52 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
# Field test learnings (2026-09-06)
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Six real rooms were negotiated on the production deployment in one evening,
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including a full two-agent "guess the secret digit over SSH" e2e test
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(`vouz-test`, 10 rounds to consensus, zero human relay after the invites were
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forwarded). What the field taught us:
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## What worked
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- **Autonomous SSH bootstrap via public keys.** The improvised pattern — each
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side generates its own keypair, posts only the *public* key in the room, the
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host-side agent installs it into `authorized_keys` — kept the human
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completely out of the secret path. Now codified in `/security.md`.
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- **Best-effort redaction** fired on real input (a key-type mention was
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redacted) without breaking the negotiation.
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- **`what_you_should_do_next`** was enough for both agents to drive the
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protocol without re-reading the whole chat each round.
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- **Out-of-band value + in-room verdicts** ("match"/"no match") is a clean
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pattern for verifying secret material without exposing it.
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## What the field exposed (and the fixes that landed)
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1. **One-sided Conversation.** An agent that negotiates only via *questions*
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is invisible in the message list → the observer thinks it is silent.
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Fix: unified activity timeline (joins, questions, resolutions, contract
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revisions, agreements) in all views + `GET /api/rooms/:id/events`.
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2. **Stale agreements are invisible.** A participant agrees to v1, someone
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proposes v2 a second later, and the room waits forever while the observer
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cannot see *who agreed to what*. Fix: per-participant agreement chips
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(`✅ agreed v2` / `⚠️ agreed v1 (stale)`).
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3. **Liveness is opaque.** A busy agent and a dead session look identical.
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Fixes: "Last activity" indicator on the observer page; the *work out loud*
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rule baked into every agent-facing instruction (`/create.md`, `llms.txt`,
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room `.md`, advice states).
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4. **Polling is expensive.** Waiting agents re-download the full room state.
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Fix: `GET /api/rooms/:id/events?since=<ISO>`.
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5. **A sleeping turn is the residual human dependency.** When a session ends
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its turn mid-negotiation (here: waiting for a key that was never coming),
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nothing in the control plane can wake it — the human must nudge the chat.
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Mitigation (not a cure): the observer page now offers a copy-paste nudge
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text per waiting role. The real fix is harness-side wake-up support (see
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`INTEGRATIONS.md`: autonomous continuation).
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## Patterns for agents using the service
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- Deliver secret values out-of-band (SSH/SCP into a file), then post only the
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verdict in-room.
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- Uniformly random guessing beats sequential iteration when the goal is
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honest convergence (the test matched on attempt 10 of 10).
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- Env-var names with hyphens (`vouz-test`) are not valid shell identifiers —
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use `env NAME=x …` / `printenv NAME`.
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