🤖 agent issue
Found by dogfooding #1334's chain end to end on a scratch repo.
A session that emits no session name gets its PR titled with the raw preset prompt, truncated mid-sentence. On squash-merge that becomes a permanent commit subject on main.
The one from the dogfood run, now a real commit on the scratch repo's main:
Open TODO_AGENTS.md and work on the FIRST open entry only. When the work (fix #1)
Where it comes from
agent-handoff.ts:749:
function agentPrTitle(agent) {
const title = agent.sessionName ?? agent.intent?.split('\n')[0]?.slice(0, 72) ?? `Session ${agent.id}`
return agent.fixes ? `${title} (fix ${agent.fixes})` : title
}The (fix #N) machinery from #1334 is correct and did its job — the issue auto-closed on merge. The problem is what it gets appended to. sessionName is the agent's own summary of the work; when the agent never emits one, the fallback is the instruction it was given, cut at 72 characters wherever that lands.
The three rungs are not equally good:
sessionName — what the work was. Correct.intent.slice(0, 72) — what the agent was told to do, mid-sentence. This is the bad one.Session ${id} — says nothing, but says nothing honestly.
The middle rung reads like a title while being neither a description of the change nor a complete sentence. It is worse than the last rung, which at least cannot mislead.
Why it matters more than a cosmetic title
- Squash-merge inherits the PR title, so this is not a transient label — it is the permanent history of the repository.
git log --oneline on a repo driven by the framework fills with truncated instructions.
- A drain preset's first line is the preset's prose, identical across every run it fires, so repeated firings produce near-identical commit subjects that say nothing about what each one changed.
- It is most likely to hit exactly where nobody is watching: unattended work, where no human sees the PR before it merges.
Worth deciding rather than patching
The narrow fix is to stop truncating a prompt into a title — drop the middle rung, so a nameless session falls through to Session ${id}. Honest, and one line.
The better fix is probably that a handoff should not open a PR without a name for its work at all: sessionName is the one rung that describes the change, and #1612 just moved PR opening onto a path where the framework composes the title. If the agent can be asked to describe its PR, it can be asked for the name too.
Not fixing it in #1616, which found it — that PR is about the CI watch reading createdAt, and this is a separate decision about what a PR title is allowed to be.
🤖 agent issue
Found by dogfooding #1334's chain end to end on a scratch repo.
A session that emits no session name gets its PR titled with the raw preset prompt, truncated mid-sentence. On squash-merge that becomes a permanent commit subject on
main.The one from the dogfood run, now a real commit on the scratch repo's
main:Where it comes from
agent-handoff.ts:749:The
(fix #N)machinery from #1334 is correct and did its job — the issue auto-closed on merge. The problem is what it gets appended to.sessionNameis the agent's own summary of the work; when the agent never emits one, the fallback is the instruction it was given, cut at 72 characters wherever that lands.The three rungs are not equally good:
sessionName— what the work was. Correct.intent.slice(0, 72)— what the agent was told to do, mid-sentence. This is the bad one.Session ${id}— says nothing, but says nothing honestly.The middle rung reads like a title while being neither a description of the change nor a complete sentence. It is worse than the last rung, which at least cannot mislead.
Why it matters more than a cosmetic title
git log --onelineon a repo driven by the framework fills with truncated instructions.Worth deciding rather than patching
The narrow fix is to stop truncating a prompt into a title — drop the middle rung, so a nameless session falls through to
Session ${id}. Honest, and one line.The better fix is probably that a handoff should not open a PR without a name for its work at all:
sessionNameis the one rung that describes the change, and #1612 just moved PR opening onto a path where the framework composes the title. If the agent can be asked to describe its PR, it can be asked for the name too.Not fixing it in #1616, which found it — that PR is about the CI watch reading
createdAt, and this is a separate decision about what a PR title is allowed to be.