A llama session was a chat box: no tools, a fixed model, no permission
mode, and a model name drawn as the path the file sits at. It now runs the
agent loop itself, which is what the pieces below all hang off.
Tools are `llama-server`'s own (`--tools all`), which that server both
publishes and runs -- `GET /tools` for the definitions, `POST /tools` to
call one. Web search is Exa's MCP server, reached from this backend rather
than from the machine serving the model: that is what llama.cpp's own web
UI does, and it puts the search on the machine with a route out instead of
the one with the GPU. `llama-server`'s `--mcp-servers-json` can only spawn
local commands, so using it would have meant a Node bridge on every
machine that serves a model.
Driving the loop is what makes the permission gate ours. Two modes,
`manual` and `bypassPermissions`, which is what the mechanism has: the web
UI asks before every call and remembers the tools you say "always" to. The
allowances fold back out of the transcript's own answers, so they survive
a restart and a model change without being stored anywhere else.
Also here, because tools made each of them matter:
- **Loading is a state.** A 12 GB model takes twenty seconds to reach
memory and refuses everything until it has; the session used to report
`running` for that whole time, and a message sent meanwhile came back as
an error. It is `loading` now, and the message waits.
- **The model can be changed.** A `llama-server` holds one model, so this
stops it and starts another. The conversation survives because it was
never in the server.
- **Models are named, not pathed.** `general.name` read out of the file
itself -- over ssh too, in the round trip the spawn was already making.
Where two models share a name the file name breaks the tie.
- **`-np 1`, and the MTP draft head where the file has one.** Measured on
the 27B here: 41.5 tok/s plain, 61.4 with `--spec-type draft-mtp` at one
slot, and 28 with it at four -- speculating against a split KV cache is
worse than not speculating. The flag is conditional because asking for a
head that is not there makes `llama-server` exit.
- **A refusal says what to do.** Tool results are thousands of tokens, so
an overrun context is now ordinary; it was "http status: 400" and is now
the server's own "exceeds the available context size, try increasing it".
`GET /machines/{id}/models` is gone: the provider models route answers the
same question, and two answers to one question is how a picker comes to
offer a model the spawn screen does not.
Verified end to end against real models: a tool call asked and allowed, an
Exa search, a shell command, a 27B loaded while a message waited on it, a
model switch mid-session, a second message queued behind a running turn,
and the whole of it again on a session running over ssh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`Config::default_effort` is what a session starts at when nothing chose one,
applied in `spawn_session` rather than filled in by the spawn screen so it
holds for an import and a bare API call too. It is set by the spawn screen's
own picker, whose label says so: one control, where new sessions are made,
rather than a settings page for a single value. Not on a provider, because
providers are discovered and the next rediscovery would erase it; not on the
phone, because a second device would then spawn at a level nobody there
chose. `GET`/`POST /defaults` carry it as a struct, so the permission mode --
still hardcoded to `auto` on the spawn screen -- can move there later without
a second route.
Only drivers that read a level are given one: an echo session was storing a
`--effort` it never passes to anything, which is a config file answering a
question about itself wrongly.
Separately, `AGENTS.md` is 35 KB sent with every request in this repo, and 12
KB of it was rigs and reference measurements that only matter once you are
running one. Those are the `ai-app-rigs` skill now -- the same text, still the
only copy, read when the work touches it. 35,198 -> 20,813 chars.
Verified on the emulator against the sandbox: the spawn screen pre-fills from
the server, picking `low` spawned a session at `low` and left `/defaults` set
to it, and an echo session spawned afterwards took no level at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A Rust backend that owns the sessions and an Android app that reads them.
The server spawns and adopts CLI processes, normalises everything they emit
into one event model, keeps the transcript, and serves it over pinned TLS on
a WireGuard interface; the phone streams that, replies, sends images, and
imports conversations the machine already has.
`AGENTS.md` is the working guide -- what runs where, what has been measured,
and the faults that were expensive to find. `PLAN.md` is the design record.
History before this point was squashed away. It was a personal project's
running commentary and carried a name and a couple of machine paths that
have no business in a public repository; the tree is what mattered and the
tree is here.
iris-aiandClaude Opus 5
iris