feat(lifeboard): the agent turn, four providers and Connections

[ivanmkc]

The stack

#	PR	What it adds	Tests at this point
1	#311	A real localStorage for the test suite on Node 25	viewer 747
2	#312	@ivanmkc/termchart-canvas; injectable interact transport	canvas 473 · viewer 278
3	#313	lifeboard PWA: fact log, boards, service worker	lifeboard 36
4	#314	Shell, family profiles, tap layer	lifeboard 82
5	#315	The agent turn, four providers, Connections	lifeboard 142
6	#316	Packs, recipes, shopping-list arithmetic	lifeboard 231
7	#317	Provenance and lineage	lifeboard 257
8	#318	Calendar, Gmail, mail triage	lifeboard 301
9	#319	The bridge and long jobs	cli 314 · lifeboard 320
10	#310	Proactivity, scheduled boards, Google sign-in	cli 320 · lifeboard 343
11	#320	Persistence audit fixes: multi-tab, stale builds, no-storage boot	lifeboard 350
12	#321	User guide, bridge setup, QA guide, persistence audit	lifeboard 350
13	#322	A plan for third-party integrations (docs only)	unchanged
14	#323	A practice drill a board can define: audio + Q&A	canvas 485 · lifeboard 372
15	#325	Export and restore	lifeboard 389
16	#326	Draft a message, approve it, then send	lifeboard 399
17	#327	Hand long work to the Mac	lifeboard 406
18	#328	A Packs screen, and authoring one by describing it	lifeboard 418
19	#329	Activity — what changed, who changed it, undo	lifeboard 428

Every branch in the stack was checked out on its own and verified independently: npm install, tsc --noEmit for every package, npm test across the workspace, and the offline e2e where it exists. All nineteen are green — no branch depends on a later one to build or pass. Full viewer e2e (11 suites, 106 assertions) was run on #312 as the behaviour-preservation evidence for the extraction.

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Stack position: 5 of 10. Base: lifeboard/03-shell.

The conversational loop: type a question, get a reply, a change you watch land, or a board.

The envelope is the whole contract — one JSON object carrying what to say, what to change and what to draw. Parsing is deliberately forgiving (models wrap JSON in prose and fences) and rejection is deliberately precise, because the error text is fed straight back as the repair prompt: mutations[1].collection beats invalid.

The repair after a bad board asks for the board alone, never the whole envelope. The mutations have already landed by then, and re-sending them would apply the change twice. There is a test for exactly this, because it is the kind of thing that silently doubles a shopping list.

Every failure path still returns something. Two unusable envelopes degrade to whatever the model actually said; two unrenderable boards degrade to a plain list built by code from the reply. A turn that throws leaves someone staring at a spinner with no idea whether their milk got added.

The model may write item, recipe, event, contact — not profile, message or derivation. A model that could rewrite the transcript could rewrite its own history.

Connections is furniture, not a board. It has secrets and text inputs in it, and the agent must never redraw the screen where an API key is typed. Keys live in device preferences and never in the log, which by design cannot forget. OpenRouter signs in by PKCE, so a router works with no backend at all.

Deviation from the roadmap: it called for bundling the 70 files in diagram-recipes/examples as few-shot. Those are engineering diagrams that teach the wrong register for a family board and would dominate the context every turn; two hand-written examples are used instead.

Verified: 142 unit tests including the full degradation ladder against a scripted provider; offline e2e still passes.

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