| 2026-10-08 |

mcp: credentials leave the tree, and sub-agents lose the task board
...
Five tracked configs (gnexus-creds, gntodo, hard-panel, synapse, tgclient)
carried live bearer tokens — in git, in every clone, and handed to the admin
client by GET /admin/mcp/config. They now name a variable, and the value lives
in the service .env (chmod 600, untracked).
Substitution happens once, at transport open, next to the project-relative
path resolution: that is the single place a transport is built, so every
stored and serialised config stays placeholder-only and save_mcp_servers —
reached by create_mcp_server and PUT /admin/mcp/config — cannot write a secret
back into a tracked file. A variable that is not set refuses the connection
instead of dropping the header, which would fail open: a server may answer an
unauthenticated request as an anonymous user rather than returning 401.
Sub-agents also drop gntodo, gnexus-creds, tgclient and synapse from their
scopes, and the runner injects a scope anchor unconditionally — a sub-agent
asked to echo one word had picked a project off the task board and researched
it for forty iterations.
Docs: docs/mcp.md#secrets, a migration recipe in deploy/UPDATE.md, the variable
names in .env.example and deploy/env.template, and a regression guard over the
tracked configs.
The old values stay in git history; rotating all five at their sources is the
remediation, not a follow-up.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
5 hours ago
|

subagents, secrets: an honest result contract, and two leaks closed
...
A pass over the sub-agent system, plus the two findings from the previous one.
Leaks:
- `redact_args` / `is_sensitive_key` (navi/tools/_internal/redact.py) mask
credential-shaped keys at every log site that prints tool arguments — by key
name, for all tools, so a future MCP tool is covered without declaring
anything. ssh_exec passwords were sitting in the prod journal in plaintext.
- `mcp_servers.d/*.json` are tracked in git and carried the scaffolding
machine's absolute paths, so navi-3d/navi-web silently vanished from the
toolset off that machine. They now hold project-relative paths, resolved in
`McpClient.open_transport` — not at load time, because create_mcp_server
round-trips every config file through save_mcp_servers.
Sub-agent result contract:
- `run_ephemeral` returns a `SubAgentOutcome` (text + status: ok, timeout,
max_iterations, thinking_stall, user_stop, context_overflow) instead of
`(text, bool)`. Every exit routes through `SubAgentRunner._finish`, so token
accounting is never dropped and a partial run always carries a progress
report — the stop-after-stream path used to return a bare string.
- `spawn_agent` renders its header from the status. Before this, every short
run reached the parent as "hit iteration limit", and the parent repeats that
diagnosis to the user — a timeout was reported as an iteration limit.
- `ContextTooLargeError` no longer kills a sub-agent: the parent compresses its
own context, a sub-agent has no session to compress into, so it stops with
`context_overflow` and hands back what it did rather than surfacing as
"Sub-agent failed: …" with the whole run discarded.
- The result is capped at 8000 chars (head and tail kept) so a long run cannot
flood the parent's context, and tool arguments in the progress report go
through `redact_args`.
- The navi-3d calling convention left the runner for the server's own tool
schemas — a generic runner should not know one MCP server's path shapes.
- Validation moved inside spawn_agent's try: a bad argument is a clean
ToolResult the model can read, not an exception in the parent's loop.
Tests: 1636 passed, 1 skipped. New: SubAgentOutcome paths and headers, result
truncation, context overflow, clean argument failures.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
7 hours ago
|

profiles: tool_developer folds into developer
...
The profile was a duplicate on every axis we could measure. 22 of its 26
native tools were already developer's; the four it alone held —
reload_tools, create_mcp_server, test_mcp_tool, mcp_status — are 2.9 KB of
schema. Its model chain was the same seven models. Of its 14 KB prompt,
about 8 KB was copied verbatim from developer's (the whole `## Orchestration
model` block and everything from `## Editing policy` down), and most of the
remainder restated manuals/create_mcp_server.md, which already carried the
same ten-step workflow in more detail. It was not a specialisation, it was a
snapshot: `git log -S '"reload_tools"'` shows the tool lived in developer
until 61fa370 rewrote that profile around MCP and cut it off.
What kept it alive was a premise that no longer holds — that Navi's own
capabilities would be written as in-repo tools. They are MCP servers now,
and an MCP server is not a file in this repository with a life of its own:
it is an isolated process registered from mcp_servers.d/. So there is no
reason left for a profile whose only distinct feature is a toolset a general
developer profile can hold, and every reason to stop maintaining a second
prompt that drifts against the first.
- developer: + reload_tools, create_mcp_server, test_mcp_tool, mcp_status
(24 → 28 native). Its sub-agent gains tool_manual, which is what it
actually needed to reach the manual while writing a server — the previous
tool_developer sub-agent had it, developer's did not.
- server_admin: + reload_tools only (24 → 25). Adding a third-party MCP
server is something this profile does as often as developer does.
Deliberately not to its sub-agent: reconnecting the MCP manager is a
process-wide operation belonging to the main agent.
- The prompt and the manual took on what the deleted profile knew and
create_mcp_server.md did not: reload_tools before the first test_mcp_tool
(a freshly registered server is not connected, so the test fails and the
iteration is wasted), the smoke test read by exit code — 124 means timeout
killed a server still running, 0 means it exited on its own, usually a
main() without parentheses — absolute command/cwd, mcp_status as discovery
only, and the steps that stay inline instead of going to a sub-agent.
mcp_status and test_mcp_tool were built without an MCP manager, and their
fallback did `from navi.api.deps import _mcp_manager` — a name that does not
exist, so a live call raised ImportError rather than the intended "MCP
manager not available". The tools always passed a manager in tests, which is
why nothing caught it. Both now receive the manager at construction and fall
back to the live one lazily.
Sessions and profile_overrides are reassigned before the restart: agent.py
resolves the session's profile without a guard, so a deleted profile turns
every session that referenced it into an uncaught ProfileNotFound. Nothing
in the test suite pins the profile inventory, and profiles are read once at
import time — reload_tools does not re-read them — so this ships as a
restart, and the restart is also what makes it take effect.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
7 hours ago
|

tool_manual: a manual the agent cannot reach is not a manual
...
tool_manual asked the filesystem for the exact string the model sent, then
fell back to registry.get(). The executor already tolerated the ways models
mangle MCP names; the tool that documents them did not, so the agent calling
mcp__navi-3d__compile_scad got a schema dump while manuals/compile_scad.md sat
there unread. Resolving a name now happens in one place — resolve_tool moved
out of the executor into navi/core/tool_utils.py — so a name that works when
the tool is *called* also works when it is *asked about*. A miss suggests the
closest names instead of "not found", and a tool that exists but is not enabled
for this profile says exactly that: documenting it is still the useful answer,
but the agent must not go on to call it. params["tool_name"] was also a crash
waiting to happen — KeyError with the key omitted, AttributeError on null or a
number — and now anything that is not a usable string means "no name given",
which returns the index of manuals grouped by source.
The generated manual now renders the whole schema. An array of objects showed
as "(array, optional)" with its item shape invisible, so a model that could not
see the fields guessed them; objects, array items, oneOf/anyOf branches, enums
and defaults are all spelled out now, depth-capped. The header names the source
(native / mcp__<server>__) and says the text is a parameter contract, not a
curated manual — otherwise a thin schema reads as "this tool is simple".
Then the manuals themselves. A manual is filed under the tool's own name, and
five of the sixteen were not: write_tool.md and write_mcp_server.md documented
tools that do not exist anywhere (the tools are reload_tools and
create_mcp_server), model_3d.md documented compile_scad, render_3d.md documented
render_stl, and write_context_provider.md documented no tool at all — it is a
guide, and now lives in manuals/guides/. The prompts pointed at the same wrong
names (tool_developer's system prompt, persona_navi_code, docs/context_providers),
so fixing the files without the callers would have moved the breakage rather
than removed it. On HEAD the probe was blunt: tool_manual("mcp__navi-3d__compile_scad")
returned None and the agent got the schema; now it returns the manual.
Nothing was enforcing any of this, which is how it drifted. tests/unit/tools/
test_manual_drift.py reads the real repository tree: every manuals/*.md must be
named after a tool that exists (built-ins and tools/*.py by their name
assignments, MCP tools by @mcp.tool(name=…) in the server sources and by the
mcp_servers.d groups, whose file name is the server name), every manual must be
reachable by both its bare name and its full MCP spelling, a guide must never
shadow a tool's name, and every manuals/<x>.md or tool_manual("x") cited in a
doc or a prompt must resolve. The next rename fails the suite instead of
quietly wasting a manual.
Finally, manuals for the built-ins the agent uses most — ssh_exec, todo, memory,
plan, filesystem, notify, code_exec — written from the current schemas and the
code paths that produce the errors, so the gotchas are the real ones (todo's
`done` validation is enforced; memory's `list` returns categories, not facts;
filesystem's `delete` removes a tree with no prompt). reload_tools.md absorbs
the file format from the deleted write_tool.md, which is where a self-extension
recipe belongs now.
1556 passed, 1 skipped. ruff delta zero.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
9 hours ago
|