Two rules §3 states and nothing checked.
MONOTONIC. The rewrite guard added earlier compares content at ONE version
number, so republishing an OLDER number with the text originally published
under it looked like a no-op: nothing conflicted, nothing was refused, and the
live row silently reverted. The agent then reads v1 in the UI while the newest
thing anybody approved was v2. The test publishes v1, publishes v2, republishes
v1 byte-for-byte, and asserts both the refusal and that the live row is still
v2. Without the guard it answers 200 and the row goes back to version 1.
DAG. §3 says cycle detection runs at publish; only the runtime depth cap
existed. That cap means a cycle was never a safety problem — it was a budget
one. Every run entering the loop spends its whole allowance delegating in a
circle before terminating, and the author learns about it from a bill rather
than from the publish that created it.
definition.FindSubagentCycle is a pure function over id -> subagent ids, so it
is tested directly: chains, diamonds, self-reference, loops not involving the
first agent walked, and a 5000-long chain that would matter if this were
written to recurse carelessly. It REPORTS the cycle ("a -> b -> c -> a")
rather than merely detecting one, because an operator otherwise has to find it
by hand across a set of specs. The report is deterministic — a test runs it
fifty times over a graph with two cycles and requires the same answer, since Go
randomises map iteration and an error message that changes between identical
runs is one nobody trusts.
Wired into both publish paths. importagents has every spec in hand, which is
the only place that is cheaply true. The API builds the graph from
organization-visible agents plus the incoming definition standing in for its
stored self — otherwise an edit that CREATES a cycle is checked against the
version that did not have one and passes. Personal agents are excluded: they
are invisible to everyone else so cannot complete anyone else's loop, and
reading them would mean reading other people's drafts to validate your own.
An edge to an agent that is not in the set is ignored rather than reported.
That is a different failure with a different message
(runtime.unknown_subagent), and conflating them prints "cycle detected" for
what is actually a typo.
The cycle test bumps the version on the loop-closing edit. Without that the
rewrite guard refuses it for changing published text, the test passes for the
wrong reason, and it would keep passing with cycle detection deleted — which
is how it was first written, and what running it without the guard showed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PJvibeSc1JYXjatankqM1g
Two problems found by deploying the previous commits to production.
FIRST: the rewrite guard compared raw Markdown, so it refused a publish over
formatting. The authoring UI re-serialises a definition when somebody saves it
— writing `webSearch: false` where the hand-authored file omitted the key, and
ordering the frontmatter its own way — and the parser reads absent and false
identically (agent.go: `data["webSearch"] == true`). A definition nobody
meaningfully changed stopped a deploy. Refusing a change that is not a change
is still a bug, even though it fails safe.
definition.SameAgent and SameSkill compare the parsed definition instead, and
are deliberately conservative, because the two ways of being wrong are not
equally bad. A false difference blocks a deploy: visible, recoverable. A false
SAMENESS lets a changed agent overwrite an approved version silently, which is
the thing versioning exists to prevent. So:
- The body is compared verbatim. Agent.Body carries `json:"-"`, so a
comparison that only marshalled the struct would call a completely
rewritten system prompt "unchanged". There is a test that fails loudly on
exactly that, because it is the mistake this design invites.
- List ORDER stays significant. loader.go resolves Skills in order and that
order reaches prompt assembly, so two definitions listing the same skills
differently are still different. A deploy that only reorders still has to
raise its version. That is a limit, recorded in a test rather than left to
be discovered: loosening it needs somebody to decide skill order cannot
matter, which is not a decision to bury in a comparison function.
What it absorbs is exactly what the round trip produces: frontmatter key order,
whitespace, and a defaulted value written out in full.
SECOND: importagents reported "9 agent version(s) recorded" on a run that
recorded nothing. The counter incremented on every successful Snapshot call,
and Snapshot returns nil for the idempotent no-op as well as for a real insert.
The skill counter was already honest; the agent one was not. snapshotAgent now
distinguishes recorded / conflict / already-present, and only the first counts.
Verified locally: 1 on the run that added activity-agent v2, 0 on the re-run,
where it previously said 9. A number that says nine every time is one nobody
checks on the day it matters.
Full suite green against PostgreSQL, only TestLive* skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PJvibeSc1JYXjatankqM1g
