mcp: a run says why a server's tools were withheld, instead of silently lacking them ...

A profile can declare a BYOK-gated server the user has no personal key for. The
manager refuses such a call and build_tool_list drops the server, so the tool
list stays honest — but the system prompt kept naming the server with no
explanation at all. The model knew it existed, held none of its tools, and had
nothing to tell the user, who concluded the assistant simply could not do the
task.

The reason was never stored: it is the complement of what visible_servers kept,
so _apply_mcp_scope derives it from that same value (byok_servers() - allowed)
rather than reading the key store a second time and risking a disagreement with
the first read. It rides in current_keyless_mcp_servers, next to the scope
variable, and _mcp_context_msg names each withheld server where it lists it,
followed by the reason and a pointer at Settings -> MCP keys.

Both ContextVar tokens are returned and reset together; without that the two
existing reset sites leak or raise. The variable defaults to empty, so a run
that never set it (a peer run out of a fresh task) claims nothing.

mcp_status said "without one this server runs on the shared default", which is
false for an ordinary account — the shared credential is admin-only.

profiles: the assistant profile is granted gntodo writes and loses the owner's monitoring servers ...

gntodo moves from read to read+write: the everyday assistant's job includes
keeping the user's todos, and a tracking server it can only read is half a tool.

synapse and hard-panel leave the profile entirely, not even read-only. They are
the owner's own surfaces — platform events and server monitoring — and a regular
user's assistant has no business listing them.

docs/profiles.md follows, since it spelled out both.

memory: a fact written under a new spelling of its key merges into the one that survives ...

The extractor invents a key every time it meets the same fact — `language`,
`preferred_language`, `ui_language` — and the upsert keys on the exact string, so
the base grew several spellings of each durable fact. On prod, 24 facts across 11
clusters share a key once noise prefixes are dropped, 10 of them under the exact
same value.

upsert_fact(dedupe=True) now compares the *tokens* of the normalized key — set
equality, not overlap, and never the value: `ui_language` and `language` are one
key while `dark` and `dark_ui` are two. The row already holding the writer's exact
key wins; otherwise the incoming one does. Losers are marked, not deleted: each
keeps its key and its value and gains `merged_into`, so the merge is reversible
with one UPDATE. Off by default, so the memory tool still writes exactly the row
it asked for.

Every read path filters `merged_into IS NULL`, and the mark is reachable only
where it is meant to be — get_all_facts/fact_count gained include_merged, and
GET /admin/memory?include_merged=true exposes it. search_facts deliberately has
no such flag: the injection path must not be able to see a hidden row. Forgetting
a key drops its hidden aliases first, so none is left pointing at nothing.

Three fixes that fell out of the same read:

- expires_at was overwritten with EXCLUDED.expires_at on every upsert, and the
  extractor always passes None — so it silently cleared any expiry the agent had
  set. Both DO UPDATE clauses now COALESCE.
- The ILIKE fallback was the one read path that served expired facts.
- The `list` action promised "all stored facts" and returned categories. The code
  was right and the description was wrong; the description now says so.

The extraction prompt stopped allowing infrastructure — servers, hosts, addresses,
running services — while the agent and the planner already forbade it; that
loophole is where 423 technical facts came from. It also forbids secrets outright,
and asks for stable snake_case keys. Expiry is now documented as being for facts
with a known end, not for facts you merely doubt.

Facts reach the prompt with their age ("updated 34d ago") alongside confidence:
nothing expires on a clock, so the injection says how old a fact is and lets the
agent weigh it.

mcp: every wait on the MCP path gets a bound, and a failed reload keeps what it had ...

reload_tools kept dying on prod, and only a restart cured it. Nothing on the
MCP path was bounded: ClientSession was built without read_timeout_seconds, so
the SDK waited forever (anyio.fail_after(None)); _send awaited a future with no
timeout; disconnect() awaited the shielded runner with no timeout; and
disconnect_all() walks the pool one client at a time, so a single wedged client
blocked every reload that came after it. A cancelled caller only cancelled
itself — the runner stayed wedged, which is why it was every reload, not one.

Bounds, in two deliberate layers. The SDK read timeout ends a request nobody
answers *inside* the runner, so the client stays usable; the caller-side bound
is the backstop for an op queued behind a stuck one, and it aborts the runner
rather than leaving it for the next command to queue behind. connect 60s,
list_tools 45s, call_tool 300s (SDK 240s), session read 30s, disconnect 15s,
each overridable, each logging the culprit.

disconnect() and disconnect_all() no longer swallow CancelledError — that is
exactly how the reload budget stopped being enforceable.

The registry is now rebuilt in one step: collect every server's tools first,
then commit the whole set in a single synchronous swap. clear_external_tools()
ran *before* the rebuild, so a rebuild that failed halfway left the model
holding MCP tool names that resolved to nothing. A failed pass now leaves the
previous registrations untouched, and the reload phase carries its own budget
so the tool always returns a report.

Two more defects fell out of the audit. The streamable_http transport was
handed a bare httpx.AsyncClient, whose 5s default read killed the GET stream of
an idle server — six of the nine prod servers are streamable_http. And
register_mcp_tools called log.warning() in a module where log was never
defined, a NameError on precisely the failure path it was meant to report.

mcp keys: KeyResolver gains list_servers ...

visible_servers() calls the resolver, not the store, so the BYOK
visibility check crashed with AttributeError for every non-admin
run (user sessions, recalls, synapse reactions) and silently
dropped all gated servers from the tool list. The resolver now
delegates to the store through the same async factory resolve()
uses; any failure resolves to an empty dict — no personal keys —
instead of an exception.

sessions: a pasted image lands in the session directory, and the notice says where ...

An image pasted into the chat lived only in the transcript. The system prompt of
every session names `session_files/<id>/` as the place its files live, so an agent
looking for "the attached images" went there, found nothing, and spent turns on
fruitless `find` calls before giving up.

Now the agent's non-hidden turn writes each pasted image into that directory as
`image_N.<ext>` — the extension sniffed from the bytes, the bytes stored as they
arrived, so a PNG keeps its alpha channel. Numbering runs across the session, and
a picture sent twice reuses the file already holding it.

The paths go into the hidden context copy of the message: images past the context
budget are not sent to the model at all, so the notice names them for `image_view`
instead. The line is written by the agent rather than the websocket handler, which
is the layer that knows the names the files actually took — including for a message
queued behind a running turn.

A save that fails is logged and skipped: it never costs the turn.

synapse: route an event by the role of the account it was delivered for ...

The dispatcher's choice of profile was checked against a hardcoded "user" role,
so an admin's own events could never reach the admin-only profiles their routing
instruction named. The event fell to whichever profile all() happened to yield
first — a profile without the tools the event needed — and the instruction looked
like it did not work. The role now comes from navi_users for the account the event
was delivered for (_user_role, failing closed to "user" and logging), and it is the
role the run carries as current_user_role.

Alongside, in the same path:

- the dispatcher is offered each profile as "id (name) — description", so a rule
  that names a profile in words has something to match it against;
- an unroutable event lands on a role-aware fallback (secretary for an admin,
  assistant otherwise) instead of the first of all(), and every substitution is
  logged as synapse.reaction_profile_downgraded with both ids;
- session_key is folded to one spelling — whitespace collapsed, lowercased — so a
  chat cannot fork on "TG:42" against "tg:42";
- the conversation rule is read from whichever instruction document states it,
  not from the dispatcher one alone.

A refused profile is still refused: hidden stays hidden for everyone, and an
admin-only profile stays out of reach for a regular user's event.

synapse: a reaction continues its conversation, and the request becomes a record ...

Every Synapse event used to open its own service session, so two messages of
one Telegram chat landed in two unrelated chats. The dispatcher now returns a
`session_key` — derived from the payload according to the user's routing
document — and a later event carrying the same key joins the session that
opened it, within `reaction_session_ttl_minutes` of idle time (0 restores the
old always-fresh behaviour). A session that is still running is never joined:
`create_run` overwrites `state.run`, so a second run would orphan the first
one's subscribers — a busy thread gets a fresh session instead. When the
dispatcher names a different profile for the event, the session's profile is
switched through `set_profile`, never through `save()`, which does not rewrite
`name` or `profile_id`: the thread keeps its name and its history.

What the user reads in the transcript is now only the request. The event
record is a system message (`metadata.source == "synapse_event"`) drawn by a
new SynapseEventNotice.vue in the visual language of the recall badge, and the
framing plus the JSON envelope become a hidden user turn written once, on the
first event of a thread — not on every one. The instructions from Settings
reach the model through a new `current_reaction_instructions` ContextVar and
the `[Reaction session]` block of the system prompt, so they appear in no
transcript at all. The stored system record still has to reach the model, so
ContextBuilder's allowlist becomes `_LLM_SYSTEM_SOURCES = {task_note,
synapse_event}`.

The dispatcher gets a document of its own — how to route, rather than what to
do — stored beside the reaction instructions, versioned separately, and edited
in its own field in the settings panel. `synapse_instruction_versions` gains a
`doc` discriminator, so existing rows keep `'reaction'` and their history
verbatim. The new columns are added by `_MIGRATE`, and the index over `doc`
lives there too: `_DDL` runs first, so an index over a column the migration has
not added yet kills the whole batch on an existing database — which is what
the prod database is. A guard test keeps it that way.

Tests: 1776 passed, 1 skipped (backend), 242 passed (webclient, 28 files).

i18n: en/uk/ru, and the interface language of the account ...

The client hard-coded English in every template. It now goes through t() from
src/i18n/ — a locale ref, {param} interpolation, plural dictionaries driven by
n, and flat per-area dictionaries in src/i18n/messages/ carrying the same slugs
in all three languages. vue-i18n is deliberately not pulled in: the platform
handbook rules it out, and what it would buy — plural forms, a reactive locale,
an English fallback — is about eighty lines here. A slug nobody carries falls
back to English, so a screen already translated and one still speaking
hard-coded English can coexist while the work goes area by area.

The language comes from locale_effective in GET /auth/me: the choice made in
Settings (navi_users.locale_override, a new column) over the gnexus-auth
account locale (navi_users.locale, a straight mirror the user.profile_updated
webhook keeps writing — the override sits in its own column precisely so that
mirror cannot wipe it), over en. PATCH /auth/me writes the override, and null
means "follow the account" again. With NAVI_AUTH_ENABLED=false there is no
account to follow, so the choice is kept in localStorage under navi.locale.

The picker is the first block of Settings → Account. Each language is named in
its own language, which is why those three strings are identical in all three
dictionaries. Lists of labels are computed rather than module-level constants:
one built at import would keep the language that was active then and ignore a
switch.

Checked in Chromium against the built bundle: choosing Русский rewrites
<html lang> and the document title, survives a reload, and Auto brings the
account's own language back.

android-client: a release-signed APK, published through the server ...

Release builds had no signingConfig, so assembleRelease produced an APK that
Android refuses to install. Sign with a key kept out of the repo: the keystore
lives in ~/.navi-android/, and android-client/keystore.properties (gitignored,
600) points at it and carries the passwords. A clone without that file still
builds — it just gets an unsigned APK, which is the right thing to fail into
for someone who has no business signing a release.

tools/publish-apk.sh builds the release APK into webclient/public/download/
and writes a JSON sidecar (version, size, sha256, build time) for the settings
page to read. The server mounts that directory at /download, so the APK ships
with a plain git pull like everything else. dist/download is ignored: vite
copies public/ into dist/ on every build, and serving the copy out of public/
means one binary in git instead of two.

profiles: give the restricted profiles image_view ...

The 3D designer renders PNG previews with mcp__navi-3d__render_stl and then
had no way to look at them: image_view was withheld from all three
restricted profiles, and designer_3d's system prompt said so outright
("You cannot look at the render yourself"). It shipped geometry it had
never seen, with only lint/compile output behind it.

Add image_view to all three rather than to designer_3d alone. The three
sets are kept identical precisely because switch_profile lets a session
move between them, so a restricted session can reach image_view from any
of the three anyway; putting it in one profile would have made the
restriction look like a boundary it is not.

designer_3d now has to call it on every preview the renderer returned
(one angle is not enough), fix what it sees, and treat the visual check
as an addition to the mechanical ones rather than a replacement. The
prompt also asks for session paths only — image_view itself accepts any
image path or URL, so that part is a rule, not a check. Sub-agents keep
the tool out of their set: they gather facts, they never render.

docs/profiles.md loses the image_view omission row and gains the grant,
its raster-only limit and the accepted residual risk.

profiles: restricted profiles for ordinary users, and a role gate that holds ...

`is_admin_only` was checked in one place out of nine and was not read from
config.json at all, so all seven profiles were reachable by every account with
role `user`. The flag now lives in config.json — the file is the baseline, a
`profile_overrides` row still wins on top of it — and one predicate,
`admin_only_blocked`, is the single place the rule is expressed. The nine
surfaces that list, switch to, spawn or resolve a profile all consult it:
`POST /sessions`, the WebSocket, switch_profile, list_profiles, the system
prompt's "Available profiles" block, spawn_agent and the Synapse reaction
runner. The prompt cache is now keyed by (profile, role), so a user's prompt
can never be served an admin's profile list.

The seven existing profiles (developer, discuss, dispatcher, modeler_3d,
navi_code, secretary, server_admin) are marked admin-only. Three new ones take
their place for ordinary users: assistant, designer_3d and coder. They share one
native tool set — ssh_exec, peer, reload_tools, create_mcp_server, test_mcp_tool,
image_view and gmail are withheld — and differ only in system prompt, model and
MCP groups. navi-web's raw `request` group, and the whole of gnexus-creds and
tgclient, are withheld too.

MCP per-user keys gain the missing half of the rule: a server that declares a
`user_key` slot is refused to anyone but an admin who has no personal key, and
is left out of their tool list entirely, instead of quietly falling back to the
owner's credential and appearing as a tool that cannot work. The refusal names
the server and points at Settings.

Also closes `GET /agents/prompts`, which served every profile's system prompt to
anyone, with no user dependency at all.

The accepted residual risk is written down in docs/profiles.md: the working
directory is a convention, not a sandbox.

tools: a non-admin may reach their own session directory ...

A non-admin was confined to user_data/<user_id>/ alone, which made four
tools reject the directory the user's own uploads land in: share_file
refused the file it was asked to send back, filesystem could not read it,
and terminal/code_exec could not be pointed at it. In a prod session the
agent worked around the refusal by copying the uploaded file into its
sandbox with code_exec — the very bypass the injected security policy
forbids — and the copy collided with a same-named file, so the user got a
link to Project_1.mp3 instead of their own upload, plus an 8.6 MB duplicate.

navi/tools/_internal/areas.py now names the two roots a user owns, and the
four call sites share it. Relative paths still resolve into the sandbox,
and each tool keeps its own way of refusing: terminal returns
sandbox_violation, code_exec silently falls back to the sandbox root. The
share_file refusal lists both roots instead of "outside user sandbox", so
the agent retries in the right one instead of routing around it.

The session directory belongs to the same user: its id arrives from the
runtime context, never from tool arguments, and only the session's owner
can open it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".