sense §11: what a running agent receives when an observation surfaces to it #584
2026-11-02
sense §11: what a running agent receives when an observation surfaces to it
All checks were successful
standards workspaces build + test / which workspaces this change touches (pull_request) Successful in 22s
standards workspaces build + test / macOS energy backends (pull_request) Has been skipped
standards workspaces build + test / sense-rs (sense/sense-rs, sense-rs, linux) (pull_request) Successful in 25s
repository checks / lockfiles, advisories, tests in CI, workflow hygiene, spec and section references, public text (pull_request) Successful in 3m26s
§5 decides whether an observation is worth attention and §8 seals that decision. Neither says what the recipient *receives*. Where the recipient is a person that is right — the form is a UI concern and a non-goal (§1.6). Where the recipient is a running agent it is not, because the delivery enters the agent's own record of what it has been told, and the standard had nothing to say about a frame that record has to hold. Three plausible forms each corrupt that record, which is why the form is normative rather than a matter of taste: - **as a result on a call the agent made** — the agent made no such call, and a record in which every result answers a call cannot hold one that answers nothing without ceasing to mean that; - **as the principal's own words** — the principal did not say it, and an auditor reading the record afterwards could no longer separate what the agent was *asked* from what it was *told*; - **outside the order** — what an agent did depends on when it learned a thing, so an observation lifted out of order silently changes what the record says it knew at each earlier point. So a surfaced observation delivered to an agent is an **injected observation**: a distinctly-kinded frame occupying one position in the recipient's order, stating the surfacing link it carries out (§8, by content address, so the delivery cites a sealed decision instead of restating it), the event's id and trust level (§2, bound in so a delivery cannot re-tag what it carries), its destination, the authority under which a parked recipient was woken, and the joules the delivery charged — which is not the joules §5 already charged for deciding to surface. The injected kind may not be offered to the agent as something it can author, and a host must refuse the recipient authoring one: an agent able to author its own observations could manufacture a record of having been told something, which is the one thing the frame exists to witness. §11.1 — the destination is stated, never inferred `own` puts the observation in the recipient's own record, so everything it does afterwards was done knowing it. `derived` puts it in a record that inherits the recipient's context, and the recipient's own record gains that record's *outcome*, not the observation — so the recipient never came to know the observation itself. An auditor reading a recipient's record has to be able to tell that an observation was handled elsewhere rather than never delivered, so the two may not be distinguished by shape alone. §11.2 — four conditions refused rather than recorded 1. **A hold is not deliverable.** §8 chains holds precisely so a decision not to surface cannot be quietly forgotten. Delivering one is that fault in the other direction. 2. **The recipient is not the author**, as a steering amendment's amender must differ from its author (JCP §4.7). 3. **A wake needs an authority** — the fire of a standing grant (JCP §4.6). Already-running names none, which is a different fact from a wake nobody permitted, and the two do not share a shape: the absent case carries no key rather than a null, so the distinction is in the frame's address. 4. **A delivery that happened cannot cost nothing.** Something ran: the recipient read the frame. Zero is not a measurement, and where a host cannot measure it estimates and labels (§7) rather than reporting nothing. This is the same rule as a parked run not being free, applied to the other side of the boundary. Conformance class C6, and the published pack gains three frame addresses — the same delivery to each destination, and one that needed a wake against one that did not — plus the four refusals as stable tokens rather than prose, so a reworded message does not move a vector. `tests/pack.rs` holds all of it to the file and asserts the three addresses stay distinct: if the destination or the wake stopped being bound in, two would collapse into one and a delivery could be rewritten after the fact without changing what it addresses to. Every published value from the five existing classes is unchanged. One implementation note. The harness picks its surfaced and held links from the C5 log **by what they decided, not by position** — the first attempt indexed `entries()[1]` as the hold, and that fixture's budget surfaces the first two, so the refusal silently passed as a success. Selecting by decision means a later change to the fixture's budget cannot quietly stop testing a refusal. Evidence, on the Framework box (nothing on the CI host, which is mid-matrix for another PR): clippy `-D warnings` clean over the workspace, every workspace test passes including the nine conformance classes and the five published-pack checks. `check-comparative-prose.sh` and `check-no-vanity-metrics.sh` clean. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>