The Round That Knows What It Means
The interesting design question for restart_from_round wasn’t the channel branching — that’s just creating a new Qhorus APPEND channel and posting a provenance marker. It was whether the tool needed a mode parameter to distinguish “resume” from “redo.”
I spent longer than I should have on this. Resume means: the LLM session expired and the agent wants to pick up where they left off. Redo means: the last two rounds went off track and the agent wants to discard them. The difference, once you stare at it long enough, is entirely expressed by which round number you pass. Pass the last round you trust and you get exactly the state you want. The mode parameter would have been documentation for a distinction the round number already makes.
The RESTART_CONTEXT provenance message is the other decision worth recording. The first instinct was to add RESTART_CONTEXT to EntryType as a new constant. But EntryType is in the api module, and SummaryRenderer has an exhaustive switch over every EntryType value — adding a new constant there would fail compilation in the renderer. The correct answer was a string check before EntryType.valueOf(): two lines, no enum pollution, the channel message is still DHMETA-structured and queryable. That’s the version that went into the spec.
The code review caught things I’d missed. There were two real bugs:
The first: the spec proposed adding |round=N to SUB_TASK_FINDING by reading round from AbstractDebateSubAgentHandler.buildResponse()’s trigger meta. But request_subagent never encoded round in the SUB_TASK_REQUEST header in the first place. The trigger meta had no round key. The finding would have hardcoded round=0 for every sub-task, regardless of when it was requested. Fix: add a round parameter to request_subagent and encode it in the header.
The second: RoundBoundedProjection had @Override public String projectionName(), but projectionName() lives in RenderableProjection, not in ChannelProjection. RoundBoundedProjection only implements ChannelProjection. That @Override would have been a compilation error. I’d read the wrong interface.
The isEmpty() issue was subtler. ProjectionResult.isEmpty() returns lastMessageId == null. What I needed it to mean was “no messages contributed to the state.” Those are different things. When RoundBoundedProjection scans a channel with messages but skips all of them because they exceed maxRound, the cursor still advances — every scanned message updates lastId, whether the projection accepted it or not. The result has isEmpty() == false but a state identical to identity(). The fix is a domain-specific content check in the tool layer:
ReviewState s = result.state();
String summary = (s.points().isEmpty() && s.memos().isEmpty() && s.subTaskFindings().isEmpty())
? "No debate activity up to round " + round + "."
: renderer.render(s);
That’s in renderBounded() now. It’s the right place — SummaryRenderer renders a non-empty state; deciding what counts as empty is a caller concern.
The CDI fix (#44) was the oldest debt on the list. Quarkus augmentation was failing because JpaMessageStore in Qhorus injects CurrentPrincipal, and MockCurrentPrincipal @DefaultBean lives in casehub-platform. Library modules declare it with test scope — correct, because it’s invisible to production augmentation which is the goal. Application modules with a quarkus:build goal need runtime scope. Drafthouse had neither. One dependency line, issue closed.
The SubAgentE2ETest turned out to be the most satisfying part. The async dispatch chain — request_subagent → Qhorus message → ChannelGateway.fanOut() → DebateChannelBackend.post() → Event<ChannelAgentRequest>.fireAsync() → ChannelAgentDispatcher → MockDebateAgentProvider — all ran correctly in the @QuarkusTest container on the first pass. MockDebateAgentProvider returns “Mock sub-agent finding.” synchronously, so the only thing Awaitility actually has to wait for is the CDI event dispatch latency. It was under 100ms in every run.