dispatchHarness was capping event.Body at 4096 bytes before handing it to the subprocess/docker harness. Those backends write the body to a message.json file in the per-run workdir (bind-mounted into the container) and have no shell/env-var size limits, so silent truncation was hostile. The doc-gardener inspector routinely produces 10-20 KiB findings JSON (drift report with per-flag evidence). Truncation cut off the trailing artifact.findings entries + artifact.recommendation, making the report look incomplete to the critic — which then spuriously REVISE'd, blowing the 600s deadline. The K8s job path still truncates in createJob() because Kubernetes imposes a 1 MiB env-var cap and most shells misbehave past a few KiB. That's a separate code path, untouched. Also: critic prompt rewrite (examples/doc-gardener/configs/critic.json). The old critic spec told the critic to "spot-check evidence by re-running the inspector's commands". That's structurally wrong: the critic runs in a fresh container with no install state, so re-running mcpproxy --help always fails and produces a false REVISE. New prompt says: audit by structural consistency only, never run shell commands to re-verify, default to FINAL, never REVISE more than once, and FINAL the failure summary back to the owner when the inspector reports status: failed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
SynapBus examples
Runnable demos of SynapBus features. Each example is self-contained under its own directory, launches an isolated synapbus instance on a distinct port, and cleans up after itself.
| Example | Feature | Real LLM? | Port |
|---|---|---|---|
cold-topic-explainer/ |
Reactive agent triggers + subprocess harness — three Gemini agents (decomposer → writer → critic) collaborate via DMs to produce a 3-paragraph explainer, with real LLM calls end-to-end. | ✅ yes (gemini CLI) |
18088 |
doc-gardener/ |
Dynamic agent spawning (spec 018) — a coordinator meta-agent decomposes a goal into a task tree, spawns specialists with config_hash-rooted trust + delegation-cap enforcement, runs them through the state machine, generates a rich HTML report. |
❌ v1 is synthetic (primitives demo); real LLM coordinator is a follow-up PR | 18089 |
Quick start
Pick an example, cd into it, and follow its README. In general:
cd examples/<name>
./start.sh # rebuild + launch an isolated synapbus instance
./run_task.sh # drive the demo flow
./report.sh # (where applicable) render an HTML report
./stop.sh # shut down
Both examples use the same layout for consistency:
examples/<name>/
├── start.sh # build & launch
├── run_task.sh # execute the demo flow
├── stop.sh # shut down
├── report.sh # (doc-gardener only) render HTML report
├── bin/
│ ├── synapbus # built from the current checkout
│ └── <helper> # example-specific driver binary
├── configs/ # per-agent JSON configs (harness_config, prompts, etc.)
├── data/ # isolated SQLite DB + attachment store + sockets
├── synapbus.log # server stdout+stderr
└── README.md # example-specific docs
What each example proves
- cold-topic-explainer proves that the SynapBus reactor + subprocess harness can drive a real multi-agent loop with three distinct LLMs, with depth and budget guards, OpenTelemetry tracing, and harness_runs accounting.
- doc-gardener proves that the dynamic-agent-spawning data primitives —
goals,goal_taskswith denormalized ancestry, atomic optimistic-lock claim,config_hash-keyed reputation ledger, delegation-cap enforcement, per-billing-code cost rollup — work end-to-end against real SQLite, and feed a rich HTML report.
The two examples are complementary: cold-topic-explainer exercises the runtime path (reactor → harness → LLM → DMs), doc-gardener exercises the work-tracking path (goals → tasks → trust → report). A future example will combine them into a full LLM-driven coordinator loop.
Global prereqs
- Go 1.25+
sqlite3,curl,jqon$PATH- A free TCP port per example (see table above)
- For
cold-topic-explaineronly:geminiCLI authenticated viagemini auth login
Troubleshooting
- Port already in use: set
SYNAPBUS_PORT=18090 ./start.sh(each example honors the env var). - Web UI is blank: rebuild the embedded Svelte SPA with
make webfrom the repo root once, then re-run./start.sh. - Stale binary: delete the example's
bin/directory and rerun./start.shto force a rebuild.