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+# Observed harness state is a driver-written catalog record
+
+Status: accepted
+
+Design decision made by Johannes on 2026-08-23 (interview over three research
+reports and issue #268, which carries the measurements cited below). Merge and
+acceptance approval required: upstream maintainers.
+
+## Context
+
+st2 exposes what an agent *declares* — presence, on a five-minute heartbeat
+with a fifteen-minute staleness horizon — and nothing about what its harness is
+*observed* doing. The one observed state machine that exists,
+`CodexObservedState`, persists host-local under `$XDG_STATE_HOME`, has zero
+production readers, and is invisible to the roster, Doctor, and every remote
+supervisor. Claude, pi, and OpenCode have no observed-state type at all. The
+concrete consumer is the one #261 and #268 name: a downstream TUI rendering a
+seat's working state, which today cannot distinguish "alive and doing nothing"
+from "recently active" because `lastActivity` advances on the agent's own
+heartbeat. #162 assigns provider-specific idle/active classification to
+drivers and keeps the generic envelope in core; this decision fills that
+envelope.
+
+## Decision
+
+Observed harness state is **one driver-written record in the catalog**,
+`<agent-dir>/harness-state`, schema `st2.harness-state.v1`, carrying the full
+tuple in v1: `state ∈ idle | active | child | ended` (`unknown` derived, never
+written; `child` reserved with no producer), **`blockedOn` as a field**
+(`human | none`), and `inputBuffer ∈ empty | nonempty | unknown`. The record
+follows the presence record's transport discipline — embedded origin
+timestamp, atomic tmp+rename, byte-distinct on every write — with its own
+staleness constants, deliberately not aliases of `status::STATUS_*`. Freshness
+is **transition writes plus a slow heartbeat** on the existing five-minute
+presence cadence, and a writer that loses sight of its harness stops
+heartbeating rather than refreshing a state it cannot see. **All four
+harnesses ship producers**: Codex projects its existing control state, Claude
+combines hooks with a wrapper-owned terminal write, pi exports the injected
+extension's positive idle signal as an evented producer, and OpenCode gains a
+full driver — session wrapper, presence lease, state producer, and a native
+delivery transport at parity with the other drivers. Exposure is **joined into
+`agents --json`** beside declared presence, plus a Doctor advisory. Teardown
+gets both fixes: the wrapper writes its terminal record *before* escalating
+SIGKILL into its own process group, and same-host readers cross-check the
+record's pty session, where only provable death downgrades. Transition history
+is deferred; `transitions` and `sinceMs` keep the record forward-compatible
+with it. The work proceeds without waiting on #242 and flags the delivery
+contract as that PR's territory.
+
+## Options
+
+| Option | Result | Reason |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| Catalog record beside `status`, presence transport discipline | Selected | Remote supervisors and the TUI read through the catalog they already sync; the presence record's embedded-timestamp discipline is proven against transports that drop mtime. Accepted cost: a replicated write per state transition, unmeasured (OHS-T01). |
+| Host-local record plus CLI exposure only | Rejected | Zero transport cost, but remote readers get nothing and the consumer TUI must run on the owning host — the exact invisibility that leaves `control-state.json` unread today. |
+| Ride the stream/event ingress (#300) | Rejected | Events land in the inbox and DING the agent on every transition, emit is gated on a live owner binding and a healthy catalog, and stream direction is ingress into an agent, not egress about one. |
+| `blockedOn` as a fifth state | Rejected | An agent can be blocked while a child command runs; the field composes, a fifth state forces an ordering. A later-added axis would decode as `unknown` in every pinned v1 reader, so the field ships in v1 while the window is open. |
+| Sibling `st2 harness-state --json` command | Rejected for v1 | Zero pinned-wire edits, but the value of the surface is the comparison: a declared `busy` beside an observed `idle` is the wedged-agent signal, and a caller made to join two commands will skip it. The three pinned roster literals and the roster invariant wording change deliberately, in one change. |
+| Codex-only v1, other harnesses follow | Rejected | The TUI pins v1 when it ships; a fleet's Claude/pi/OpenCode seats reading `null` indefinitely re-creates the two-tier observability this exists to close. |
+| History (JSONL transitions) in v1 | Deferred | Measured burst coalescing — 4 transitions per turn, 0.1–0.4 ms apart (#268) — erases states shorter than the coalescing window, defeating the dwell-time analysis history is justified by. Deferred, not deleted: `transitions` + `sinceMs` make a later history additive. |
+
+## Evidence and Argument
+
+The signal already exists, typed and durable, for exactly one harness in the
+wrong place: `CodexObservedState` is written on every transition to
+`$XDG_STATE_HOME/st2/codex/<hash>/control-state.json`, and at current main it
+has no production reader — the pump rebuilds from `AwaitingStatus` on restart.
+So the Codex producer is a projection of shipped state, not a new observation
+path. The two rows #268's adversarial review corrected are binding here:
+`ActiveWithoutTurn` and `ConflictingTurn` project to `active`, because Codex
+positively reported activity and st2 merely cannot name a steerable turn; and
+`Held` never enters the published vocabulary, because it is defined as the
+complement of steerable — a delivery predicate, which decision 0001 already
+established must not govern an observability surface. pi is the strongest
+evidence for the evented path: the injected extension's `ctx.isIdle()` is a
+positive in-process signal (false exactly for `agent_start`..`agent_end`),
+which is the "stronger evented signal" root DQ2 asks for, on the one harness
+that already has a channel. On vocabulary provenance: the
+`idle|active|child|unknown × inputBuffer` words #268 reuses are from PR #123,
+which remains open — this decision *defines* those words for st2 rather than
+reusing something landed. The self-wake hazard #268 warns about is live today:
+the Codex delivery pump arms an unfiltered recursive watch on the whole agent
+directory while its own five-minute presence refresh writes into that tree, so
+scoping delivery-input watching is a prerequisite, not a precaution.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- The vocabulary (`idle`, `active`, `child`, `ended`, `unknown`; `blockedOn`;
+  `inputBuffer`) is defined by this decision and
+  [`05-harness-state`](../05-harness-state/requirements.md), not inherited
+  from PR #123. If #123 lands with different words, that PR reconciles to
+  these or supersedes this decision explicitly.
+- Homographs to manage: *observed harness state* is neither **presence**
+  (agent-authored), **session state** (task-record liveness), R08's declared
+  **activity status**, nor R09's **working state** (restored context). The
+  ontology pins all four apart.
+- The roster wire shape changes: the three full-string pinned assertions and
+  the stable-roster invariant wording are edited deliberately in the same
+  change that adds `observedState`, with the new proof named.
+- `blocked` is vacuous under `bypassPermissions`, which is what
+  `examples/native/agent-claude.kdl` ships today; a fleet running entirely on
+  it gains nothing from the axis until that changes (OHS-T02).
+- The OpenCode native delivery transport is designed against #242's contract
+  shape and does not wait for it; #242 reconciles at review.
+- The `.decisions/` series carries two documents numbered 0005 from separate
+  PRs. This decision takes 0006 and leaves the collision as recorded history;
+  numbers are not reused.
+- Root DQ2 and DQ3 are updated: pi gains an evented signal, the observed half
+  of DQ3 is specified here, and the declared half (activity status, plan,
+  plan step) plus supervisor-following behavior remain open.
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+# DELTA-005: observed harness state is specified ahead of its producers
+
+## Current mismatch
+
+[`05-harness-state`](../05-harness-state/spec.md) and decision
+[`0006`](../.decisions/0006-observed-harness-state-is-a-driver-written-catalog-record.md)
+specify one observed-state record with producers on all four maintained
+harnesses, a roster join, Doctor exposure, and scoped delivery-input watching.
+The shipped implementation at the time this delta was filed is the envelope
+alone: `src/harness_state.rs` (record, writer, derivation, liveness
+cross-check hook) with its module tests. No producer writes the record, the
+roster does not expose it, the Codex delivery pump still watches its whole
+agent directory unfiltered, and OpenCode has no typed driver.
+
+## Why the docs land first
+
+The vocabulary and derivation rules are the contract the fractal TUI pins;
+they were interview-settled on 2026-08-23 and are cheaper to review as one
+document set than re-derived per producer PR. Producers are independent
+vertical slices (Codex projection, Claude hooks + wrapper, pi extension,
+OpenCode driver) and land incrementally against this spec.
+
+## Direction
+
+Update implementation to match the spec, in dependency order.
+
+## Resolution Signal
+
+Checked off as each lands with its named tests green; this delta is deleted by
+the change that completes the last box.
+
+- [ ] Scoped delivery-input watching replaces the Codex pump's unfiltered
+      agent-dir watch, with the no-self-wake regression test.
+- [ ] Codex producer: projection per the spec table, wired to the control
+      pump's transitions, heartbeat, and terminal write.
+- [ ] Claude producer: hook-side classification plus wrapper-owned heartbeat
+      and terminal write (pre-escalation ordering fixed).
+- [ ] pi producer: evented extension transitions over the channel; wrapper
+      writes.
+- [ ] OpenCode: typed driver + `opencode-session` wrapper (presence lease),
+      then its producer, then the native delivery transport.
+- [ ] Roster `observedState` join with the pinned assertions updated and the
+      stable-roster invariant wording amended in the same change.
+- [ ] Doctor advisory for owned agents.
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+# Observed harness state open questions
+
+Each entry links a spec `DQ-H*`. Questions leave this file when resolved —
+into [spec.md](./spec.md) as decisions or `.experiments/` as tested
+hypotheses.
+
+- **DQ-H1 Claude blocked-exit edge.** `PermissionRequest` carries no
+  `tool_use_id`, so leaving `blockedOn: human` can only match on tool *name* —
+  and Claude batches tool calls (`PostToolBatch` carries plural `tool_calls`),
+  so the first call's `PostToolUse` would clear `blocked` while the human still
+  faces the second call's prompt. The corpus enters `blocked` in 2 of 9
+  captures and exits in 1, with one tool and no batching: a rule validated on
+  a single exit path is not validated. Until then the producer holds
+  `blockedOn: human` until turn end (`Stop`) rather than encoding an exit rule
+  that cannot hold. Resolves by: a capture with batched tool calls where the
+  second call needs permission, then specifying the exit edge against it.
+- **DQ-H2 Transport cost of per-transition writes.** Presence refreshes every
+  five minutes; turn boundaries are far more frequent, and burst coalescing
+  measured 4 transitions per turn 0.1–0.4 ms apart. No measurement establishes
+  what per-transition replicated writes cost on a real catalog under a real
+  transport (OHS-T01 accepts this for v1). Resolves by: measuring write and
+  sync volume on a live catalog; if unacceptable, a minimum-interval
+  coalescing window is the tuning knob, at the cost of spinner latency.
+- **DQ-H3 `child` has no producer.** The word is reserved because the tuple's
+  reasoning needs it (a long-running foreground command is neither the model
+  working nor idle), but the producer that would have supplied it — the PTY
+  screen observer — is cut: its idle proof was Codex-specific and its Claude
+  arm collided with the empty-composer sentinel (#268 Limits). Resolves by: a
+  harness exposing a positive child-process signal (Claude `PreToolUse`/
+  `PostToolUse` pairs are the candidate), proven against batching.
+- **DQ-H4 Ungraceful-death coverage.** The wrapper's terminal write covers
+  child-reap and SIGTERM; nothing in-process covers SIGKILL escalation into
+  the wrapper's own group or an external forced kill (invariant row 11's
+  case). Same-host readers NARROW the window via the liveness cross-check —
+  only for provably dead sessions; `pty kill` removes the pidfile and leaves
+  the probe indeterminate, so a same-host reader then shares the
+  fifteen-minute horizon (or waits for the next relaunch claim) exactly like
+  a cross-host one. Resolves by: either
+  accepting the horizon (documenting it as the cross-host bound) or a
+  supervisor-side terminal write derived from reconcile's session state —
+  which would need its own fencing rules to avoid a supervisor overwriting a
+  live wrapper's record.
+- **DQ-H5 Supervisor-following behavior.** Root `DQ3` sets two gates for
+  catalog agent state: stale-state behavior (addressed throughout this
+  subsystem) and supervisor-following behavior — what a *remote* supervisor
+  may conclude and do from this record. The second gate is unmet, which is a
+  reason decision 0006's spec ships Draft. #107 already bounds it: a remote
+  `unknown` is no fresh observation, never proof of ill health, and never
+  gates local work. Resolves by: specifying remote-reader semantics with a
+  proof, or explicitly scoping the record same-host advisory.
+- **DQ-H6 OpenCode state source.** The producer needs a verified source.
+  Candidate: OpenCode's server/SDK event surface (session state, message
+  lifecycle); fallback: the shipped composer adapter's positive markers
+  (`ctrl+p commands` footer) with documented limits. Nothing is measured yet —
+  the DING adapter (#313) proves only composer classification. Resolves by:
+  an `.experiments/` capture of OpenCode's event surface on a pinned version,
+  then choosing the source and its skew policy — the repo's standing rule
+  (pin where version skew fails silently, as `checks.pi-extension-types` and
+  `SUPPORTED_CODEX_CLI_VERSIONS` do) applies.