paseo/docs/timeline-sync.md

Timeline sync

Agent chat delivery has two paths:

1. Live stream — agent_stream WebSocket messages for immediacy. These may be delta-shaped lifecycle updates.
2. Authoritative history — fetch_agent_timeline_request for correctness. This always returns full projected timeline items, never lifecycle deltas.

The daemon keeps canonical rows only for its runtime. Provider history is the durable transcript authority and repopulates those rows when an agent resumes.

The invariants are:

A continuously subscribed client applies every committed row in order. Opening or resuming an agent establishes the daemon's current tail in one bounded request, with older history reachable through backward pagination.

Tool output is bounded before it enters either delivery path. Canonical shell tool output is sliced to 64 KiB, and the same bounded item is used for runtime timeline rows and live stream events. Provider history hydration applies the same rule so reopening an agent cannot restore an oversized tool payload.

Presence is not delivery

Client heartbeat reports presence:

• device type
• app visibility
• focused agent
• last activity time

Heartbeat is used for notification routing. It must not be used as a correctness gate for agent_stream delivery. A stale mobile focus heartbeat may affect whether the user gets notified; it must not make timeline rows disappear from the live stream.

Gap recovery is paged but complete

Large unbounded timeline responses can exceed relay frame limits, so catch-up uses bounded pages. Bounded does not mean partial.

Page limits are projected-item targets. A tool call lifecycle is one projected item even if it spans many source sequence numbers, and assistant/reasoning chunks are merged before counting. The response carries seqStart, seqEnd, sourceSeqRanges, and collapsed so clients can advance sequence cursors without rendering delta rows.

When live delivery detects a sequence gap, the app fetches direction: "after". If the daemon responds with hasNewer: true, the app immediately fetches the next page from endCursor. Gap recovery is complete only when hasNewer: false.

Initialization timeouts guard lack of catch-up progress, not the full multi-page sync. A successful page that queues the next after page refreshes the watchdog.

Opening or resuming an agent fetches one bounded latest tail page. Older history remains user-driven by scrolling upward.

A failed catch-up or subscription reconcile retries on its own, doubling from 1s to a 30s ceiling. A fixed 1s retry turned a persistent daemon-side refusal — a Codex thread that already has an active writer, say — into a request and a log line every second on an idle app. The delay resets on success, reconnect, delivery-mode change, and visibility change, so recovery is still immediate once the condition clears. Republishing the same visibility set is a no-op and never bypasses backoff.

Background retries are silent. The retry the user presses in the sync-error callout is a fallible user action and owns its pending state: retrying is a status the sync model publishes, not a React boolean, so the button reports in-flight and the callout returns to error when the attempt fails.

Reaching the history-start threshold loads one older page and preserves the visible content anchor. Cursor progress does not trigger another page. The user must leave and return to the threshold unless the anchored page still leaves the viewport at history start, as with short or compacted content; in that case pagination continues as one loading operation until the page fills the viewport or history is exhausted.

Durable item anchors

Provider message IDs are not guaranteed for every displayed item. Paseo-generated system errors are one example. Rendered item indices are not durable either because pagination and projection can merge source rows.

Actions that address a point in chat history, such as Fork, use the daemon timeline epoch plus the projected item's seqEnd. The app carries that position on the rendered assistant item for both live and fetched history. When adjacent projected chunks merge, the merged item retains the newer chunk's position.

The daemon validates that the epoch is current and the exact source sequence still exists before slicing rows. It slices before projection so later lifecycle updates cannot leak into the selected context.

Resume behavior

Opening, reconnecting, or revisiting after a selective-delivery coverage gap fetches the latest tail page. Focus alone does not mutate timeline state; the tail response is compared with the local authoritative range first.

• The same epoch and window.maxSeq is an exact display no-op. The app advances synchronization bookkeeping without replacing timeline arrays, preserving an upward-scrolled viewport.
• When the page overlaps or is adjacent to the local end cursor, only projected items newer than that cursor are applied. Already-covered rows are not replayed.
• A true middle gap, epoch change, or rewind atomically replaces stale canonical history with the latest tail. The replacement reconciles positioned live rows beyond its coverage and unresolved local submissions; it never retains two discontiguous canonical ranges.

The installed tail carries hasOlder, so history skipped by a replacement remains reachable through ordinary backward pagination. A backward page is accepted only when it is adjacent to the current history start; a response requested from a pre-replacement range is stale and is discarded.

Client replica lifetime

The host runtime owns each session replica for as long as the host remains registered. React providers attach message handlers and UI integrations to that replica, but mounting or unmounting a provider must not create or clear it. A provider can remount during Fast Refresh or ordinary UI recomposition while the runtime still owns the same directory snapshot and timeline cursors.

Removing the host from the registry is the destructive boundary: it stops the runtime and clears the session and host-scoped setup state together.

The durable replica cache persists synchronization authority only when it can store the complete current canonical window losslessly. The stored range describes those exact items: startSeq drives older pagination and endSeq drives forward catch-up. Restore paints the items immediately, requests after endSeq, and requests before startSeq when the user loads older history.

The first resume request is bounded. If it reports more newer history, fetch one latest bounded tail instead of replaying every missed page. Live gap recovery still pages forward until current.

If the canonical window exceeds the cache item limit, contains a discontiguous retained range, has a live head, or includes presentation data the cache cannot encode losslessly, persistence drops the range and keeps a display-only tail. Restore then uses the ordinary bounded tail bootstrap. Never slice items while retaining the pre-slice range; that falsely certifies discarded source rows.

Live rows received between cache paint and catch-up stay in the separate live head and reconcile with the authoritative range through the existing forward-page path. The cache does not persist sync generation or unreconciled local submissions.

Every daemon-derived live item carries its timeline epoch and sequence position. Bootstrap replacement keeps only positioned rows newer than the page it installs, while unresolved local user presentations identify themselves by having client identity without a timeline position. This prevents a page from duplicating rows it already covers without coupling display continuity to the shorter-lived submission registry. Unreconciled local presentations are not persisted in the durable replica cache.

Selective and legacy delivery

The app chooses one delivery policy from server_info.features.selectiveAgentTimeline:

• Selective daemons receive every agent visible in any pane plus the most recently viewed hidden agents, up to five subscribed agents. Visible agents always win: if more than five are visible, they all remain subscribed and no hidden agent does. Switching and app backgrounding preserve this connection-scoped hot set, so returning to an agent still covered by it needs no catch-up. Losing window keyboard focus does not make a selected pane invisible. Disconnecting clears hidden hot agents; reconnect restores the currently visible set before authoritative catch-up. Revisiting an evicted retained timeline displays its cached state immediately while authoritative catch-up advances it to the current tail.
• Legacy daemons keep globally streaming agent timelines. Visibility still triggers the existing authoritative catch-up, but the app does not issue selective-subscription RPCs.

This policy is owned by viewed-timeline-sync.ts; downstream reducers do not branch on daemon version.

Projected pages reconcile with live presentation

A projected page is canonical state, not a sequence of live deltas. One projected item can overlap rows already received live—for example, a tool call retained at its original display position while its completion advances seqEnd, followed by a merged assistant message. The app uses sourceSeqRanges to replace overlapping assistant and reasoning projections before applying the remaining page through the existing stream reducer. It must not append full projected text to a live prefix.

Every path that sends a message to an agent — composer send, dictation accept-and-send, queued send-now, and the automatic queue drain in HostRuntime — goes through dispatchComposerAgentMessage with a submission writer. There is no second transport for the same product action: calling client.sendAgentMessage directly skips the submitted row and the pending footer, and permanently drops attachments because the daemon does not echo them back.

A submitted prompt is one UserMessageItem row. That row is the authoritative local presentation: its stable identity, text, timestamp, images, and attachments do not change when the provider acknowledges it. Submission lifecycle is a separate record keyed by agent, not another row shape. The transaction registry records two independent settlement facts: canonical acknowledgement and RPC settlement. Canonical acknowledgement retires optimistic activity immediately. When both facts are known, whichever arrives second deletes the record. A canonical acknowledgement that arrives first prevents a later transport error from rolling back a prompt already observed.

The daemon's accepted response waits for the correlated run start and guarantees that the canonical submitted row has been recorded. It publishes the accepted turn's liveness before that row, so the client applies authoritative activity before canonical acknowledgement retires optimistic activity. Timeline render batching does not delay lifecycle application. Directory status never settles a submission. Overlapping sends settle independently rather than collapsing to one newest pending message.

Daemons advertising server_info.features.canonicalSubmittedPrompts guarantee that every accepted prompt carrying a client message id is recorded and streamed as a canonical user_message with that same id. This includes daemon-handled commands that do not allocate a foreground turn; their submitted row is recorded before handler output. The app tracks submission transactions only for hosts with this capability. Older hosts keep the shipped untracked optimistic-row behavior and roll that row back on RPC rejection.

Turn activity has one client-side replica. Lifecycle events can attach turnId, and agent snapshots can expose activeTurn: { turnId, startedAt } | null. An identified terminal cannot close a different identified turn; an unnamed legacy terminal can close the current turn. Snapshots, stream events, cancellation requests, and every visible surface update the same per-agent record. The snapshot covers both user-started foreground turns and autonomous provider turns; foreground control ownership remains a separate daemon concern. Cancellation request identity is stored with that record rather than in a React component, so an old request cannot clear a newer one. Submissions remain a separate pre-turn registry and retire on canonical acknowledgement.

Canonical turns and visible responses are different boundaries. System-injected prompts are absent from the Paseo timeline, so one visible response can span several canonical turns without a user message between them. Layout and copy group that response together; lifecycle, timing, tool sequences, and exact fork positions retain the canonical turnId boundaries.

The compatibility boundary for older daemons is snapshot normalization: running/idle status becomes an anonymous active turn or idle state once, and downstream code consumes the same activity shape. The app does not combine anonymous lifecycle events, timestamps, timeline rows, and resume coverage to infer a second running state. Disconnect and replica removal remain destructive close boundaries. Elapsed time comes only from turn liveness, never from submission records or whichever timeline rows happen to be mounted.

The daemon records one canonical submitted user row at acceptance. Its wire messageId is the submission's clientMessageId, so the row is born with its final identity and remains immutable on the wire. A correlated provider echo records the provider's native identity internally without dispatching another timeline event. Rewind resolves the wire identity to that provider identity at the provider boundary. Daemon-handled prompts follow the same identity rule.

Content matching is limited to the dated compatibility path for daemon timelines created before that field existed. Canonical ingestion may match only an explicit unreconciled local candidate; the draft-create handoff is the one boundary that also permits the legacy canonical twin to have arrived first. Generic reducers and consumers do not reimplement message identity matching.

Ordinary bootstrap, same-epoch reset, and catch-up replacement preserve unmatched locally submitted rows because a provider may never echo them. A known epoch change or rewind replaces history and drops acknowledged local rows omitted by the new canonical epoch; every transaction not yet acknowledged by the provider, and no other local row, crosses that destructive boundary. A cold reset without an existing epoch is destructive because the client has no continuity anchor.

Tail rows are positioned history, so an unmatched local presentation is appended after the canonical replacement rather than ordered by timestamps from different machines. The head is a live overlay: cursorless items stay there during continuity replacement until canonical positions arrive, while a destructive replacement retains only active submission transactions.

Canonical replacement owns both timeline lanes. A matching local row keeps its presentation ID and payload while taking the canonical row's ordered position. If a live assistant head is the canonical assistant prefix, it stays in the head lane. No row may be returned in both lanes.

Relevant code

• Server live stream forwarding: packages/server/src/server/session.ts
• App sync planning: packages/app/src/timeline/timeline-sync-plan.ts
• App viewed-agent synchronization: packages/app/src/timeline/viewed-timeline-sync.ts
• App stream/timeline reducer: packages/app/src/timeline/session-stream-reducers.ts
• Session wiring: packages/app/src/contexts/session-context.tsx