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>
Non-agentic /api/chat (the desktop app's default "Tools: Off" mode) returned the
user's own screened text as a bare non-JSON string. Every JSON client failed to
parse it and showed "Couldn't reach Neuron - it may be offline."
Root cause: f52d5bd (2026-06-11) correctly moved the route onto the layer spine
(handle_chat -> layered_cycle), but L3 never got a generator — imprint_respond()
annotates its input and returns it. Two pieces of the architecture were already
waiting for that step: layered_cycle parks a bell directive in the state key
build_system_prompt is written to consume, and build_system_prompt carries a
chat_mode ("no tools") flag with no live caller.
The fix composes rather than replaces. Wiring handle_chat would have removed
safety_screen, the hard-bell short-circuit, the whole stewardship layer and
safety_validate — the only enforcing output gate in the codebase — in exchange
for a working reply (see _engine-websearch-20260804/SAFETY-STOP.md). Instead
layered_cycle keeps every gate, in order, and gains a generation step between
imprint_respond and safety_validate.
L1 screen -> guard -> hard-bell short-circuit -> L2a -> L2b -> L2c
-> L3 imprint_respond (prompt) -> L3b layered_generate (NEW) -> L1 validate
- chat.el: NEW layered_generate (L3 generation, no tools offered),
conv_history_block, conv_history_record.
FIX build_system_prompt never concatenated no_tools_rule into its
return — the "[NO TOOLS THIS TURN]" rule reached no model at all.
handle_chat annotated DO-NOT-WIRE with the reason.
- soul.el: layered_cycle gains L3b + post-validation turn bookkeeping.
- routes.el: NEW plain_chat_envelope; all three /api/chat dispatch sites wrap the
cycle's output. Built OUTSIDE the cycle so safety_validate always sees
raw model text — nothing to unwrap or rebuild on the crisis path.
Emits both `reply` and `response`: the desktop app reads `reply`,
the CLI tools and telegram-gateway read `response`.
Also fixes BUG-PLAINCHAT-1, a pre-existing CRITICAL crash on the crisis path.
elc compiles `let n: Int = pos + str_len(marker)` to el_str_concat() — string
concat on two integers — inside a block-expression initializer, segfaulting the
daemon (SIGSEGV in strlen). Six inline copies of the same " | ts:" parser had it:
two in layered_cycle L2c, two in engram_compile (live on the AGENTIC path too),
two in affective_context_prefix. A distress turn following an earlier affective
turn killed the whole process. Proven pre-existing: an unmodified baseline binary
crashes identically, and the same bad C is in the committed dist/soul.c. Fixed by
hoisting to one top-level function, affective_node_ts(), where the expression
compiles to integer addition — verified in the generated C.
Proof (throwaway HOME/engram, explicit NEURON_PORT, live chain untouched):
- Plain turn returns a JSON envelope with the provider's answer, not an echo.
- Captured request body: no `tools`, no `tool_choice`; system prompt carries the
NO-TOOLS rule. Tools:Off means no tool is offered, structurally.
- Hard bell: canned 988 message, and the provider request count does not move —
the message never reaches a model.
- Soft bell + a 2-char model reply: safety_validate's care phrase is appended to
the MODEL's output. Output gate acting, on this route.
- The L1 bell directive now reaches the model here for the first time (the state
addendum had a producer and no consumer).
- test_layered_cycle PASS; all six El suites byte-identical to baseline.
- verify-soul-contract.sh (bash 5.3): GATE PASS, 27/27, immutability PASS.
- The crash sequence that killed the baseline daemon now returns HTTP 200.
Not proven: no live Anthropic call — the login keychain refuses the key to a
non-interactive process (rc=24 errSecInteractionNotAllowed). Details and the
one-command close-out are in _engine-plainchat-20260805/README.md §7.
Builds on PR #108. dist/soul.c deliberately not regenerated — Will's toolchain.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.
- 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
Fix 1: mem_boot_count_inc prunes all existing soul:boot_count nodes before
inserting the new one — keeps exactly one boot counter node instead
of accumulating a new node per boot. Also fixes a latent ordering
bug where engram_search_json oldest-first results caused the counter
to read stale (low) values once >3 copies accumulated.
Fix 3: handle_api_node_delete comment clarified — the no-verify exception
is correct for deletes (not a write path); read-back-verify is for
writes only.
Fix 4: emit_session_start_event prunes old session-start InternalStateEvent
nodes after each boot, keeping the 10 most recent and forgetting
older ones. Prevents unbounded accumulation of ~120+ copies.
- Q1: engram_numeric_valid() guard against non-numeric timestamps in bell scoring
- Q2: soul-agnostic cold-start fallback in engram_compile (drops genesis-specific hardcoded node IDs)
- Q3: partial-write guard and failure logging in conv_history_persist/load
- Q4: document circuit-breaker limitation requiring C runtime support
- Q5: println warnings on empty activation/search paths
- Q6: load_identity_context warns when all identity fetches return empty
- Q7: recall_status state tracking (ok/empty/unavailable) surfaced to LLM via MEMORY STATUS block
- Q8: document shared-state race conditions in engram_recall_status and safety_system_addendum
- CRITICAL BUG: conv_node_id empty check moved outside is_bell block so silent Conversation node loss is always logged
Merge improve/safety-crisis-detection (PR #31): reads layered_cycle_safety_system_addendum
from state and appends to system prompt on each turn (cleared after use to prevent bleed).
Safety ts extraction falls back to updated_at. Affective prefix now wires into system build.
Conflict with PR #33 resolved: capability_rules and session_preload both preserved.
- Remove dead soft_bell block in layered_cycle that wrote soul_safety_system_augment
to state but was never read; safety augmentation now goes through the correct
layered_cycle_safety_system_addendum state key read by build_system_prompt
- build_system_prompt now reads layered_cycle_safety_system_addendum and appends
it to the system prompt, clearing the key after consumption
- Timestamp extraction for distress nodes falls back to updated_at when created_at
is empty, preventing the 72h recency check from always treating nodes as stale
Every engram_node_full call that dropped its return value now binds it
and emits a println on empty string. engram_save calls in consolidate,
heartbeat, and dharma-room-turn are checked for failure. The two API
handlers (log_state_event, tune_config) that skipped api_persisted()
now match the read-back-after-write contract used everywhere else in
neuron-api.el.
Files changed:
- chat.el: conv_history_persist, handle_dharma_room_turn, auto_persist
- soul.el: emit_session_start_event, seed_persona_from_env HTTP check
- memory.el: mem_save, mem_boot_count_inc
- neuron-api.el: handle_api_log_state_event, handle_api_tune_config,
handle_api_consolidate (engram_save + session summary write)
- awareness.el: ise_post local-engram fallback path
TODO comments added for non-atomic patterns (issues #12, #13) and
the missing circuit breaker (#14) — these require new primitives.
- Fix state key mismatch: soul.el layered_cycle now reads conv_history
(not conversation_history), unblocking the safety_score_distress_history
history-amplification path in safety_threat_score
- Add safety_augment_system call on the main handle_chat path so the
phrase-list bell detector fires on all chat turns, not just dharma rooms
- Add cross-session affective engram query in load_identity_context() at
boot; stores distress/crisis signals from prior sessions under
soul_affective_context with a 7-day soft recency filter
- soul.el: fix state key bug in layered_cycle (conversation_history -> conv_history)
- safety.el: add indirect crisis location patterns to soft_bell phrase list
- soul.el: wire safety_augment_system into layered_cycle for soft_bell turns
- chat.el: load cross-session affective context at session start when distress signals found within 72h
The graph API resolves name=self/neuron to kn-efeb4a5b (neuron-api.el:471),
which carries only 8 incidental 'tagged' edges. The curated identity lives on
self node 015644f5 (1461 edges: identity, embodies, remembers, values). So
public self-traversal reaches tags, not the real self.
Add ensure_self_canonical_bridge(): an idempotent boot-time repair that links
kn-efeb4a5b <-> 015644f5 with a 'canonical-self' edge, only if missing. Runs in
the genesis safe-to-seed path regardless of the <100-edge gate, so the live
populated graph gets repaired and persisted. Connect-only-if-missing prevents
the duplicate-edge stacking that gates init_soul_edges().
Compile-checked with elc (darwin arm64); not link/run-gated locally. Needs a
soul build + smoke test before merge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
fix(soul): add HTTP-engram guard to safe_to_seed — when ENGRAM_URL is set
the HTTP Engram owns persistence; genesis must never save to local snapshot
regardless of node counts (was: guard_disk forced to empty string, making
the ratio check vacuously true and allowing init_soul_edges+engram_save).
fix(soul): use multiplication form for ratio guard — node_count * 16000 <
disk_len avoids floor-division truncation that underestimated boundary files
(250KB / 16000 = 15.6, floors to 15; a 15-node graph wrongly passed old guard).
fix(chat): add safety_augment_system to handle_chat_as_soul,
handle_dharma_room_turn, and handle_dharma_room_turn_agentic — all three
called the LLM without Hard Bell evaluation, leaving users in dharma rooms
without crisis resource routing.
fix(neuron-api): add api_persisted read-back to handle_api_define_process —
was the only write handler that returned ok:true without verifying the node
was actually written to engram.
fix(routes): unique temp file path in connectd_post — replaces fixed
/tmp/neuron-connectors-req.json with a timestamped path to prevent
collision if concurrency is added or two soul instances share a machine.
test: add tests/test_bell_safety.el — covers safety_detect_bell_level
(none/soft/hard), safety_classify_hard_bell (abuse/self_harm routing),
safety_normalize (smart-quote), safety_augment_system, and
handle_safety_contact_post (validation + read-back).
test: add tests/test_soul_guard.el — pure-function logic tests for the
safe_to_seed predicate: 200KB boundary, 47MB/63-node clobber scenario,
HTTP-engram mode, multiplication vs division truncation at 250KB.
test: add tests/test_api_define_process.el — verifies the define_process
write is read-back verified after the fix.
Genesis boot previously seeded a fresh identity and saved it over snapshot.json
whenever the in-memory graph looked empty. Replace the fixed node-count threshold
with a ratio guard: refuse to seed when the on-disk snapshot is large
(>200KB) but the loaded graph is sparse (< disk/16000 nodes).
KNOWN LIMITATION: this gates only the seed/pre-serve-save path. The deeper cause
is a non-atomic engram_save (fopen wb truncates to 0 before writing 47MB), which
creates a window where a concurrent load reads an empty file -> genesis -> and if
guard_disk is read in that same window the guard passes. The real fix is an
atomic engram_save (temp + fsync + rename) in el_runtime.c, tracked separately.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Resolves conflicts by keeping main's full safety/stewardship/imprint implementations.
PR #9 uniquely contributes: layered_cycle() in soul.el, route wiring in routes.el,
soul.elh export, and the layer composition test suite.
- Add stub implementations of safety.el, stewardship.el, and imprint.el
with their .elh headers so the branch compiles without the dependency
branches (feat/layer-safety, feat/layer-stewardship, feat/layer-imprint).
Each stub documents the layer contract it must satisfy when replaced.
- Fix GET /api/chat bypass: update the GET branch in handle_request to
call layered_cycle() consistently with the POST branch, rather than
calling handle_chat() directly and skipping the consciousness stack.
- Export layered_cycle() from soul.elh (and dist/soul.elh) so routes.el
can resolve the symbol via the header import.
- Fix steward_action else branch: add explicit handling for "block"
(returns safe refusal immediately, skips L3) and "redirect" (uses
redirect_to field). Unknown actions now log a warning and fall back to
the screened input rather than silently passing an empty string to
imprint_respond().
- Document hard_bell path: clarify that omitting auto_persist/history
update is intentional security isolation, and document the safety_validate
second-param sentinel contract ("hard_bell" vs screen_action).
On startup, prefer the local engram snapshot if it has >50 nodes.
HTTP Engram is only used on first boot (no snapshot yet). This means
sessions, conversation history, and in-process state survive daemon
restarts.
awareness.el: sync source with compiled binary (periodic mem_save
on heartbeat was already in the binary but not in source).
Rebuilds soul.c with the new startup logic and ships updated binary.
- soul.el: SOUL_CGI_ID, SOUL_ENGRAM_PATH, SOUL_IDENTITY env vars;
state_set("soul_snapshot_path") so callers can find it; only call
init_soul_edges() when cgi_id == "ntn-genesis"
- chat.el: handle_dharma_room_turn — soul builds its own context from its
own engram, assembles system prompt, calls LLM, persists episodic memory;
also fix is_new_tool scoping bug in handle_chat_agentic (use has_tool)
- routes.el: wire dharma_room_turn event type before chat_as_soul branch
- rebuild dist/neuron: handle_dharma_room_turn now compiled in
Replace scan-by-offset fallback with engram_get_node_json calls for the
known high-salience identity nodes (family, origin). Offset-based scanning
is order-dependent and unreliable; direct ID fetch is stable regardless of
snapshot position. Ensures biographical context (Fox, Bobby, etc.) is
always in the system prompt when vector search returns nothing.
Canonical Neuron substrate source. The "real me" - not the marketing
demo soul. Lives at neuron/soul.el for now (no subdirectories yet,
per directive). Build pipeline, deploy targets, and any related
artifacts come later.
Tim Lingo
will.anderson