tools, mcp: a description is a hook, not a manual ...

With 24 tools in a profile the schemas are the largest fixed block of every
request, and they are paid for whether or not the tool is called. Eleven of
them carried a manual's worth of prose in their `description` — examples,
error tables, "common mistakes", the mechanics of the file areas. Reading
them against the manuals first, the manuals already held all of it, and
richer: this was duplication sitting in the one place the model cannot avoid
reading, not knowledge that had nowhere else to live. So the descriptions
became selection hooks — what the tool is for, when to pick it over its
neighbour, and the one rule that cannot wait — and the detail moved to
tool_manual("<tool>"), which costs nothing until the tool is actually in
play.

filesystem, spawn_agent, schedule_recall, manage_recall, scratchpad, plan,
share_file, content_publish, reflect, todo and peer. Descriptions drop from
18.4 KB to 11.5 KB, those tools' schemas from 25.5 KB to 16.8 KB, and a
profile's whole native toolset from 38.3 KB to 29.6 KB (server_admin,
developer; secretary 33.7 → 25.0, navi_code 32.9 → 25.9, tool_developer
37.9 → 29.2, modeler_3d 33.4 → 24.8). Stated as a budget rather than a byte
count: roughly 4k tokens of the model's window per request, back.

Two things were deliberately not shortened. The filesystem edit ladder
(`edit` → `edit_lines` → `smart_edit`, last resort, costs an LLM call) and
todo's mandatory `validation` on `done` both exist to prevent an extra
round trip; a shorter description there would trade tokens for turns. What
todo lost is the prose around the rule, not the rule. `enabled.json` was
left alone too: weather, gmail and get_current_datetime are opt-in and the
DB shows 12, 16 and 40 calls, so they are opt-in tools that are actually
used.

peer had no manual at all, which is how this surfaced: its description was
the only documentation the tool had. manuals/peer.md is now written from
the tool and its /peer route — the ask/status/list actions, the fact that
the hive is only a phone book and the question travels peer-to-peer, the
one-concurrent-answer semaphore, the two independent recursion guards, and
the six error codes.

The MCP server instructions leave the system prompt the same way. They were
8 KB of always-present prose per request, most of it workflow detail the
model only needs when it is about to use that server. Each server now
contributes one line — a new optional `summary` field in mcp_servers.d/*.json,
defaulting to the first sentence of its `instructions` — and
tool_manual("<server>") returns the full text plus the tool names the server
declares. server_admin's MCP block goes from 8.3 KB to 1.3 KB, secretary's
from 8.1 to 1.2. tool_manual learned to answer for a server (a tool name
still wins over a server of the same name, and dash/underscore spelling is
tolerated), and the index names the servers alongside the tools.

One judgement call worth recording: gnexus-book's and navi-web's
instructions end in an absolute "NEVER bypass these tools with filesystem,
terminal or code_exec" rule. Moving that on demand would have been a
behavioural regression dressed as a token saving, so those two `summary`
fields carry the prohibition verbatim alongside the hook, and it stays
always visible.

docs/tools.md gains a section on the split (a description is paid for every
request, a manual only when the tool is used), which is where the next
person will look before trimming a description back into a manual.

Full suite green (1577 passed, 1 skipped). No frontend change and no new
dependency, so the deploy is a pull and a restart.

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.

startup, llm, profiles, todo: five more the prod logs gave up ...

The same 5-day sweep of prod's journal as 5e51f87, continued. Every one of
these failed silently: no error in the UI, just a line in the log or a hole
in the database.

complete()/embed() retry a connection error before falling back.
stream_complete has always given its first chunk two attempts, but the
non-streaming path made exactly one per (server, model), and with a single
configured server (ollama.com) one ReadTimeout raised "All backends
exhausted: ReadTimeout" outright. That is the whole story of 2026-10-08,
when 27 calls died that way in a day — 23 of them memory summarisation, the
rest planning. Attempts now come from settings.llm_complete_retries (2) with
llm_retry_backoff_sec (2.0) between them; a missing model is still not
retried (a 404 is an answer, not a hiccup), and a lone server is still never
blacklisted — blacklisting it would block the next request for _TTL.

Startup waits for Postgres. create_container() opens the pool eagerly and
the retry loop for the DDL tables sits below it, so a host that comes up
before docker takes the whole lifespan with it. On 2026-10-07 15:19:40 the
agent ran `sudo reboot` on itself at the user's request ("Перезагрузи
себя"); the host booted 15:20:03, navi started at 15:20:18, hit
ConnectionRefusedError on the pool and logged "Application startup failed.
Exiting." Connection errors now retry for ~30s; a genuinely broken config
(a missing DATABASE_URL) still fails fast.

The profile loader reports its tally. A profile dropped by an unreadable
config.json is skipped by design so it cannot take the server down, but on
that same 15:20 boot four of them — modeler_3d, navi_code, secretary,
server_admin — were dropped with `Extra data: line 125 column 1`, and the
only trace was one error line each: the UI simply showed four profiles
fewer.

todo recovers a dropped `op`. Of the 3385 todo calls stored on prod, 73
arrived with the discriminator flattened away ({"index": 1, "status":
"in_progress"}, {"action": "view"}, {"": "add", "tasks": [...]}) and got a
bare "Unknown op: None" — a wasted round trip for an intent the remaining
arguments state plainly. The error message now names the five ops and what
each needs.

Message.created_at is stamped at creation. It defaulted to None and only
some construction sites filled it, so 85% of stored rows had no timestamp at
all (every tool message, 14 168 of 14 168) and no query could slice history
by time or measure a pause. Loading a row passes the column through
explicitly, so NULL rows stay NULL instead of being restamped with "now".

Every new test was checked to fail with its fix reverted. Full suite green
(1466 passed, 1 skipped). No frontend or dependency change, so the deploy is
a pull and a restart.

memory+llm: three failures the prod logs gave up ...

All three came out of a survey of the last days of journalctl on prod,
and each one silently destroyed something the user had already paid for.

memory_facts: the no-embedding INSERT bound $13 while its column list
had 12 entries, so every fact written while the embedding backend was
down died on PostgresSyntaxError and the extraction was lost — 47
embed failures in three days, most of them landing in this branch.

Embedding input now gets clipped instead of 400'd away. A 400 takes the
whole embedding with it and recall drops to ILIKE over everything; a
reaction-session prompt (a full event envelope inlined) did that 41
times. settings.embedding_max_chars (6000, 0 disables) caps the input
at the model's window, so recall still works on the head of the text.

Message strips NUL bytes at the model boundary. PostgreSQL text cannot
hold one, and a NUL arriving in a tool result (reading a binary file)
made the whole session_messages INSERT fail with
CharacterNotInRepertoireError — the turn died and the user lost it.
Three times on 2026-10-07. As a Message validator it covers every
writer downstream: session store, kv store, memory extraction.

Each new test was checked to fail with its fix reverted.

agent: a profile switch now survives the turn that made it ...

switch_profile repoints the session with one narrow UPDATE, and the run's own
save() — which lands right after every tool batch, the switch's own batch
included — wrote its stale in-memory profile back over it. The post-turn
reload then read the row it had just clobbered, saw no change, and left the
turn bound to the old profile's tools: the agent called exactly the tools
switch_profile had just advertised ("Newly available: ssh_exec, terminal, …")
and got "tool not found" for every one of them. Prod shows both halves — the
session that reported two switches kept the profile it started with, and
agent.profile_reloaded appears zero times in the whole boot.

The reload now compares against the profile the run is bound to
(bound_profile_id), which set_profile cannot move, instead of against
session.profile_id, which the store either rewrites or mutates to the new
value — making the old guard false in both branches by construction. And
save() leaves the profile_id column alone on conflict: set_profile owns it
after creation, the same way name/created_at are owned elsewhere.

A tool the live tool_map does not hold is now logged (tool.not_found, with
profile and live tool count). It previously left no trace at all in the
journal, which is why this took a database dig to find.

Three tests, each verified to fail without its fix: the next LLM call is
offered the new profile's tools, save() does not rewrite profile_id, and a
missing tool is logged.

mcp: point navi_ui at the port its server actually binds ...

navi_ui is navi's own MCP server (navi/mcp/ui_server), started in-process on
NAVI_UI_MCP_PORT — 8098. The config still carried the pre-8099/8098 default,
localhost:8001, where nothing has listened for a long time: on prod the connect
fails on every start and render_component only ever appeared as an unregistered
phantom in list_tools.

The URL now names the loopback literal rather than "localhost", which can
resolve to ::1 while the server binds IPv4 only.

Three tests assert the file against the live FastMCP object (host, port, path,
transport) instead of a second copy of the setting — with the old URL two of
them fail, so the drift that produced this cannot come back unnoticed.

tools: list_tools defaults to the profile the run executes as ...

Asking "what tools do I have?" required the agent to know its own profile id
— and to be right about it after a switch_profile had moved the session. The
run knows: run_stream now publishes the active profile id (re-published when
switch_profile reloads the run) alongside the model, SubAgentRunner publishes
its own rather than inheriting the parent's, and ToolContext carries it into
every execute() call.

list_tools reads that when profile_id is omitted, so the bare call answers the
question, and it says which profile it assumed ("current profile") so the
answer cannot be mistaken for another profile's.

scope='agent'|'subagent' selects which of the profile's two toolsets to list —
the set spawn_agent would hand a sub-agent running that profile, which is a
different list and until now had no way to be inspected.

Item D of the list_tools plan, kept separate from the accuracy/compactness work.

tools: list_tools tells the truth and costs a tenth of the context ...

The tool read the profile config, not the registry: a tool the config declares
but nothing registered — mcp__navi_ui__render_component, whose server never
connects — was advertised as callable, and the agent walked into "tool not
found" (28 such warnings on prod). It now resolves every name against the live
registry and reports the rest separately as "Not registered", so a phantom
entry reads as a broken server, not as a tool to try.

It also returned every description it could find. For server_admin that was
125 tools and 35 316 bytes per call — ~9k tokens to answer "do I have anything
for ssh". Names are now grouped by source (native, then one section per MCP
server) with descriptions behind verbose, and query filters by substring over
names and descriptions: the ssh question costs 88 bytes instead of 35 KB, and
a plain listing drops to 3.7 KB (9.5x smaller).

Tests cover the phantom-tool case, query matching by name and by description,
and the size property that makes names-only the default.

config: let server_admin manage synapse hub keys ...

server_admin keeps the whole synapse server now — read, write and admin — so
it can issue and revoke hub API keys and change hub settings without a
detour into the admin panel. All 35 registered tools resolve.

secretary stays on read; the admin group is still withheld from every other
profile.

config: give server_admin and secretary the synapse MCP tools ...

The synapse server was connecting and registering all 35 of its tools, but
no profile listed it under tools.*.mcp, so build_tool_list never handed a
single one to an agent — the hub was up and unreachable at the same time.

server_admin takes read + write (32 tools: events, deliveries, rules,
sources, targets, routing); secretary takes read only (15). The admin group
— key_issue, key_revoke, settings_put — is deliberately left out of both:
issuing and revoking hub keys stays a manual operation.

config: run every profile on glm-5.3-flash:cloud first ...

Four chains still led with gemma4:31b-cloud, so those sessions were resolved
onto gemma4 even though glm-5.3-flash:cloud is the instance default. glm now
leads every profile.

The rest of each chain stays behind it as a fallback — that is what carried
today's 16:57 run through a ReadTimeout against ollama.com instead of failing
it. developer, navi_code, discuss and modeler_3d already led with glm and are
untouched.

config: give tgclient the shared key it needs to handshake ...

The server declares a user_key slot and no shared credential, so the
startup handshake went out unauthenticated, got a 401, and the client
was marked disconnected — which kept its tools out of the registry
entirely, groups or no groups. The shared key now backs the handshake
and stays the fallback: a personal key from /mcp-keys still wins.

webclient: hold the chat at the bottom when a stream ends ...

The list was pinned per streaming delta, but the last things to land arrive
after that final pin: the stats/rating footer, which renders only once
msg.done is set, and the copy buttons attached to code blocks after render.
Nothing re-clamped afterwards — the length watcher never fires (the message
stays in the array) and the landing loop only runs when a session opens — so
the view was left short of the bottom, looking like it had scrolled up.

Re-clamp through the same settle window the landing uses when streaming goes
true -> false, unless the user has scrolled up or a session is loading.
This addresses the late-layout half of the problem; the row is still remounted
when msg.id becomes h_<n>, which is the other source of a jump.

config: tool groups for tgclient and synapse ...

Both servers declare no groups, so every profile asking for "tgclient":
["read", "write"] resolved to nothing: resolve_group reads the static
config, returned [], and no mcp__tgclient__* name ever reached the agent.
Worse, the server's own instructions did reach it — they are selected by
server name, not by group — so the model was told about tools it did not
have. synapse is not exposed by any profile, so its groups change nothing
today; without them, exposing it would repeat the same failure.

read  — observe only.
write — changes to sources, types, targets and routing rules.
admin — hub-wide knobs, not routing: issuing and revoking a source's API
        key, and settings overrides on top of .env. The same fence
        gnexus-book puts around its service-operator tools.

deps: declare html2text, which tools/gmail.py imports ...

The import worked on the server only because the package had been
installed into the venv by hand; a fresh sync would have pruned it and
tools/gmail.py would have stopped loading while tools/enabled.json kept
naming gmail. Reload now reports that drift, but the fix is to declare
the dependency. Lock gains html2text and nothing else.

webclient: reload tools from a button in the MCP tab ...

Settings → MCP gains a Tools block for admins only: one button, then the
same report the tool prints — what loaded, how many are in the registry,
per-file errors, and names in enabled.json nothing answers to.

It sits inside the existing MCP tab rather than a new one: the reload
rewrites the toolset of the whole server, not just this user's MCP keys,
and it belongs next to the thing it affects. Non-admins never see it.

dist rebuilt together with the source, as the server serves the bundle.

webclient: keep MCP rows at content height on a phone ...

.mcp-keys-row stacks into a column below 768px, and .mcp-keys-info kept
its flex: 1 1 240px. That basis is a width in the desktop row and a
height once the row stacks, so every server reserved 240px and its text
sat at the top of the gap — 402px for a row whose content is 90px.

Back to content height on mobile only, and drop the kit's .form-group
bottom margin there: the row's own flex gap already separates the field
from the buttons.

admin: POST /admin/tools/reload ...

reload_tools is granted to one profile only (tool_developer), so an admin
whose profile lacks it cannot reload at all — the tool answers "not
found" instead of reloading. The route calls the same reload_all() the
tool does, behind require_admin, for whoever is logged in as an admin.

An admin may read: ok, the tools loaded, the registry total, per-file
errors, names in enabled.json nothing answers to, and the MCP/providers
summary.

reload: pick up the new code, and drop MCP tools that are gone ...

reload_tools reported success while three separate things kept it from
doing what it says.

The bytecode cache is keyed on (mtime in whole seconds, file size), so a
tool edited to the same length inside the same second as its previous
load re-ran the OLD code — the reload was real, the new version was not
live. The loader now compiles the source itself instead of consulting
__pycache__ (importlib.invalidate_caches() does not help here).

MCP registrations only ever grew: register_mcp_tools called
register_external, and unregister_external was used in one place, so a
server removed from the config or a tool a server stopped exposing
stayed in the registry and failed only when the model called it. Reload
now clears external tools and rebuilds them.

enabled.json naming a tool that failed to load (the gmail/html2text case)
was visible only as a log line. It is now part of the report.

The reload itself moves to navi/core/reload.py, one implementation shared
by the tool and the admin route, so the two cannot leave different
toolsets behind. list_tools.py also read enabled.json through its own
cwd-relative path, which made it disagree with the real toolset, and the
class-based loader rejected execute(self, params, ctx=None) — the shape
every built-in uses.

config: point the tgclient MCP server at the live host ...

The committed value was the local dev address (localhost:8710, where
~/Projects/tgclient-mcp serves it) and the server ran with the wrong public
host, so the tools never connected. Both clones now use
https://tgclientmcp.gnexus.space/mcp.

No default headers: the key is per-user by design (BYOD settings field), and
until one is entered the server answers 401.

switch_profile: run the switch alone, then the batch on the new tools ...

A tool called in the same batch as switch_profile was still dispatched against
the old tool_map and died with "tool 'X' not found" — reload_tools did, twice
in one session. The batch is now split: the switch runs first, its
ProfileSwitched event is watched for the target profile, the tools are
re-resolved from it, and the remaining calls run against the new set.

The turn's own profile binding is deliberately left alone — the
end-of-iteration reload in run_stream() is what rebinds profile/llm/schemas,
and pre-setting session.profile_id here would make it skip that step.

switch_profile: deliver profile_switched, report the new toolset ...

The tool took its sink as `ctx.event_sink if ctx else current_event_sink.get()`,
but the agent loop builds tool_ctx with event_sink=None — the ContextVar is the
real channel — so the branch always picked None, the event was silently
dropped, and the profile badge in the header never moved. plan.py already had
the fall-through (`if ctx and ctx.event_sink else current_event_sink.get()`);
this is the same fix.

The result also said nothing about what the switch changed, so the model kept
calling tools the target profile does not have (reload_tools after leaving
tool_developer). It now names the gained and lost tools, and the timing claim
is corrected: the new prompt and tools are in force from the next step of the
same turn, not "from the next message".

Allocate message sequence numbers in the DB, not in memory ...

save() numbered new messages from Session.db_next_sequence, a counter read
when the session was loaded. Any second writer of the same session handed
out the numbers it still believed were free, and the two inserts collided on
UNIQUE(session_id, sequence_number) — in production, when switch_profile
loaded the session mid-run and saved it back. The turn died with
"Internal error: duplicate key value violates unique constraint".

The range is now claimed inside save()'s transaction with a single
UPDATE ... RETURNING, so concurrent writers serialize on the session row,
and GREATEST() seeds the pre-counter sessions whose next_sequence is still 0
instead of relying on a racy max()+1 fallback in memory.

switch_profile itself no longer saves a session at all: it repoints the row
through a narrow set_profile() UPDATE, which keeps it out of the running
turn's way. It runs mid-turn on a session the turn still holds, so saving a
second copy from there was the collision in the first place.

config: add the gntodo MCP server

config: capture the live server configuration ...

Profiles gain the gntodo / gnexus-book / gnexus-creds scopes for agent and
subagent runs, refreshed model lists, and write access where the live setup
has it. MCP server configs pick up their user_key slots, gnexus-book learns
delete_pending_change, and the hard-panel / synapse / tgclient servers join
the tree.

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'

Await the session pool in notify and three neighbours ...

PgSessionStore._get_pool() is async, and four call sites passed its coroutine
straight into a store constructor, so the first query inside died with
"'coroutine' object has no attribute 'fetchrow'": notify always failed, the
reaction runner never got past reading its settings, synapse_instructions was
unusable, and the BYOK resolver caught the AttributeError and silently fell
back to the default credential.

The tests missed it because each one mocked the store or the pool provider
away; the new ones run on a fake asyncpg pool with nothing faked below the tool.

Merge origin/master (b7743f8): PWA icons, MCP settings tab, android push, runbook

webclient: serve the PWA artwork past the images cache ...

/images/* is served cache-first from IMAGES_CACHE, which activate deliberately
keeps across builds. That is right for content whose URL is unique and wrong
for the app's own artwork: /images/icon-*, /images/logo-icon* and
/images/apple-splash/* keep their URLs while their contents change with the
logo, so a browser that had once loaded an icon would keep showing the old one
even after a deploy — and the apple-touch-icon is linked from index.html, so it
does travel through the page and the service worker.

Those paths now go network-first with a cached fallback (offline still works);
every other /images/ request is untouched.

Tests: frontend 148 passed; backend 1367 passed, 1 skipped.

webclient: draw the PWA icons at full size again ...

The maskable icons and the apple-touch-icon carried the mark at 21% of the
canvas — the artwork scaled down and pasted in the centre — so on a home
screen the logo read as a fragment of itself. The mark takes 73.4% of the
canvas in logo.svg and in the launcher tile of the Android app icon; that is
the proportion all five files use now.

scripts/gen_pwa_icons.py redraws the mark from logo.svg's geometry with
Pillow (already a project dependency, no SVG rasterizer needed) and writes the
whole set, so the scale lives in one constant; --check measures what is on
disk and reports SUSPECT if it drifts again. Two runs produce identical bytes.

The regenerated icon-192/512 are geometrically identical to the rsvg-rendered
ones they replace: ink bbox 376x376 with 68px insets at 50% coverage, and the
same ink mass across the stroke. Only the antialiasing bytes differ.

dist/ rebuilt (it carries a copy of public/ and is served by the backend).

Tests: frontend 148 passed; backend 1367 passed, 1 skipped.