Commit Graph
6 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Kai 8a8f9c6c20 docs(scenarios): rewrite the curator prompt as an assistant, not a terminal
The hand-written sections of SYSTEM.md drew one line around every answer
("only tool output is fact", "prefer an over-confident guess to a blank") and
reduced the agent to relaying receipts. Rewrite:

- identity: active assistant that searches, discusses and recommends, not a
  lookup terminal;
- fact authority split: library state still requires the tools (hallucinated
  ownership is the one thing we must not allow), but discussion, reviews and
  recommendations now draw on the model's own judgement;
- quantitative vs qualitative: qualitative is confident, numbers are verified;
- output: don't dodge a judgement behind "insufficient evidence".

The generated tool list (usage discipline) is regenerated from the backend
contracts, which now draw the same library-vs-discourse line.
2026-08-29 15:04:31 -07:00
Kai 14bea3fb37 docs(scenarios): state which propose_write verb matches each medium
The tool prose in SYSTEM.md had no way for the model to know that collect is
for film/TV and add_wanted is for books, so it picked add_wanted for "add a
movie"; the server then mis-routed it to the book wishlist. Regenerate the
generated tool list from the backend contracts, which now carry the verb/medium
mapping.
2026-08-29 14:55:00 -07:00
Kai b5a29b05e1 docs: mark phase 3 complete, record the skills and caching findings
Two findings that changed the plan rather than confirming it:

  23. Skills require a tool literally named `read`. Curator's tools are all
      domain-specific, so every --skill argument was discarded in silence. The
      planned split into curator-core / video-arr / books-ingest was inert before
      it was written; the policy stays in APPEND_SYSTEM.md. memo-inbox is
      unaffected because it registers a restricted `read` override, which is why
      the earlier note generalised wrongly from it.

  24. A long-lived session is worth far more than the startup it saves: 99.97% of
      input read from cache on a continuing conversation against 0% on a new one.
      That is what makes the generated tool list necessary rather than merely
      tidy -- anything varying at the front of the prompt destroys it -- and it
      makes rotation a cost to be bounded rather than applied eagerly.

profile.toml now describes the phase-3 configuration that is actually deployed,
including that the empty `skills` list is a finding and not an oversight.
pi_rpc gains --system-prompt support and no longer guesses whether a `read` tool
will exist; extension_registers_read has to be stated.

harness-layering.md records what transfers from a widely-shared account of
building a personal coding harness on pi, and what does not. The layering frame
holds and the cache-hit figure was the useful part. Its central recommendation --
installing third-party packages -- is disqualifying for an unattended agent
holding tracker credentials, and its discipline layer (AGENTS.md) is precisely
what we block, because it is discovered from every parent directory.
2026-08-28 01:10:58 -07:00
Kai eaa3f6a8a1 feat(curator): tool extension, generated prompt check, two pi findings
curator-tools.ts registers no schema of its own: it fetches the specs from the
backend bridge, so contracts.py stays the single owner and there is no TypeScript
copy to drift. It refuses to activate without a bridge URL and token, because an
agent that silently loses its tools still answers -- from the model's memory of
what a media library might contain.

deploy-scenario.sh now vendors listed shared/extensions modules into
.pi/extensions/_shared/. A tracked extension importing from shared/ cannot
resolve that path once installed outside the repository, so the deployed tree has
to be self-contained; this overwrites rather than merges, keeping the repository
authoritative. common.sh gains toml_list, using tomllib rather than more awk
because an array can span lines or carry comments.

verify-generated.sh checks that generated regions in tracked prompts match the
backend that generates them, and is wired into the pre-commit hook. This is
needed because of finding 22 below: the tool list has to be copied into the
prompt, and a copy drifts silently.

Two findings recorded in docs/pi-runtime-notes.md, both measured:

  21. An extension that fails to import is silent -- exit 0, empty stderr, no
      tools. A missing --extension path exits 1 with a clear message, but a
      module that throws while loading reports nothing. The agent then invented a
      complete library listing with plausible episode counts, quality and size.
      A later identical run said it had no data instead, so the failure is both
      silent and inconsistent.

  22. --system-prompt suppresses the tool list. The customPrompt branch returns
      before toolsList and guidelines are built, so promptSnippet and
      promptGuidelines are inert. The tools stay callable over the provider API,
      so tool use becomes a coin flip: one run in four looked at the library and
      three said they had not been given any results.

SYSTEM.phase3.md is staged alongside the deployed SYSTEM.md rather than replacing
it: profile.toml still describes the phase-0 configuration that is actually
running, and the live service is untouched.
2026-08-28 00:35:04 -07:00
Kai cf61a72bd2 feat(curator): deploy the phase-0 system prompt, and correct a misleading README figure
The workspace now holds .pi/SYSTEM.md and .pi/APPEND_SYSTEM.md and nothing else.

SYSTEM.md is rewritten for what is actually deployed. The version committed in
07dd648 described five tools that will not exist until phase 3; shipping it would
have invited the model to call tools it does not have. The capability section now
states plainly that the agent has no tools and that every fact arrives in the
request. The phase-3 target, including the full tool-bearing launch contract, is
recorded in the plan as §4b together with why each part cannot be enabled sooner.

profile.toml likewise describes the deployed configuration rather than the target,
so that deploy-scenario.sh validates against reality and the path check means
something.

Recovered from the retired SKILL.md and folded into SYSTEM.md: the rule that the
current request's schema and length limits override everything else, and that a
JSON task returns exactly one JSON value with no fences. Phase 0's four prompt
types all depend on it, and it was the one part of that file not already covered.

Measured before and after on the real workspace, with flags read from the code
rather than transcribed (docs/evidence/2026-08-27-curator-phase0-prompt.md):

- expert coding assistant framing: present -> gone
- pointer to pi's own documentation: present -> gone
- the 64-line media policy: absent -> present
- workspace AGENTS.md: loaded -> blocked
- parent-directory AGENTS.md: LEAKED -> blocked
- <available_skills>: absent both times

Two things this confirms on the production configuration rather than a synthetic
probe. --skill was genuinely a no-op: it pointed at a real 64-line SKILL.md and
the skills block was still absent, because pi emits it only when a tool named
read is active and --no-tools deactivates everything. And --no-context-files is
the only switch that stops parent-directory pollution: a marker planted in
/home/claw/pi-workspaces/AGENTS.md reached the prompt before and not after.

Deleting the now-dead AGENTS.md and SKILL.md from the workspace changed the
prompt length by zero bytes, which is the proof that they were dead.

README corrected. Its table cited 960 characters as Curator's system prompt after
the change; that figure came from a few-line stub SYSTEM.md in the isolation
probe, and the real prompt is 3539 -- larger, not smaller. Presenting the stub
measurement as Curator's was misleading, and "72% smaller" was wrong. The prompt
grew because roughly 1.9 KB of pi scaffolding was replaced by domain policy that
had never loaded at all. The mechanism claim is unaffected.
2026-08-27 23:09:20 -07:00
Kai 07dd648b5f feat: scenarios for curator/memo-inbox/pi-grok, deploy and backup tooling
Scenarios
- memo-inbox: mirrored by copying; the live directory was not moved or modified
  and the service was not restarted. All four tracked files match byte for byte
  (pi-diff.sh reports SAME). Marked deploy = "mirror" so deploy-scenario.sh
  refuses --apply: applying a mirror would invert the direction of truth and
  could change a service in daily use.
- curator: target configuration, not yet deployed. .pi/SYSTEM.md replaces pi's
  coding-assistant prompt; durable role text is in .pi/APPEND_SYSTEM.md;
  profile.toml is the single source of truth for the launch contract.
- pi-grok: registered only. It is genuinely a coding agent, so the isolation
  baseline does not apply in full.

Corrections to the documentation, found by testing rather than by reading
- AGENTS.override.md does NOT block parent-directory context files; it only
  shadows its own directory. Verified: with an override file in the workspace, a
  marker in /tmp/AGENTS.md still reached the system prompt. The only effective
  switch is --no-context-files, so durable role text must live in
  .pi/APPEND_SYSTEM.md, which is a system-prompt file and unaffected by -nc.
  Verified end state: no coding-assistant framing, no pi-docs block, own
  identity and role text present, no parent pollution, only own skills/tools.
- PI_CODING_AGENT_DIR isolates settings/models/auth/trust/extensions/skills/
  prompts/themes under the agent directory -- stronger than the --no-* flags
  because it also repoints credentials -- but does NOT cover ~/.agents/skills.
  Measured: find-skills, modsearch and summarize still leak. So it complements
  --no-skills rather than replacing it.
- --append-system-prompt accepts a file path, which pi-grok relies on.
- cwd is what anchors .pi discovery: a probe that forgot cwd silently lost
  .pi/SYSTEM.md and kept the coding-assistant persona.

Tooling (all dry-run by default; none of them restarts a service)
- pi-diff.sh: compares tracked config against the live install in both
  directions, with a key-redacted comparison for models.json
- deploy-scenario.sh: installs a workspace and renders profile.toml into
  .pi/launch.json, then checks that every referenced path exists
- deploy-runtime.sh: renders models.json from its template, refusing placeholder
  or missing keys. Verified byte-identical to the live file
- pi-backup.sh / pi-restore.sh: archives outside the repo, sha256 manifest
  verified before any restore, live paths preserved rather than overwritten

Fixed while testing: pi-backup.sh compared the destination against the repo root
literally, so a relative --dest ./backups wrote credential archives into the work
tree. Now canonicalised with realpath; ./backups, an absolute in-repo path and
./docs/../backups are all refused.
2026-08-26 23:17:12 -07:00