Operator: "I'd like to be able to see in the chat what the agent is actually
running, right now I just wait while nothing happens." Two compounding gaps:
1. The auto-continuation worker (cmd/nomos/continue.go) had zero live push —
its result only appeared on a manual page reload, so approving a plan and
watching the chat looked completely dead even while the agent was actively
working.
2. Even with polling, continueSession only persisted ONE message at the very
end of a continuation — a continuation that runs several tool calls before
concluding would still show total silence for however long that took.
Fixed both:
- web/src/lib/stores/chat.ts: polls the current session's messages every 3s
between turns (never while a live stream owns the message list) and merges
in anything new. Started after a live turn ends and when a session loads;
stopped on new-chat/session-switch.
- cmd/nomos/store.go: insertMessageReturningID/updateMessage — lets a message
be created as a placeholder and updated in place.
- cmd/nomos/continue.go: continueSession now inserts a placeholder the
instant it starts (renders as the existing "thinking" dots — immediate
feedback that something is happening) and updates that SAME row after
EVERY tool call, not just at the end. A poll within ~3s of any tool call
landing shows it — individual `run` commands appear as the agent issues
them, not just the final rolled-up summary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Verified live: the new auto-continuation worker (previous commit) worked end
to end for the happy path (provision -> auto-verify -> report success, zero
operator ticks). But testing a failure-recovery case (a destroy that failed
because the container was still running) surfaced a real bug: continueSession's
emit closure only captured "text" events, so when chatWith ended the turn on
an "error" event (LLM returned an empty/refusal response, internal retry also
empty), the worker persisted a completely blank, uninformative "auto" message
— no sign anything had gone wrong, undermining observability of the very
mechanism just built.
- Capture "error" events and, if the turn produced no text/tool_calls at all,
persist an explanatory placeholder instead of blank.
- Add one outer retry of the whole chatWith call when the first attempt
produces nothing — the principle behind this whole feature ("don't give up
on the first error") should apply to the continuation mechanism itself, not
just the homelab commands it's continuing.
Also verified live: recovery-from-failure works via the normal chat path once
prompted, and cleaned up the test container.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The root cause behind "the agent stops at the first error and doesn't recover":
provisioning executions run ASYNCHRONOUSLY (pct_create fires the SSH work in a
goroutine and returns "running" immediately), so the agent's turn ENDS before
the result exists. The agent literally isn't running when the step fails — it
can't react to a failure it never observes. The only thing that fed results
back was the operator typing "continue" after every async step: the human was
the event loop. (In the flagged 18-message session the operator typed
continue/proceed/?? eight times while the agent correctly diagnosed each failure
but couldn't advance a step on its own.)
This makes the system the event loop instead:
- migrations/017: nomos_plan_executions links each gated execution to the chat
session that started it.
- cmd/nomos: after a tool result, any "execution <uuid>" it started is linked
to the session. A background worker (continue.go) polls for those executions
reaching a terminal state and — while the agent has an open assent window (an
approved plan is in flight) — re-invokes the agent with the result
("execution X completed/failed: <result>"), so it proceeds to the next step
or diagnoses+fixes the failure, with no operator tick. Guarded against loops
(mark-continued before running) and bounded by the 30-min window.
- chatWith(): chat() variant that injects the finished-execution note after
replayed history without persisting a fake user turn.
- DecideApproval: approving a step by ANY route (button or chat-assent) now
opens the assent window, so auto-continuation works regardless of how the
operator approved — previously only typing "go ahead" opened it.
- SOUL: the agent is told it will be auto-re-invoked when async steps finish —
don't poll get_execution_status, don't wait for "continue"; end the turn and
keep going step by step until the goal is verified or a genuine blocker.
This is the root fix, not another per-command patch: you can't enumerate every
failure of an unbounded action space, but you can give the agent a loop that
observes each result and adapts — because "do anything" always includes "the
first attempt failed."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
