agent-response

Agent Response — Consumer Branch

The durable contract row is the turn's whole delivery. The final message is the signal that the turn ended and carries no envelope of its own, so there is nothing to reconcile against: what the agent declared and what was persisted are one artifact.

The read is not free, and that is the economics that decides whether it happens at all. contract view --field <dotted.path> prints only that subtree of the envelope (agent_status.agent_state, evidence_report.open_gaps, ...), exiting 0 with the value verbatim when the path exists and 1 when it does not — so "searched and found nothing" and "did not search" are distinguishable without opening anything else. Without that distinction the only choice is between the WHOLE row (expensive) and nothing (free), and free wins every time; the narrow --field read is what makes reading the row cheaper than skipping it. contract list --state DISPATCHED lists turns still open; contract list --cut lists every turn that did not close cleanly, naming the specialist and the lane; contract view --harness-id <agentId>, with the id the dispatch returned, gives that turn's own partial evidence.

Reading order

Phase 0 — triage, always, cheap. Read agent_status.agent_state, then cut_reason, then continues_contract_id, in that order. agent_state routes everything downstream. cut_reason says whether that state is honest: it is stamped at birth and cleared only by a clean finalize, so clean-versus-cut is recorded by design, not inferred. never_finalized means the turn never closed itself; backstop_capture and reaped are the stop hook's forensic cleanup; salvaged_truncation is rebuilt purely from the agent's incremental on-disk draft — which is why incremental writes are what survive a cut. continues_contract_id says whether "empty" means anything: a continuation row is born empty by design (Trap 3), and reading this before judging any field as empty is what keeps that design from reading as a failure. What the row does not hold was never delivered — an open_gaps entry the agent only narrated in its message did not survive the turn; treat the row's silence as the finding it is rather than reading the prose as if it had been persisted.