Four review findings on the worker-transcript feature:
- Docker and remote-SSH dsh sessions now keep the pane segmenter: their
transcripts live in the container's / remote host's own ~/.dsh, which
the local reader can never see, so the transcript path returned
'nothing said yet' forever and an agent polling such a worker starved
on an answer that existed. Gated on !session.docker && !session.remote
(statically pinned) and documented in the integration guide.
- last-response reads are memoized on (path, mtime, size, blocks): the
skill's last_text polls once per second, and each poll decompressed and
reparsed the whole file on the event loop even when nothing had been
appended. An unchanged poll now costs one stat.
- The pairing ladder's comment claimed /new is served by step 2; in truth
the boot-window transcript wins for as long as it exists (deliberately:
preferring newest-eligible would hand a worker its busier sibling's
reply). The comment now states the real tradeoff instead of the
aspirational one. Same for decodeZstdFrames' 'skipped' wording — a
corrupt frame truncates the decode there, which is the safe behavior.
- stripReasoningPrefix no longer runs on user prompt text, so a prompt
containing a literal </think> renders whole in blocks view.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`GET /api/sessions/:id/last-response` is how an agent (and the Response
Viewer) reads what a worker said. DeepSeek was falling through to the
pane segmenter with the other external CLIs, which for this mode is not
merely coarse but wrong: dsh-TUI paints a full-screen splash, so a
`last-response` call on a fresh dsh session answered with its ASCII-art
logo -- and anything polling for a worker's first reply reads that as a
reply.
dsh does not belong in that group. It writes a structured JSONL
transcript per session, so read it. Four things in that file shaped the
reader, all measured against real transcripts on disk:
1. dsh appends ONE ZSTD FRAME PER WRITE, and Node's zlib zstd decoder
(one-shot and streaming alike) stops at the first frame end: a real
56-line transcript decoded as 1 line / 158 bytes -- the session header
alone, i.e. a silent truncation that reads as "nothing said yet"
forever. `zstdFrameRanges()` walks frame and block headers to find
exact boundaries; splitting on the 4-byte magic would corrupt
everything after a magic sequence occurring inside compressed data.
zstd is resolved at RUNTIME because it landed in Node 22.15 while the
project floor is 22.0, so an older Node keeps the pane behaviour.
2. Every turn also records a plugin-sourced `user/message` (the runtime
context snapshot), which must not render as the user's own words.
3. A turn that ends in an error carries the provider's message; it is
surfaced as `Turn error: …` (and a non-error early stop as
`Turn ended: …`) rather than as an empty string, which an agent reads
as "still thinking" through fifteen polls.
4. Reply text is assembled per (turn, step): a finalized message wins and
the streamed deltas fill in only for a step that never finalized, so a
partial answer is readable mid-turn and never doubled. "Finalized" is
tracked as a set of steps rather than as non-empty text, because a
step whose whole reply was reasoning strips to '' at the `</think>`
boundary and would otherwise resurrect the raw deltas in its place.
Session-to-transcript pairing is by the transcript's own header `cwd`
plus a boot window against the session's createdAt, never by
reproducing dsh's directory mangling (already two forms on disk) and
never by newest-mtime alone -- mtime alone handed a freshly spawned
worker its predecessor's answer in the same case directory.
An empty result still wins over the pane; only a Node that cannot decode
zstd falls back to it.
Codeman maintainer