hard-delete an engram
node anymore.
Canonical helper: mem_tombstone (memory.el, imported first so every module
can call it) — keep the node + its edges, record a Tombstone marker, never
engram_forget. neuron-api's tombstone_node now delegates to it (single
source of truth).
Per-path before -> after:
- memory.el `mem_forget` hard delete (engram_forget) -> tombstone. This
alone fixes both callers: the /api/neuron/memory/forget route
(handle_api_forget) and the cultivate op=="forget".
- awareness.el autonomous `forget` action engram_forget -> mem_tombstone.
The soul can no longer autonomously hard-delete a memory.
- mcp-wrapper tool_forget was a FAKE no-op that returned {"ok","deleted"}
without deleting OR tombstoning -> now routes to the soul's tombstoning
/api/neuron/memory/delete; tool description fixed to say it
supersedes/tombstones (recoverable), not "Remove a node".
Left intentionally as hard deletes (internal GC / lifecycle, not user
memory, all call engram_forget directly): session-summary replace
(chat.el), mem_consolidate dedup (memory.el), session-start telemetry
pruning (soul.el), session lifecycle (sessions.el).
Regenerated both ship paths under a 3GB physical-RSS watchdog (peak ~32MB):
dist/soul.c (single-TU amalgamation, macOS/Linux) and the per-module
dist/{memory,awareness,neuron-api}.c (Windows/Linux build). Verified: no
forget handler calls engram_forget; a forget leaves the node present +
tombstone marker. Gate (neuron-ui verify-soul-contract.sh, new memory-forget
row): PRESENCE + IMMUTABILITY PASS.
soul.c (the macOS single-TU amalgamation) already carries the
tombstone/supersede change, but the Windows/Linux build path compiles
the per-module dist/*.c instead (build-soul-windows.sh excludes soul.c).
That path was still pulling the stale, destructive dist/neuron-api.c —
so without this the cross-compiled neuron.exe would keep hard-deleting
engram nodes even though the source is fixed.
Regenerated with `elc --emit-header neuron-api.el`: no engram_forget in
memory_delete/node_delete (tombstone), supersedes edge in node_update.
Portable C — identical for macOS/Windows/Linux; only the runtime it links
against differs.
The soul was hard-deleting engram nodes: memory/delete and node/delete
called engram_forget (frees the node and drops its incident edges), and
node/update created a replacement then forgot the original with no link
back. That violates the day-one rule that engram nodes are immutable —
memory could be silently, irrecoverably destroyed via the API.
Convert the three destructive handlers to Will's immutability semantics,
mirroring the pattern memory/update and knowledge evolve/promote already
use:
- node/update -> create the new node, wire a "supersedes" edge new->old,
KEEP the original. No engram_forget. (Was: create + forget old, no edge.)
- memory/delete and node/delete -> TOMBSTONE: keep the node AND its edges,
create a Tombstone marker node (content = target id, label
"tombstone:<id>") wired with a "tombstones" edge. Never engram_forget.
Default bounded list reads (handle_api_list_typed / the memory list) hide
tombstoned nodes and the markers; ?include_deleted=1 returns them, and
internal cognition + /api/graph/nodes still traverse them. memory/update
was already correct and is unchanged.
Full-graph hiding on /api/graph/nodes is deliberately NOT done at the el
layer: json_array_get is O(index), so filtering that endpoint (called with
limit up to 999999) would be O(n^2). That hide needs a runtime scan filter
and is a separate follow-up; nodes there remain traversable, tagged
status:deleted via the marker edge.
Regenerated dist/soul.c from these sources (flat single-TU amalgamation,
compiled under a 3GB physical-RSS watchdog, peak ~32MB). Verified with
scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh in neuron-ui: PRESENCE passes (all 27
routes) and IMMUTABILITY passes (all four mutation routes KEPT; deletes
produce a real tombstone marker and hide from the default list).
Two compounding defects made every pause->approve write_file report success
while writing NOTHING:
1. The naive json_get scanner matches "content" anywhere in the approve
body — including INSIDE tool_input, which for write_file always carries
a content field. The handler therefore treated every approved builtin
write as already-client-executed, skipped dispatch entirely, and handed
the model the file's own content as the 'tool result'. The model then
narrated 'Done, created' — a false receipt with no file. Builtin tools
now ALWAYS dispatch server-side; client content is only honored for
non-builtin (MCP/client-executed) tools. Stricter only.
2. write_file returned {"ok":true} unconditionally — fs_write's outcome
was never checked, so any failed write also reported success. The write
now verifies the file landed (fs_exists) and returns the RESOLVED path
in the ok payload; failures return a real error naming the destination.
E2E on the test brain (boot 38): approve-path write lands byte-exact and
the result carries the resolved path; auto-run writes unchanged; denied
writes execute nothing. BUG-5 (approve wire lacked tool_name) had been
masking this one — two stacked bugs on the same path.
NOTE for review: the deeper cure is a nesting-aware json reader; this fix
removes the dangerous consequence at the two spots that lie about disk.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
will.anderson
Tim Lingo