[dannyward630]

Summary

Fixes #62 by allowing the budget reducer to reduce complete lanes and retain the projection request needed to build a continuation for visible items. Empty lanes no longer receive cursors, each continuation cursor is emitted once, and static drill-down routes move to help(topic="engineering_memory"). If the response cannot fit any memory item, the tool raises an MCPServiceContractError with the empty-response estimate and limit instead of returning an empty success. No schema or contract version bump is needed.

Validation

• uv run pre-commit run --all-files — passed.
• uv run pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-push --all-files — passed: 4,254 passed, 2 skipped, 99.16% total coverage.
• uv run --with zensical==0.0.46 zensical build --clean --strict — passed.

Docs and release notes

Updated the changelog, README, and MCP contract/reference docs.

AI assistance and review status

Prepared with Codex (GPT-6), which implemented the patch and ran the checks above. This is a draft pending human verification of the tests, contract implications, documentation, and final diff. The repository requires substantive human review before merge.

[orenlab]

Thanks for looking into #62. We won't merge this one: development continues on a separate branch that is several hundred commits ahead of main, and this patch no longer applies there (6 of the 12 files conflict). The duplicated cursor and the per-response drill-down list described in #62 are already gone on that branch; the remaining part of the issue (continuation cursors crowding out records on wide scopes) will be fixed there directly. Closing — thanks again.