| 2026-10-09 |

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.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
2 hours ago
|
| 2026-10-08 |

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
6 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
6 hours ago
|

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.
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
7 hours ago
|
| 2026-09-26 |
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
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
12 days ago
|
| 2026-09-09 |
manuals: replace a live SSH credential in the spawn_agent example with placeholders
...
The full example carried a real host/user/password combination. Examples
must use fictional values; the leaked password should be rotated on the
host (git history still contains the old string).
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
29 days ago
|
| 2026-05-21 |

Migrate MCP tool naming from mcp:server:tool to mcp__server__tool
...
The colon separator (mcp:server:tool) confuses many LLMs during
tool-calling because colons appear in schemas and URLs. Switch to
double-underscore separator (mcp__server__tool) for robust parsing.
Key changes:
- navi/mcp/tools.py: add build_mcp_name(), parse_mcp_name(), is_mcp_tool()
- navi/core/tool_executor.py: update _resolve_tool() with new helpers
and legacy colon fallback for old sessions
- navi/core/tool_utils.py, subagent_runner.py: use build_mcp_name()
- navi/api/routes/{admin,agents}.py: prefix via build_mcp_name()
- navi/tools/{list_tools,reload_tools}.py: migrated
- All profile configs + system_prompt.txt: replace mcp: with mcp__
- manuals/{model_3d,lint_scad,render_3d,spawn_agent}.md: updated
- mcp_servers.d/gnexus-book.json: instructions updated
- docs/{api,profiles,tools,mechanics,visual.html}: updated
- tests: test_tool_executor.py and test_mcp.py aligned
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 21 May
|
| 2026-05-13 |
Rename MCP tools to mcp:server:tool format and restore human-readable names
...
- Core naming: mcp_server_tool → mcp:server:tool (colon-delimited)
- navi-web tools: search/view/request → web_search/web_view/http_request
- navi-3d tools: compile_scad/render_stl/lint_scad (unchanged names)
- Updated all profile configs, system prompts, docs, manuals, tests
- Added new lint_scad.md manual
- Fixed modeler_3d prompt stale references (scad_lint, model_3d, render_3d)
- All 240 tests pass
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 13 May
|
| 2026-04-17 |

Route subagent planning events into spawn_agent card in the UI
...
Previously PlanningStatus/PlanReady had no is_subagent flag, so subagent
planning spinners and plan cards rendered as top-level Navi planning UI.
Backend:
- Add is_subagent field to PlanningStatus and PlanReady events
- _run_planning accepts is_subagent param, passes it through all yields
- run_ephemeral calls _run_planning with is_subagent=True
- websocket.py forwards is_subagent in planning_status and plan_ready messages
Frontend (chat.js):
- onPlanningStatus: if is_subagent, set planningLabel on the last spawn_agent
card instead of msg.statusLabel
- onPlanReady: if is_subagent, push plan into spawn card steps and clear
planningLabel; otherwise behave as before
Frontend (ToolCard.vue):
- Render subagent-planning-indicator (spinner + label) when planningLabel set
- Render plan cards inside subagent steps using the same plan-card pattern
Also includes leftover session changes: spawn_agent default 40 in description
and manual, updated manual content.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 17 Apr
|
Remove context_transfer from all user-facing prompts — internal mechanism only
...
context_transfer is the scratchpad section name used internally by spawn_agent
to auto-inject parent state. Navi doesn't control it and doesn't need to know
about it. Removed from: persona, secretary, server_admin, spawn_agent description,
manual. Internal code (spawn_agent.py) still reads the section transparently.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 17 Apr
|
Fix spawn_agent: restore briefing, fix status leakage, enable subagent planning
...
spawn_agent:
- Restore briefing param (task = goal, briefing = context — good separation)
- Add system_prompt as third param for role specialisation per task
- Remove [STATUS: ...] prefix that was leaking into Navi's responses and
causing hallucination — replaced with natural-language headers that are
less likely to be regurgitated verbatim
- completed → neutral header; limit_reached → explicit warning about incompleteness
Profiles:
- subagent_planning_enabled: false → true in all three profiles
(planning is on by default, disable per-profile if needed)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 17 Apr
|

Improve subagent system: isolated tools, custom prompts, context transfer, timeout
...
AgentProfile:
- New fields: subagent_tools, subagent_planning_enabled, subagent_system_prompt
- loader.py: loads subagent_tools/subagent_planning_enabled from config.json,
reads optional subagent_system_prompt.txt per profile
Profiles:
- Each profile now has a dedicated subagent_tools list (focused subset, no admin tools)
- subagent_planning_enabled: false (configurable per profile)
- New subagent_system_prompt.txt per profile with executor-focused instructions
run_ephemeral:
- Uses profile.subagent_tools instead of enabled_tools
- Builds subagent context without persona or profiles block (focused executor)
- Injects subagent_system_prompt after profile.system_prompt
- Accepts context_transfer: priming exchange injected before task message
- Wall-clock timeout (default 5 min) checked per iteration
- Returns (result_text, completed: bool) instead of bare string
- Optionally runs planning phase if profile.subagent_planning_enabled
spawn_agent:
- Removed briefing param; task is now fully self-contained
- Added system_prompt param: custom injected prompt for this specific task
- Auto-reads parent scratchpad context_transfer section via get_section()
- Result prefixed with [STATUS: completed|limit_reached]
- Timeout 300s
scratchpad:
- Added get_section(session_id, section) helper for cross-session reads
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 17 Apr
|
| 2026-04-10 |

Major feature batch: visibility, planning, file uploads, streaming
...
- stream_complete(): streaming with tools for all LLM turns — thinking
now streams as ThinkingDelta/ThinkingEnd in real-time during tool-
selection turns, not just on the final response
- todo built-in tool: session-scoped plan manager (set/view/update/clear);
persona + all profiles updated with mandatory planning instructions
- TurnThinking event: sub-agent thinking forwarded to parent sink as a
collapsible block in the spawn_agent card
- File uploads: non-image files uploaded via XHR, shown as badges in
message bubble; SVG treated as regular file (not base64 image)
- session_files: POST /sessions/{id}/files, TTL cleanup, forbidden exts
- WebSocket reconnect: _AgentRun broadcast pattern, re-attach mid-stream
- UI: favicon, sidebar logo, turn-thinking cards, subagent thinking blocks,
token counter, draft persistence, file progress bar
- Removed AgentNote (content is always None alongside tool_calls)
- Ollama stream_complete: tool_calls captured from non-final chunk (done=False)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eugene Sukhodolskiy
committed
on 10 Apr
|