tasks: card 45 — a past agent session is labelled You
The Sessions list shows agent names only for runs this board process launched; anything replayed from disk loses its agent id and falls through to the You branch of session_label(). Diagnosis and evidence in the card.
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# 45 — A past agent session is labelled "You", because "You" is what the board says when it does not know
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**Status:** Backlog
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**Priority:** High — the flight recorder misattributes work, and
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misattribution is worse than an absence: the list looks complete
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**Type:** Bug
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Sessions shows agent names only for agents this board process launched.
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Every session read back from disk loses its agent id, and the label falls
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through to `You · <id>` — so past agent runs do not vanish from the list,
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they appear as the human's own sessions. What looks like "several sessions
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of me and no old agents" is one bug: the old agents *are* the several
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sessions of me.
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## Context
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The label is decided in one place, `manager/core/events.py:27`:
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```python
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def session_label(meta: dict) -> str:
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agent_id = meta.get("agentId") or ""
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if agent_id:
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record = state.AGENTS.get(agent_id) or {}
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...
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return f"{who} · #{num.group(1)}" if num else who
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return f"You · {meta['id'][:8]}"
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```
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**"You" is not a positive identification. It is the `else`.** Anything the
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board cannot attribute to an agent it attributes to the person.
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That is fine while the board is up. `ingest_event` (`:41`) reads
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`raw["agent"]` — the adapter puts `BOARD_AGENT_ID` there
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(`adapters/claude/emit.py:194`, from the child env set in
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`agents.py:138`) — and stores it on the session meta, so a live run reads
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`Reed`, `Juno`, `Basil`.
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It breaks at the disk boundary, in two steps:
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1. **The agent id is never persisted.** The `event` dict built in
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`ingest_event` (`:47-59`) carries `ts`, `session`, `kind`, `summary`
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and optionally `file` / `cmd` / `detail` / `ok`. The agent id is read
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into the *session registry* and never copied into the *event*, and the
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event is what `state.persist()` writes. Verified on this repo's own
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state: every persisted event's keys are
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`['kind', 'session', 'summary', 'ts']`, and of 63 files in
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`manager/local/state/sessions/`, the only one containing the string
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`"agent"` is `board.jsonl` — a different log.
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2. **So the replay cannot recover it.** `load_disk_sessions()` (`:96`)
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rebuilds each session's meta with `"agentId": None` hardcoded. It is
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not an oversight in that function — the data is not on disk to read.
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`session_label()` then takes the `else`.
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The evidence, from this checkout while the card was written. Two rows in
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Sessions read `You`, and their last persisted event is:
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```
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be5408af… kind: report "Nell's report on 41-the-drawer-renders-…"
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d1a65161… kind: report "Piper's report on 35-the-site-reads-on-a-phone.md"
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```
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Nell and Piper are agents. Their sessions are wearing the user's label,
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and carrying their own closing reports underneath it.
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A third thing compounds it: `state.AGENTS` is memory-only
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(`state.py:22`), so even with the id restored, the *name* would be gone
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after a restart — the best today's fallback could say is `Agent · #41`.
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The same gap is why a replayed session wears no model chip
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(`board.html:1575` resolves it through the live agent list).
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**Affected areas:** `manager/core/events.py` (event shape, replay,
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labelling) and `manager/core/state.py` (what a session's identity is and
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where it lives).
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## What to build
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- **Persist who a session belonged to.** The smallest fix is one more key
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on the persisted event; the better one is a per-session identity record
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written once when the session is first linked — `agentId`, the agent's
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name, its model, its task — because the name and model are the parts a
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restart loses and neither can be recovered from an event stream.
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- **Read it back in `load_disk_sessions()`**, so a replayed session
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arrives with the same label it had while it ran.
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- **Stop asserting "You" when the board does not know.** After the fix,
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absence of an agent id on a *live* session still means the person — a
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human Claude Code session genuinely sends none. For a session replayed
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from an old file that predates persistence, absence means unknown, and
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the label should say something neutral rather than claim it was you.
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Old logs must not be retro-attributed, in either direction.
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- **Keep the fallbacks honest and distinct.** `Agent` when the id is
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known and the name is not; the name when the name was persisted;
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neutral when nothing was recorded. Three different states, three
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different words.
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- **Let the model chip follow.** If the model is persisted with the
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identity, a replayed session can wear its chip instead of the board
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saying nothing rather than guessing — that rule was written for a board
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that had nothing to read.
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**Out of scope** — tempting neighbours left alone:
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- Making `state.AGENTS` a durable registry of every run ever launched.
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This card needs a session to remember who it was, not the board to
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remember every agent.
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- The Sessions list's ordering, filters or timeline rendering.
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- `board.jsonl` and the board event log, which are a separate stream.
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- Retro-labelling the sessions already on disk. They have no id to
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recover; a migration that guesses from `"<Name>'s report on …"` would
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be a heuristic in the one place that should not have one.
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## Acceptance
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- [ ] Given an agent session that ran before the current board process,
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when Sessions is opened, then the row carries the agent's name and
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task — not `You`.
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- [ ] Given a human session, when it is replayed from disk, then it still
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reads `You` — this fix does not relabel the person's own sessions.
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- [ ] Given a session file written before this change (no identity
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recorded), when it loads, then it is labelled neutrally and no row
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claims to be you.
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- [ ] Restarting the board does not change any session's label.
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- [ ] A replayed agent session shows its model chip, or the board keeps
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saying nothing — but the same way every time, not by accident of
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what happens to be in memory.
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- [ ] Edge case: a session whose events arrived before its agent id did
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(the id is attached on a later event) is labelled correctly after
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the fact, as it is today.
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## Notes
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The design principle this breaks is one the project states elsewhere: the
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board says nothing rather than guessing — that is why a session with no
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known model wears no chip. Labelling an unattributable session `You` is
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the opposite of that rule, and it is load-bearing here because the
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Sessions view is a flight recorder. A gap in it is obvious; a confident
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wrong name is not.
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**Risks** — session files are append-only JSONL read by
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`load_disk_sessions()` with a bare `json.JSONDecodeError` guard. Whatever
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shape the identity takes, a file written by the old code and a file
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written by the new one both have to load; a header line prepended to
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existing files would break every reader that assumes line one is an
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event.
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