A Conversational Console for a Running Build

This sprint was asked to define the neutral conversation contract before any assistant existed to answer it. A fresh agent could hold it because the work was type-level: add an inbound user message command, outbound assistant reply events, correlation, and history encoding while leaving older consumers additive. The run record shows no stress here, which fits a foundation that was narrow and mechanically testable.

This slice gave the assistant its own harness and model resolution without changing the build, review, plan, or utility roles. It was contained because the brief directed the agent to reuse the existing harness precedence machinery instead of creating another configuration system. The sprint stayed green across its boundary, leaving the later runner a single resolver to call.

This sprint isolated persistence from the act of talking to a model. Its done line was an append and replay API under the run artifacts, with recorded tool effects, so the agent could test file format behavior without a live engine or pane. The cut held cleanly: no retry or re-plan was needed before later sprints depended on the transcript.

This piece carried the turn runner itself, after selection and transcript storage were already available. The brief kept it agent-sized by making it a single entry point: read prior turns, run one assistant reply through the harness seam, emit reply events, then append the completed turn. It stayed within the existing runner machinery and did not draw a re-plan.

This was the backend's first hard boundary: the assistant had to reach the run-scoped tool host inside the same process as the engine. The sprint carried in-process MCP lifetime, live prompt attachment, and sandboxed shell effects, so review forced a re-plan before the backend capstone could lean on it. The stress belongs here because the agent was no longer shaping data; it was connecting shared live channels.

The capstone sprint wired the backend parts into the engine command stream and proved them with a mock engine rather than a TUI. It inherited the MCP re-plan from the prior sprint and then hit an execution failure before retrying to green. That locates the remaining difficulty in demultiplexing live commands and proving a stateful end-to-end assistant turn.

This sprint rendered an expanded pane from already defined reply events. A fresh agent could focus on the TUI fold and layout because it was explicitly told not to rebuild the backend. The green boundary says the prior event contract gave the pane enough stable input to add transcript state and independent scroll without disturbing the feed.

This was a contained interaction sprint on top of the expanded pane. It owned the pane presentation flag, unread counting, and hit-tested toggle behavior, while preserving the existing feed and sidebar behavior. The absence of run stress fits a local state-machine change with clear snapshot and event tests.

The final pane sprint closed the user-facing round trip: typed input became a chat command and reply events rendered back into the same transcript. It was scoped to reusing the existing text input widget and command channel, which kept the fresh agent out of backend internals. The sprint stayed green and completed the pane milestone without re-opening earlier work.

This sprint introduced the common primitive for turning an error stop into an answer-needed investigation. Its boundary was tricky enough that review forced a re-plan: the engine had to keep the success path unchanged while an interactive failure blocked for a directive and headless mode still resolved promptly. The piece was rightly isolated before merge conflicts reused it.

This was the hardest recovery slice: it attached the support surface to worktree merge conflicts while preserving the existing clean-merge and rollback rules. The brief named a separate policy problem too, because a real conflict investigation cannot inherit the short no-answer backstop used for headless prompts. The sprint failed in execution once, retried, and still drew a re-plan, which matches the size of that boundary.

This final sprint was smaller because the surfaces and backstop split were already in place. It made the record complete: not only the assistant turns and shell effects, but also the surfaced stop or conflict lifecycle had to be observable after the fact. The sprint stayed green, which fits a consolidation pass over already established recovery paths.