A cite call naming one good id and one mangled one registered the good one and
then asked the model to cite again. A model that mangles ids obeys, mangles
again, and the run dies on output retries with the answer lost: observed at 22
consecutive cite calls against gemma4-26b, with the citation policy registered
to press for a declaration. The branch is only reachable once something has
registered, so the answer already has grounding and there is nothing to ask for.
Resumption was inferred from the transcript, and no shape says it. A missing
prompt is how UI adapters ask their first question as much as how pydantic-ai
resumes one, so every AG-UI host failed on its first message. Reading the tail
instead moved the error rather than fixing it: a settled structured answer ends
with an output tool's return, indistinguishable from results delivered to a
question still in progress, so following questions inherited the first one's
identity.
`CapabilityEvidenceRecord.in_progress` is now the authority. `begin_question`
sets it, `after_run` clears it unless the run is only pausing for deferred work,
and a run that raised never reaches `after_run`, which is what leaves an
interrupted question claimable. The history is consulted only to catch a host
that dropped the state of a question the model is unmistakably still owed.
`rag_cite` and `analysis_cite` accepted only a non-empty `chunk_ids`, so a model with
nothing to cite could comply only by staying silent — indistinguishable from
forgetting. An empty list is now a valid answer to "what grounds this?", recorded as a
declaration with no refs, which derives `ungrounded` rather than leaving the question
undeclared. Citing again cannot narrow it: an empty call after a grounded one leaves
it grounded.
The instructions lose their carve-outs. Refusing for lack of information no longer
exempts the call, and a corpus-level computation cites an empty list instead of
skipping.
A request can carry several of this capability's returns — a model can call search
twice in one response — and the carrier was identified by message alone, so each of
them received the whole capsule. It is selected by message and part now, so exactly
one carries it however many share the request.
The chat TUI passed its persisted state into the run, so tool synchronisation mutated
it in place while the message history was promoted only on success. A cancelled or
failed run therefore kept the evidence the tools had recorded and discarded the
messages that justified it, and the next question derived its identity from the
shorter history: behind the recorded epoch, refused as non-append-only, the
conversation unusable until cleared. The run gets a copy, promoted with the messages
or not at all.
Five decorators had been left attached to a helper by an earlier extraction, which
pytest does not collect, so the resume case they carried was silently untested. The
wire test covers both resume shapes again, no prompt and deferred results.
`_compact_old_tool_returns`, `PRIOR_TURN_NOTICE` and `turn_start` leave
`RAGCapabilityBase`, along with its `wrap_model_request` hook. The evidence
capabilities now retrieve and validate, and nothing else. Registering the compaction
capability is what rewrites a request; leaving it out sends the transcript untouched,
which was never a choice a host could make before.
The boundary is the recorded question identity rather than message shape, so a
resumption compacts what lies below the question in progress instead of switching
compaction off for the whole run. The newest earlier evidence return carries the
capsule and every other becomes a receipt, so one capsule exists by construction and
every return stays paired with its call.
Pictures of cited evidence are fetched through the capability that retrieved them and
re-attached beside the capsule with fresh labels. Ownership of a picture on the wire
requires the machine tag we write and an image directly after it, since neither
position nor prose is proof: several tools' results can arrive in one request, and a
user quoting our wording above their own picture had it removed. A picture that cannot
be fetched or decoded is emitted with neither its image nor its label.
The chat TUI and the example backend register the compactor, being multi-turn.
`client.ask`, `client.analyze` and the MCP tools do not: a single-shot question has
nothing earlier to compact.
`EvidenceCompactionCapability` reads what the evidence capabilities recorded out of
the run registry, and `build_capsule` renders it: every cited item, grouped by the
question that last cited it, newest group first, each rendered once, with the
pictures of cited evidence and the labels that must accompany them. Discovery runs
one way and reads only, so no capability holds a reference to another and a host
running one, both or neither needs no wiring change.
Everything cited is kept whole and everything else is dropped. There is no character
budget, no picture cap and nothing to configure: a cap would only half-rescue models
that fail on long conversations regardless, and a host that needs earlier evidence
pruned can compact its own requests further.
A capability reports which of its tools produce evidence, so a cite acknowledgement
is never mistaken for one. Pictures are identified by owner, document and reference,
so one figure cited through overlapping chunks is attached once while the same
reference in another document stays a different picture.
The builder does no I/O and never sees the message history, so a picture travels with
its label and the caller fetches the bytes. Nothing reaches the wire yet.
A question identity is unset until a run establishes it. Testing whether the
record exists cannot stand in for that: a host with no state to send seeds a
default record, and a default record is truthy, so a resumption missing its real
state would have proceeded as question zero.
Every way of recording a message count now refuses one behind what is already
stored, through one shared check: a new identity, an evidence outcome and a
declaration, each against the newest identity, evidence epoch and declaration
epoch. Identities and epochs are only comparable while the conversation grows,
and `before_model_request` results are assigned back onto history, so that is a
constraint on the host rather than a guarantee of the framework. Left unchecked,
an evidence outcome moving backwards freezes every later declaration as stale,
and a declaration moving backwards replaces a newer one with an older one and
revives the answer it grounded.
The searches, citations and executions of a question in progress survive a
resumption. Clearing them cost the results the model was still answering from: a
citation afterwards recorded no provenance and could not resolve against the
expanded result it had seen, falling through to a database lookup.
A code execution counts as evidence when it succeeded or printed something. A
raised error with an empty stdout grounds nothing.
`CapabilityEvidenceRecord` holds the relationships a transcript cannot express:
which chunks a capability retrieved, which it cited, in which questions, and at
which point in the conversation. RAG and analysis each own one in their own state
namespace. Nothing is co-written: the host's state is JSON storage, so a shared
record would be overwritten by whichever capability synced last, and merging
happens in transient per-request views instead.
Both clocks are derived from the conversation rather than counted locally, so
every participant computes the same values without sharing a counter. Question
identity is the message count when the question arrived; epoch is the message
count at an outcome. Epochs are therefore globally comparable, which is what
lets `citation_status` require a declaration to follow the newest evidence of
every capability, and what makes equal epochs mean one request.
A declaration is written only after `resolve_citations` succeeds, so a call
naming only unresolvable ids is not a citation. Status is derived, never stored,
so refs and status cannot contradict.
Resuming a question requires the host to carry the capability state from the run
being resumed. Without it the identity of the question in progress is unknowable,
and adopting the current message count would relabel that question as a new one
and judge every declaration in it against the wrong identity.
Nothing reads the records yet and no wire behaviour changes.
deferred_tool_results may arrive with a non-empty prompt, so the absence of a
prompt cannot be the only test for a resumption. Reproduced: resuming a live
question that way replaced its search result with the earlier-question notice
while the deferred result arrived alongside it.
_is_resumption accepts either signal — no prompt, or a history ending with a
request the model has not answered or a response whose tool calls have no
returns. A settled history ends with the previous answer, so a genuinely new
question is unaffected.
A new prompt on top of an unanswered tail is ambiguous and now counts as a
continuation: compacting costs the answer if it is one, while not compacting
only costs a larger request.
A run carrying no prompt is continuing a question rather than asking one:
pydantic-ai resumes that way for deferred tool results, interruptions and
suspended responses. len(ctx.messages) then counts the live question's own
messages, so its search result was replaced by the earlier-question notice and
the model was asked to answer with the evidence removed. Reproduced: resuming
with an in-flight history left a notice where the only evidence was.
Switch compaction off for the whole run when ctx.prompt is None. The absence of
a prompt is the signal rather than the message layout — the resume shapes differ
from each other, and deriving the boundary from layout is what broke this to
begin with.
_compact_old_tool_returns ran in before_model_request, whose result core
assigns back onto ctx.state.message_history, so the trim reached
all_messages() and every host that persists a thread. It now runs in
wrap_model_request, which operates on a detached list: the model sees the
trimmed history, the host keeps what it retrieved.
Content attached to a ToolReturn arrives as its own UserPromptPart in the
same ModelRequest as the ToolReturnPart, so the turn-boundary scan read an
image-bearing search result as a new user turn and discarded evidence
retrieved earlier in the same turn. _is_user_turn() now requires a request
with no tool returns.
Page images on a replaced return stay. Dropping them with their text bounds
context growth, but a follow-up about a figure already shown ("what colour
is that box?") carries no terms that could retrieve it again: measured on
gemma4-26b against two ORB figures, removing the image turned both answers
into "I cannot find enough information", and keeping it answers correctly.
Bounding that growth needs to preserve cited figures, which is a separate
change.
The replacement notice no longer claims citations remain in state;
_clear_invocation_state has cleared them by then.
The request-limit notice said only the cite tool remained available, but
chat registers rag and analysis in one agent, so exhausting analysis
claimed rag_search was gone too. Scoped to the capability's own tools.
The cite window was counted over every model request once loaded, so
turns spent on another capability expired it before the model was ever
placed where citing was the obvious move. Count only requests whose
preceding response called one of this capability's tools; engagement is
also the only thing that can loop, which is all the bound guards against.
Also: _count_tool_traffic returns a named tuple rather than four bare
ints, and counts failures only for this capability's tools, so host-tool
retries and output-validation retries no longer read as its failures.
The notice told the model to answer from what it had the moment
qa.max_searches ran out, while up to 15 code executions remained and
in-code search() does not count against that budget. It now names the
spent tool and points at whichever evidence tool still has budget,
falling back to answer-and-cite only when none do.
Also count RetryPromptPart in n_failed_tools: _cite rejects with
ModelRetry, so a run whose every cite attempt was refused reported zero
failures. And note that n_requests is the run's request count, which
tracks a capability's own budget only while it stays loaded.
- _budget_notice no longer names the cite tool after prepare_tools has
withdrawn it; the post-grace state gets the plain no-tools text back.
- Split search-budget rejections from any failed tool call: the code tool
raises ToolFailed for every error in model-written Python, so
budget_spent was true for a ZeroDivisionError.
- docs/capabilities/rag.md described the old single-turn removal.
- Drop the rationale clause from the CHANGELOG entry.
50 executions across 40 cases in an 822-case run died on
'_io.TextIOWrapper' object is not iterable, and those cases scored 37.5%
judged against 60.1% and cited 12.5% against 55.2%.
