profiles: the Personal Secretary retires, and every reference goes with it ...

`secretary` had become a second general-purpose assistant: same models, same
tools, one temperature step apart from `assistant`, and admin-only for no
reason the user could see. The directory is gone and the eight remaining
profiles load clean.

A profile that no longer exists is not a harmless orphan — `Agent` resolves
`session.profile_id` on every run and raises `ProfileNotFound`, so any session
left behind would open and then fail on its first turn. Prod sessions were
moved to `assistant` first (115 rows, verified after), and the local clone
along with them (101).

The reaction fallback loses its role table: it existed because the admin
fallback was itself admin-only, which `assistant` never is. `spawn_agent`
falls back to `assistant` too, and the two prompts that recommended
`secretary` now name only `server_admin` and `developer`.

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.

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.

agent parallelism: background tools, bg spawn_agent, parallel tool batches, message queue ...

- backgroundable tools (terminal/ssh_exec/peer/spawn_agent/code_exec) detach
  via TaskManager with per-session/global/spawn caps, rate limit and TTL
- completion delivery both ways: task_update event (out-of-band) + pending
  notes injected into the next turn; tasks tool (list/check/wait/cancel)
- parallel tool-call batches (profile-level gate, off by default) with
  ToolStarted up-front, tagged event mux, call-order results, one save,
  plus dangling tool_call repair on session load
- user message queue instead of busy error: message_queued frame,
  back-to-back drain on the same socket, headless fallback on disconnect
- pin mcp<2 (v2 renames FastMCP with breaking API changes)
- docs: tasks.md (new), websocket/api/agent/config updates, tasks manual,
  spawn_agent background param, persona contract section

Pass explicit ToolContext to tools instead of hidden ContextVars ...

Add ToolContext dataclass (session_id, event_sink, stop_event, model,
user_id, user_role, user_info) and thread it through the execution chain:
Agent._execute_tools_with_sink → ToolExecutor → tool.execute().

All ~25 tools updated to accept ctx parameter. Tools that previously
read ContextVar now prefer ctx when provided, falling back to
ContextVar for backward compatibility.

Tests updated to pass ToolContext explicitly — no more test fixtures
that set current_session_id / current_user_id ContextVars.

ContextVar setters remain as fallback for non-tool consumers
(ai_helper, context_builder, planning) and will be removed in a
follow-up refactor.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Refactor: move tool helper modules into _internal subpackage ...

Moves non-tool infrastructure out of navi/tools/ root so that only
actual tool classes live there:

  base.py           → _internal/base.py
  loader.py         → _internal/loader.py
  middleware.py     → _internal/middleware.py
  logging_middleware.py → _internal/logging_middleware.py
  _time_parser.py   → _internal/time_parser.py

All imports updated across core/, api/, mcp/, tools/, and tests/.
No proxy files remain in navi/tools/ root.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Allow subagents to use selected profiles