Two membership-propagation defects let an agent team silently lose
members — both observed live on Will's store (Sietch Tabr), not
hypothetical.
**Stale `persona_ids` dropped on save.** Team records written before
persona ids were namespaced hold bare slugs (`thufir`) instead of the
namespaced id (`sietch-tabr:thufir`). Nothing rewrites them, and the
interactive save path (`ensure_persona_ids_are_active`) *drops* any id
it cannot resolve — so the next in-app save shrinks the team. This nuked
four of five Sietch Tabr members.
**`team_id` drifts from team membership.** Team instructions are
injected at spawn by matching `record.team_id`
(`spawn_snapshot::effective_team_instructions`), so an instance's
binding must track its persona's membership. It drifts two ways: adding
a persona to a team leaves the persona's already-running instances at
`team_id: null` (a member in the roster but not in behavior — seen
twice, Gurney and Hayt), and removing a persona while keeping its agents
leaves the kept instance bound to a team that no longer lists it (still
drawing that team's instructions at spawn).
## Fix
A boot migration (`migration/team_membership.rs`) heals existing stores
in one pass over `teams.json` + `managed-agents.json`:
- **Rewrite stale ids.** A stale id is one no definition slug resolves.
Its target is the definition whose `source_team_persona_slug` equals the
bare slug, scoped to the team's source team (via `source_dir` for a
directory-backed team, or the unique `source_team` among resolvable
members for a detached one). Rewrite only when exactly one candidate
matches; zero or many leave the id in place — strictly safer than the
save path, which drops it.
- **Repair `team_id`.** Backfill an instance whose persona is a team
member but whose own binding is unset, and heal a stale binding whose
team no longer lists the persona (re-point when exactly one *other* team
claims it, otherwise unbind). Both directions gate on single-team
evidence — a persona spanning several teams has none (JSON team order is
not ownership), so it is left as-is and logged. A binding whose team
still lists the persona is authoritative and never touched.
Runs BEFORE `detach_directory_backed_teams` (so a not-yet-detached team
can still be scoped by its `source_dir`) and before any UI save can drop
an id. Rewrite-or-leave converges to a fixed point, so a second boot is
a no-op; the store is backed up once before either write.
The edit path (`commands/teams.rs`) propagates a membership change to
live instances immediately, without waiting for the next boot, scoped to
the delta between the pre-edit and post-edit rosters:
- **Added personas** (on the team now, not before) backfill `team_id` on
their unbound instances. An explicit add is legitimate binding evidence
even for a persona shared across teams — unlike the order-blind boot
case.
- **Removed personas** (on the team before, not now) clear `team_id` on
instances bound to *this* team (bindings to other teams are untouched),
so a "keep agents" removal stops feeding a kept instance the old team's
instructions.
- **Delta-scoping keeps a metadata-only edit inert:** with no roster
change, no instance is re-pointed — a shared unbound persona is never
silently bound to whichever team was edited last.
Propagation is best-effort after the authoritative `save_teams`
(mirroring `retain_team_pending`): the team already exists on disk, and
boot repair is the designed retry for a stale/unset binding, so a
secondary `managed-agents.json` write failure no longer fails a command
whose team write succeeded — which would otherwise let a UI retry mint a
duplicate team.
---------
Signed-off-by: Will Pfleger <pfleger.will@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Duncan <dcfd242e557282d7a1e2cf2e6877522682f1e5c6156dc92ca7d90eaedd3b0f95@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
Agents in a team receive two `Team Instructions` blocks per turn, and
the observer feed renders two Team Instructions cards for them.
There are two producers. `with_team()` in `crates/buzz-acp/src/pool.rs`
appends the LIVE `[Team Instructions]` block from the runtime
`TeamRecord` — that one is correct. The second is baked into the stored
`system_prompt` itself: records written before the runtime framing
landed were composed by the now-removed `compose_prompt()` in
`buzz-persona`, which appended `"\n\n---\n# Team Instructions\n"` plus a
frozen copy of the team instructions. So an affected agent is fed a
stale roster ahead of the current one, and the transcript parser —
correctly — reports both.
Fixing this in `parseSystemPromptSections` would hide the symptom while
the agent kept receiving the stale bytes, so the suffix is removed at
rest by a boot migration.
`strip_baked_team_instructions` splits each stored `system_prompt` at
the LAST occurrence of the exact delimiter and keeps the text before it.
Last-occurrence matches the parser's own `lastIndexOf` guard: a persona
body may quote a delimiter-shaped passage, and only the final one is the
producer boundary. The match is byte-exact — a bare `---`, a `# Team
Instructions` heading at a different position, or a single preceding
newline are author content and are left alone. It applies to every
record regardless of `team_id` / `persona_id` / `pubkey`: the key-less
definition records carry the suffix exactly as the instances minted from
them do. A prompt that was nothing but the suffix becomes `None`, not
`Some("")`, matching the absent-prompt convention in
`AgentDefinition::into_agent_record`.
Stripping a definition's prompt changes its `persona_content_hash`,
which is the drift basis behind the Agents-menu "out of date" badge.
Left alone, every linked instance would light up stale for a change the
user never made. The migration therefore advances the pin of instances
whose `persona_source_version` still equals the definition's PRE-strip
hash — the same conditional `refresh_builtin_agent_avatars` already
uses. An instance that had genuinely drifted keeps its stale pin, and
its badge.
The migration runs after `fold_personas_into_agent_store` so definitions
lifted out of the legacy `personas.json` are cleaned in the same boot,
and before `backfill_standalone_agents` so a manufactured definition
never snapshots a suffix about to be removed. It writes only when at
least one record changed, so a second boot is a true no-op, and takes a
create-if-absent backup at
`managed-agents.json.pre-team-suffix-strip.bak` following the
`pre-backfill.bak` contract — a re-run after a partial failure cannot
replace the pristine backup with a half-migrated snapshot. An
unparseable store errors without writing and without taking a backup,
leaving the file for manual recovery.
Pass 5's legacy branch in `agentSessionTranscriptHelpers.ts` is
deliberately untouched: un-migrated installs and snapshot imports still
need it.
---------
Signed-off-by: Will Pfleger <pfleger.will@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: npub1mn7jgtj4w2pd0g0zeuhxsa6jy6p0rewxz4kujt98my82ahfmp72sxjexk7 <dcfd242e557282d7a1e2cf2e6877522682f1e5c6156dc92ca7d90eaedd3b0f95@buzz.block.builderlab.xyz>
