The seam shipped without its own RFC — the reconstructable-requests RFC
was amended with the mechanics, but the decision record (why a
compose-once frozen prefix, and what the per-request before/after shape,
a system-prompt section, a durable history opener, per-turn composition,
and a dedicated session event each lost to) had no home. Implemented
lifecycle, feature class, dated to the first commit of the work.
The seam gained sessionPrefix between fullSystemPrompt and signal in
18d478bc, but the compact README member table and the compaction
core-data-structures page still showed the 3-arg form and listed only
agent/system/signal as what pre-step supplies. The generated service
catalog was already correct; only these two prose homes drifted.
A cancel/dispose landing inside the first agent/session-prefix waterfall
used to commit the listener chain's return value to the instance cache
before the interruption check dropped the turn; an abort-aware listener's
degraded fallback would then ship on every later request of the instance.
The commit now happens only after the composition survives the
interruption check — the cache only ever holds a fully composed prefix,
and the next turn recomposes under a live signal.
ds-review-bot critical (follow-up): on the first step of a resumed or
seeded/forked instance, auto-compaction ran before runStep composed
this instance's prefix, so the gate read the PREVIOUS instance's logged
prefix from the header fold — a contributor that grew across
resume/fork (skills added, AGENTS.md grown: exactly the
environment-dependent case) could under-gate and ship an over-window
first request.
The loop now composes agent/session-prefix before the instance's first
agent/pre-step (still once per instance; runStep just reads the cache),
and agent/pre-step carries the composed prefix to its listeners.
CompactService.compactIfNeeded gains the sessionPrefix parameter;
BasicCompactService.estimatePressure gates on the handed value — the
header-fold read is gone, so the estimate is exact at every step
including a resumed/forked instance's first. Composition moving before
the boundary snapshot also means a composing listener's session append
now joins the CURRENT request (documented on the seam).
New coverage: composition precedes pre-step and the seam receives the
composed prefix; cancel and disposal landing inside the composition
window drop the step cleanly; the compact gate test hands the prefix
directly.
ds-review-bot critical: compactIfNeeded estimated pressure from the
derived history + system prompt only, but every loop-built request also
carries EpochHeader.messagePrefix in front of the history — a
deployment at the window edge would under-estimate by exactly the
prefix, skip compaction, and ship an over-window request.
BasicCompactService now gates on estimatePressure(): the session prefix
read from the log's folded header + the derived history + the system
prompt. The fold is exact from the instance's second request on (and
from a resumed instance's first — the previous instance logged its
prefix); it is absent only before a fresh session's first request,
where the history is a single prompt and compaction is moot. Compaction
itself still shrinks history only — a prefix that alone approaches the
window is a configuration error no compactor fixes, same as the
documented single-unit-overflow stance.
Two ds-review-bot findings:
The seam JSDoc claimed extending 'await next()' composes in
registration order — false for the append form: the waterfall unwinds
innermost-first, so appending places later-registered contributions
first. The canonical contribution is now documented as the PREPEND
'[mine, ...await next()]' (registration order on the wire), with the
append form's reverse-order behavior stated explicitly; the ordering
test now uses the canonical pattern in both listeners.
scrubRequestHeaders tokenized only system/tools, so a fixture recording
a composed session prefix would carry its raw text (workspace-specific
churn/leak). The scrubber now maps each header/delta messagePrefix
entry to a {{messagePrefix}} token — count stays a structural fact,
absence stays absent, the empty-array transition stays visible — with
normalize.spec coverage for the header, delta, absence, and odd-shape
paths.
Review discussion converged on the industry shape (Claude Code caches
user context per conversation; Codex separates initial context from
diffs; Kimi appends at continuation boundaries to protect prompt
caching): stable openers belong in a compose-once prefix, mid-session
changes belong in append-only history — not in a per-request slot.
agent/session-prefix fires ONCE per loop instance, lazily on its first
request-building step: the composed Message[] is deep-frozen, cached on
the transmission bookkeeping, recorded as EpochHeader.messagePrefix on
the anchoring 'initial'/'resume' snapshot, and reused verbatim for
every request the instance sends — prefix stability is structural, not
a producer discipline, and a resume recomposes with attributable drift.
The request is messagePrefix + boundary snapshot.
The per-step RequestAdvice/RequestAdviceContext surface and the
messageSuffix header field are dropped: the tail slot had no consumer,
and every current update pattern (new AGENTS.md discovered, memory
update, skills change) routes through the existing append-only history
channels — inject(), tools/post-execute additionalContext,
prompt-submit additionalContext — each paid once and prefix-cached
thereafter. The messagePrefix delta arm stays for codec totality; the
loop never produces one in practice.
tianyicui's review: the seam name did not say what the event or its
types do. 'advice' reads both ways — advisory content for the model,
and AOP before/after advice woven around a join point (here the
derived history) without modifying it — so RequestAdvice.before/after
are self-describing. Types follow: RequestAdvice / RequestAdviceContext;
the logged EpochHeader fields keep their positional names
(messagePrefix/messageSuffix).
Also sharpens the core.md wording the review flagged as ambiguous:
before-advice sits in front of the ENTIRE derived history, directly
after the system slot (the conventional home for session-stable openers
— an AGENTS.md digest, a skills catalog), after-advice follows the
history's last message. Catalogs and doc graphs regenerated.
A new waterfall near request construction lets plugins contribute
request-ONLY messages framing the derived history: RequestMessages
{ before, after } with a frozen empty seed, fired inside the open step
after the agent/request config waterfall, so the step/start boundary
snapshot and its same-sync-frame invariant are untouched. The request
becomes messagePrefix + boundary snapshot + messageSuffix.
Contributions never enter session history — deriveMessages() is
unchanged — so the request header is their durable record:
EpochHeader gains messagePrefix/messageSuffix (canonical absence for
empty arrays), request/header-delta replaces either array whole with
an empty array encoding the transition back to absence, and the
dev-mode reconstruction cross-check now expects the folded header's
framing around the boundary derivation.
This is the seam for per-request advisory context that must be
model-visible now without becoming durable history (a skills catalog,
an environment reminder), keeping the base system prompt
workspace-independent and provider prefix caches stable. The docs
carry the channel cost model: session-frozen content belongs in
before, low-frequency change notices belong in durable history via
inject() (paid once, prefix-cached thereafter), and after is reserved
for small frequently-refreshed state snapshots re-paid on every
request they ride. No shipped producer yet, so ACP snapshot fixtures
are byte-identical.
Add the implemented skill-system RFC, a core data-structures page, and JSDoc for the skill public vocabulary so the generated catalogs and review-facing docs describe the new service/tool contract.
Use the new filesystem seam for skill file reads and system skill writes when ctx.fs is available, and include the skill tool in the generated tool catalog.
Yichen Jiang