The guard accepted one carried record as covering the whole request, so a host
retaining only the RAG namespace had its earlier analysis evidence replaced by
receipts and lost, with the RAG record making the loss look accounted for.
Each capability is now judged on its own, and only when its own evidence is at
stake: another capability's record says nothing about this one's, and requiring
every record would stop a host that registers both capabilities and only ever
uses one.
Both optional capabilities read what earlier questions retrieved and cited from
the capability's state, so a host that carries only the message history hands
every run an empty record. Compaction then replaced the earlier evidence with
receipts and retained nothing, and the loss was invisible: the citations the host
already displayed were still there. It now refuses when it finds evidence from an
earlier question and no record of what that question cited.
`state_carried` reaches the optional capabilities through discovery, so the
refusal distinguishes a host that never carries state from a question that simply
cited nothing.
The documentation taught the pattern that breaks: the compose example is now
stateful and the requirement is stated where each capability is introduced.
The app's browser storage was doing exactly this, keeping only the fields the UI
reads. It now persists the whole namespace map, so the citation policy's
violations survive a reload as well as the evidence record.
`CitationPolicyCapability` makes the single enforcement decision, whatever mix of
evidence capabilities is registered: two of them must not each demand a citation for
one answer. It decides in `after_model_request`, when a response carries no tool calls
and the question can still be redirected. An explicitly ungrounded answer is a
declaration and is left alone; a question that gathered no evidence is left alone too,
read from the ledger rather than from a searches dict that a new question clears. When
the cite tool is already withdrawn the question is recorded in
`CitationPolicyState.violations` instead of pointing the model at a tool that is gone.
Registering it is the only switch. `DiscoveredEvidence` and discovery move to
`capabilities.evidence` so both optional capabilities share them, and `cite_available`
joins `evidence_tool_names` as public for the same reason.
Measured on Qwen3.6-35B over two arms of 37 questions, 29 of them unanswerable from
the corpus: explicit ungrounded declarations rose from 23 to 26, grounded answers to
unanswerable questions fell from 4 to 2, answerable questions stayed at 8 of 8, and
one redirect fired in the whole arm. Reading every answer found no invented grounding.
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.
