Persist the agent registry explicitly

Status: accepted

The root session persists an explicit agent registry rather than reconstructing identities from rendered root transcript events. Each record owns its opaque storage ID, canonical and parent paths, role and configuration snapshot, current activity, unread mailbox, and session-relative conversation location. Root and child transcript records remain presentation, context, and audit history; compaction or rendering changes cannot alter addressability or topology.

Live transitions

Published records remain serializable while provider setup yields. A retained follow-up clears its prior result before entering starting, and restores it on dispatch error or quit. Execution mail delivered during that interval remains queued independently of the follow-up outcome. Active records never serialize a previous settled result; validation retains that invariant.

Conversation residency

Restoring a registry does not load its idle conversations. Follow-up, history resource access and explicit Emacs inspection hydrate the selected identity through one persistence entry point. Active abandoned turns still hydrate before recovery so their partial responses enter the interruption result. Frozen configuration, mailbox and topology do not depend on buffer residency. Failed hydration does not publish a partial resident buffer or start a provider request.

Frozen built-in tool references resolve through their owning mevedel registrars when a cold editor has not loaded those tools yet. Registration reconstructs the same current schema without executing a tool. Unknown names and foreign-category paths remain invalid persisted data; they are not substituted with another tool.

Decision history

On 2026-09-21, a complete archive restored in 4.71 seconds, including 1.58 seconds hydrating 28 idle conversations. Deferring them reduced restore to 3.19 seconds and registry restoration to 46 ms, preserving all identities and the rendered root view. This replaces eager idle hydration while retaining eager abandoned-turn recovery. Inspection/no-save markers are restored after Org mode setup, and owned follow-ups acquire writable buffers instead of reusing inspection snapshots.

On 2026-09-23, a graphical multi-agent capture exposed execution completion during reviewer follow-up startup. The old result remained attached to the starting record until invocation admission, causing an unrelated root mailbox save to fail with Invalid live agent registry entry. Clearing it at startup, with rollback on dispatch failure, replaces that transient invalid state. A regression delivers execution mail through registry serialization during setup.