fix(plugin/tether): don't drop replies on async parse; add ask (email-and-wait)#355
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…il-and-wait) Two fixes surfaced by a live run: 1. Parse-race reply loss. `poll` advanced a time-cursor to "now" on every call, so a reply picked up in the brief window before e2a finished parsing it (empty parsed/body) was skipped permanently — a real emailed question was lost. Replies are now deduped by message-id (a `seen` set) and the watermark only advances through the contiguous processed prefix; an unparsed message is retried (up to a max age), never dropped or repeated. 2. Questions stalled the session. An AFK user can't answer a terminal prompt, so any agent question would hang tether. New `tether.sh ask "<q>"` emails the question into the thread and blocks until the reply, then prints the answer. SKILL.md makes it a rule: while tethered, ask by email, never the terminal — and documents that CLI permission prompts must be pre-authorized (an emailed reply can't answer them; the Notification hook remains the alert). Bumps plugin to 0.4.3 across all manifests. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Follow-up to #354, from a live run of the harness.
1. Parse-race reply loss (bug)
e2a parses inbound email asynchronously — a just-arrived reply briefly has empty
parsed/body, then populates. The oldpolladvanced a time-cursor to "now" every call, so a reply caught in that window was skipped permanently (a real emailed question was silently lost in testing).Fix: dedup by message-id (a
seenset in state); thelast_pollwatermark only advances through the contiguous processed prefix, and an unparsed message is retried (until a max age) rather than skipped. Replies can no longer be dropped or double-delivered.2. Questions stalled the session (the AFK problem)
An AFK user can't answer a terminal prompt, so any agent-initiated question (AskUserQuestion / bare prompt) would hang tether.
Fix: new
tether.sh ask "<question>"— emails the question into the thread and blocks until the user replies, then prints the answer. SKILL.md makes it the rule: while tethered, every question goes over email, never the terminal. For permission prompts (which an emailed reply can't answer natively), the guidance is to pre-authorize the session; theNotificationhook stays as the alert/safety-net.Testing
install.sh _selftestgreen (syntax + unconfigured no-op).curl: unparsed reply is retried not consumed → delivered once when parsed → never repeated (seen=['msg_r1']).ask: sends question, blocks, returns the emailed answer.validate-plugin.mjs: 3 skills, version 0.4.3, manifests in sync.Bumps plugin to 0.4.3.
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