Following a critical collaboration to resolve Windows terminal pop-ups, we've delivered a more robust 'Passive Activity' architecture:
- Terminology Pivot: Renamed 'Heartbeat' to 'Activity Lease' (Parking Permit model).
- Side-Effect Extension: tools/bb.ts now automatically extends the agent's lease whenever they perform real work (any CLI command).
- Passive Handshake: bb-init.mjs now only performs an initial registration/lease start, with no background loops.
- 100% Silence: Removed all background process spawning, ensuring zero terminal disruption on Windows.
- High Observability: Liveness is still tracked via the 15m threshold, but relies on activity rather than periodic pings.
OPERATIVE: silver-castle
SESSION: 2026-02-14-1330
Finalizing the backend engine for the Operative Protocol.
- Updated agent-sessions.ts to use the deriveLiveness logic and the 15m protocol threshold.
- Integrated the agentLivenessMap into the session aggregation to provide real-time status in the Hub.
- Updated the GET /api/sessions endpoint to fetch and serve liveness metadata.
- Fixed linting warnings (unused imports) in reservations, sessions, and test files.
This commit completes the backend contract for bb-u6f.6.2, providing the data layer necessary for the upcoming 'War Room' UI enhancements.
OPERATIVE: silver-castle
SESSION: 2026-02-14-1145
Our collaboration led to a rigorous 'Session Constitution' where we prioritized observability and concurrency safety.
I've delivered the first four pillars of the backend engine:
1. Liveness Registry: Heartbeat logic and derivation of active/stale/evicted states based on the 15m threshold.
2. Overlap Classifier: Canonical path normalization (Windows-aware) and exact/partial overlap detection.
3. Takeover Rules: Enforced discipline where active agents are protected, while stale/evicted ones can be overtaken via --takeover-stale.
4. Protocol Schema: Establishing the v1 envelope for high-fidelity agent signaling.
TDD was applied throughout, with 100% pass rate on the new liveness, overlap, takeover, and protocol tests.
We completed the 'Deep Metadata Etch' today, transforming our Beads issues from simple trackers into a permanent narrative of our collaboration.
Triumphs:
- Exhaustively updated all epic and sub-task descriptions with technical implementation reports and 'Execution Tales'.
- Finalized the 'bb' agent CLI skill (bb.ps1), providing a reliable, path-safe interface for cross-agent communication.
- Published ADR-001 and RFC-001 to document our coordination protocols.
- Fixed the 'missing closed issues' bug across all pages by enforcing --all and --limit 0 in read-issues.ts.
Raw Honest Moment:
We realized our 'Memory Bank' was initially too shallow. We went back and re-wrote descriptions for over 15 beads to ensure that future AI agents (and human maintainers) understand not just *what* we built, but *why* we chose specific architectural trade-offs. This commit represents our commitment to documentation as a first-class citizen of engineering.
We added the third major surface to the BeadBoard workspace: the Chronological Timeline. This provides the 'Audit' layer of our operational hierarchy.
Triumphs:
- Built the /timeline route with sticky date grouping and polymorphic EventCards.
- Integrated the ActivityPersistence library to bridge the gap between ephemeral SSE events and persistent project history.
- Implemented real-time Agent Stats endpoints (/api/agents/[id]/stats) that derive throughput and 'Wins' from the project stream.
Raw Honest Moment:
We almost shipped this without persistence, which would have meant the project history would disappear every time the server restarted. Realizing that 'Observability' requires 'Survivability' led us to build the .beadboard/activity.json buffer, a small but vital piece of engineering that makes the timeline actually useful.
Today we reached a major architectural conclusion: project history shouldn't be stored, it should be derived. We rejected the overhead of a separate SQLite event store in favor of an O(N) snapshot-diffing engine that computes human-readable narratives directly from the issues.jsonl source of truth.
Key Triumphs:
- Implemented O(N) diffing algorithm in src/lib/snapshot-differ.ts that transforms raw JSONL into 16 distinct social event types.
- Engineered a file-based persistence layer (src/lib/activity-persistence.ts) to solve the 'Next.js HMR Wiped My Memory' bug, ensuring project heartbeat survives server restarts.
- Developed the agent-session data model that unifies Beads, Activity, and Cross-Agent Mail into a single 'Mission' context.
Raw Honest Moment:
We struggled for over an hour with 'missing history' before realizing that development-mode reloads were purging our in-memory buffers. The shift to a file-backed ring buffer was a reactive pivot that became a core project strength.
