0227: Prompt context carries only news

Status: accepted (2026-10-31) · Scope: product tier (core/agents/render, hooks, agents status)

Context

Everything the prompt hook injects is re-read on every later turn of the session. Three parts of it repeated without carrying anything new:

• The peer table’s change key included each peer’s activity, which changes on nearly every peer tool call. In a busy checkout the table reprinted on most prompts.
• The table listed every session in the coordination view, including ones with no heartbeat for hours, and it shortened an unnamed session to an 8-character instance-id prefix. Time-ordered ids share that prefix, so two sessions read as one name listed twice.
• The Stop-enforced turn-ritual reminder was injected on every prompt, even though the Stop hook already enforces the ritual on every tool turn.

The closing agents status box also printed session age, edit counts, activity, parent evidence, context use, and a multi-line resource summary on every turn, when most of those rows report nothing an operator acts on.

Decision

• Peer-table key. The key covers the live peer set (identity fields), each peer’s lifecycle, and its claimed files. Activity and task text still render but no longer trigger a reprint.
• Stale peers. A peer whose last heartbeat is older than coord.freshness_seconds is left out of the table and counted in its subtable’s +N more line. A table with no live peers prints nothing. agents status and agents list still report every session.
• Names. An unnamed row shows its full instance id; a name shared by two live rows carries each row’s instance id.
• Ritual reminder. Shown on a session’s first prompt, again when the context generation advances after a compaction, and again on the prompt after any turn the Stop hook blocked. Stop enforcement is unchanged, so a missed ritual still costs one retry, which re-arms the reminder.
• Status box. The default box shows task, lifecycle, files, peers, and time (with the turn duration). parent appears on a conflict, context at 80% or more, and resources when the assessment is elevated or critical. --full prints every row and --json is unchanged. The Stop hook detects the box by its ┌─ agent- title, so no row is load-bearing.

Alternatives considered

• Hash only the peer count. Rejected: a file claim is the most important peer change and would not register.
• Keep the per-prompt ritual reminder. Rejected because enforcement already exists; the reminder’s value is highest before the first reply and right after a failure, which is where it now appears.
• Drop stale sessions from the view entirely. Rejected: liveness is a rendering concern here, and the authoritative view must keep them.

Consequences

Bounced turns could rise if the first-prompt reminder is not enough. The re-arm on bounce bounds that to one retry per lapse, and reverting is local to renderTurnRitualReminder.