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Author SHA1 Message Date
taodengandClaude Fable 5 fc63b8a49a docs: fold in adversarial review — correct the debug-log reasoning + the overhead number
Independent adversarial reviewer (tasked with REFUTING this doc) confirmed the central
claim — no byte-faithful incremental source exists on the TUI path — but found four
factual defects in the prose. A negative claim that will be cited for years has to be
right in its reasoning, not just its conclusion.

1. --debug-file: the "written at end-of-turn" reasoning was WRONG. The default log level
   is `debug`, which suppresses every `verbose` site; the original probe therefore ran
   with the stream logging OFF. At CLAUDE_CODE_DEBUG_LOG_LEVEL=verbose there ARE 16
   mid-turn `[shoji-engine] yield stream_event/-` lines spread over ~3.9s of generation.
   The conclusion survives because those lines carry TIMING ONLY, no text payload
   (content_block_delta / text_delta / content_block_start / message_start = 0 at any
   verbosity or category filter). Reasoning rewritten: "logs when tokens arrive, never
   what they are" — as written before, the doc was falsifiable in 30 seconds.

2. The 7.319s `turn_duration` is NOT a "native" (non-OCP) baseline: it comes from an
   OCP-driven turn (cwd .ocp-tui/work, same 7451-char prompt, same 204-char answer as
   pr1 baseline row i=5, elapsed 11563ms). Reframed as what it actually is — a SAME-TURN
   decomposition, 11.563s wall - 7.319s CLI-internal = ~4.2s OCP overhead (n=1), which is
   a cleaner comparison than the doc originally claimed.

3. Dropped the "~2-4s" range: its low end mixed an effort-HIGH turn_duration with the
   effort-LOW wall-clock median, which understates overhead (a low-effort turn generates
   faster, so its own turn_duration would be lower). No turn_duration sample exists for
   the effort-low config. Now stated as ~4s (n=1, baseline config), with both caveats.

4. Softened "ZERO marginal benefit" (backlog #4) to "no benefit detectable at n=5" — n=5
   cannot prove zero — and added the mechanistic reason the reviewer supplied, which is
   far stronger than the empirical null: `--help` says the flag improves cross-user
   prompt-cache REUSE, and OCP is single-user, so there is no cross-user cache to share.

Also folded in the reviewer's independent sweep, which closes the search space rather
than sampling it: the hook registry was enumerated from the shipped binary (no per-chunk
/ streaming hook exists among the 21 events); `capture-pane -e` was tested and shown to
be a provably non-unique inverse (an H2 and a bold span emit IDENTICAL SGR 1); and
sessions/<pid>.json, history.jsonl, CLAUDE_CODE_INCLUDE_PARTIAL_MESSAGES (undocumented),
sessionMirror, --sdk-url and --input-format stream-json were each checked and each dies
(contentless, or gated behind --output-format stream-json -> --print -> the metered
sdk-cli pool). Prompt-mutation (asking the model for plain text) is named and rejected
on ALIGNMENT grounds so it is not re-litigated later.

Docs-only. No code change, no version bump.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VqgWJcjxrjjL9L9SkpZyXR
2026-07-13 16:04:12 +10:00
taodengandClaude Fable 5 6848f9751c docs(plans): TUI streaming is not achievable — prereq spike result + honest README constraints
Backlog #2 of docs/plans/2026-07-13-tui-latency demanded a prereq spike before any
streaming design: does the transcript JSONL grow during a turn, or only at the end?
The spike was run. All three candidate sources are dead:

  (a) transcript JSONL — grows at EVENT granularity; the assistant's text event is
      written as ONE complete line, ~0.3s before the terminal turn_duration event
      (observed: turn_duration 7319ms; text event at t+7.0s, terminal at t+7.3s).
  (b) tmux capture-pane — the pane is a RENDERED view, not the text. Same turn,
      transcript T = '## Semaphore\n\nA **semaphore** is a synchronization…'
      pane        = '⏺ Semaphore' / '  A semaphore is a synchronization…'
      '## ', '**' and ```-fences are absent from the pane entirely (rendered to ANSI,
      then stripped by capture-pane -p). T.startsWith(paneText) is FALSE both raw and
      indent-stripped — not on redraw, but on essentially every markdown answer.
      capture-pane -e recovers styling, never source spelling: no unique inverse.
  (c) --debug-file — byte-exact ('last_assistant_message':'## Title\n\n**alpha…'),
      but only inside end-of-turn Stop-hook payloads; zero content_block_delta /
      text_delta events; ~2.7MB per turn.

--output-format stream-json, the only interface emitting token deltas, requires -p —
the metered-billing path TUI mode exists to avoid (cc_entrypoint=sdk-cli). The
constraint is structural. OCP's TUI SSE is, and remains, replay-only.

Also corrects this plan's own "~20s waiting for the whole turn" decomposition, which
was inferred from an external 30-32s report and never measured through OCP. Measured
through a real OCP instance (TUI, claude-sonnet-4-6, n=5): median 11.30s before #156,
9.55s after, vs a native turn_duration of ~7.3s → OCP's own overhead is ~2-4s, not
~20s. The remainder is generation time, which streaming would not shorten (it moves
the first byte, not the last) — so a consumer needing the COMPLETE answer, which is
the JSON-card case that motivated this work, would have gained nothing from streaming.

Backlog #4 measured while here: --exclude-dynamic-system-prompt-sections gives ZERO
marginal benefit (TTFT median 6.39s vs 6.17s for --effort low alone, n=5, one worse
outlier). Do not adopt. Banner stayed on Claude Max.

README: documents the ~6s TTFT floor plainly (TUI mode cannot serve interactive-latency
consumers) and states that no-token-streaming is structural rather than a missing feature.

No code change. No version bump (docs-only). Not endpoint-touching: no server.mjs diff,
so no cli.js citation applies.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VqgWJcjxrjjL9L9SkpZyXR
2026-07-13 15:32:41 +10:00