promptkit/docs/roadmap/conversation-continuation.md

# Conversation Continuation And Application-Directed Repair

Status: proposed feature roadmap; open decisions await discussion. No
implementation is authorized by this document. Recommendations below are not
accepted contracts.

## Purpose And Scope

This roadmap records PromptKit's design questions arising from
[Audita's feature request](audita-request.md). That request owns the consumer
workflow and requested acceptance scenarios; this document owns the proposed
PromptKit direction, discussion order, and eventual implementation sequencing.

The proposed capabilities are:

- Capture a rendered request and its final assistant content, then continue it
  using ordinary configured prompts without reconstructing the original request.
- Allow independent continuations from one captured exchange.
- Coordinate bounded revisions for one branch using application-supplied
  assessment and follow-up request construction.

Continuation has direct value by removing consumer capture, reconstruction,
prefix comparison, and history assembly. The revision coordinator could also
remove repeated lifecycle work, provided its public contract remains small.
Audita would continue owning candidate selection, domain validation, feedback
meaning, branch scheduling, accepted sibling proposals, and transcript changes.
Its domain-specific repair code would not move wholesale into PromptKit.

The request needs in-process use. Persistent sessions, restartable workflows,
conversation storage, and batch-item reconciliation are outside its scope.
The existing [prepared execution handle](../../prepared_execution.go) remains a
single-use execution capability; continuation needs its own semantics.

## Open Decisions In Discussion Order

### 1. What Does A Captured Exchange Contain?

**Status: open.** Decide whether capture represents a logical conversation or
the complete sequence of provider requests, including structural repair.

**Recommendation:** capture the complete rendered request, preserving message
content, roles, and cache metadata, followed by the final assistant content
returned by the run. An initial run that needed structural repair would retain
its final content without adding the internal corrective instructions to the
logical conversation. This matches Audita's requested history and keeps
transport attempts and structural repair separate from application turns.

Make capture opt-in. A continuation would append its rendered follow-up messages
and final response to produce a new exchange, leaving the source exchange and
other branches unchanged. Previously rendered history would not require the
original input files or templates to be rendered again.

**Alternative:** retain the actual corrective messages and responses that led
to the final output. This provides more execution detail, but increases retained
content and carries internal repair instructions into later model context.
Attempt diagnostics can serve that need separately if a consumer requires it.

**Details to settle:** capture availability after structural validation
exhaustion or an operational failure; how callers request capture for ordinary
and prepared runs; and the ownership and engine-binding of captured exchanges.
The request's “full final assistant response” should refer to the content
supported by PromptKit, without silently adding a raw provider-envelope API.

### 2. How Are Follow-Up Execution Settings Selected?

**Status: open.** Decide which settings come from the follow-up request and
which, if any, carry forward from the originating exchange.

**Recommendation:** preserve conversation content while resolving the new
profile and output contract through the follow-up prompt and ordinary request
overrides. The follow-up can therefore use a different model and response
schema without modifying the original exchange. Reuse existing selection and
precedence rules rather than adding another settings-resolution system.

In particular, prefer the follow-up prompt's default profile when no explicit
profile is supplied, with the ordinary missing-profile behavior if neither is
available. Do not retain the original direct credential merely to retain
conversation history; resolve credential supply for the new execution.

**Alternative:** inherit the originating execution's profile and settings unless
overridden. This is convenient for repeated turns against the same model, but
adds another precedence source and can make a follow-up prompt's defaults
surprising. Inheriting an old output contract is especially unsuitable when
proposal and revision responses have different shapes.

**Details to settle:** session-ID inheritance versus follow-up template
resolution, explicit overrides, credential lifetime, and the ordering of
follow-up definition messages and caller-appended messages. Preserve authored
roles rather than silently rewriting follow-up system or developer messages.

### 3. Where Does Application Assessment Run In The Capacity Lifecycle?

**Status: open.** Select a lifecycle that permits application validators to
call the same engine and backend, including with capacity limited to one.

The current [run flow](../internal/runner.md#run-flow) retains logical admission
through structural validation and repair. Releasing an active generation permit
alone does not release that admission lease.

**Recommendation:** coordinate completed executions. Finish a revision run and
release its admission lease before invoking application assessment. Each later
revision receives ordinary admission. The coordinator itself holds no backend
capacity while awaiting application work. This reuses the existing execution
machinery and supports validators that make their own model calls.

**Alternative:** extend the existing structural-repair lifecycle with application
callbacks and explicit lease release/reacquisition. This could share more loop
code, but would complicate admission ownership and combine operations with
different schemas and validation responsibilities. It would still have to meet
the same nested-call requirement.

**Details to settle:** callback cancellation boundaries and the sequence of
request building, execution, response interpretation, and assessment. The
coordinator should remain scoped to one branch; applications retain decisions
about scheduling branches and stopping other work after a failure.

### 4. How Are Assessment Outcomes And Failures Represented?

**Status: open.** Define how acceptance, another requested revision, withdrawal,
unavailable assessment, exhaustion, and interruption are distinguished.

**Recommendation:** use explicit application assessment outcomes separately
from operational errors. Applications interpret responses and feedback;
PromptKit records the selected disposition and coordinates subsequent work.
Accept supplied initial rejection findings without repeating the original
assessment. A revised candidate becomes accepted only after application
assessment accepts it.

Return sequence diagnostics that preserve completed attempts when work stops,
while clearly distinguishing the latest candidate from an accepted candidate.
Cancellation and operational errors should retain useful Go error identities.
Applications decide whether a stopped branch affects independent work.

**Alternative:** use an error-only assessment callback, treating nil as
acceptance and typed errors as rejection, withdrawal, or unavailability. This
looks smaller, but overloads errors with ordinary domain decisions and makes
continuation policy harder to understand.

**Details to settle:** the small outcome vocabulary, who supplies each outcome,
callback/result types, result-plus-error behavior, zero-budget behavior, and
what consumes an additional-revision attempt when preparation or generation
fails. Keep this budget distinct from structural repair and transport retry.

### 5. How Are Related Executions And Usage Accounted For?

**Status: open.** Define accounting for the initial exchange, each revision,
its structural repairs and transport retries, and model calls made by
application validators.

The current [observation boundary](../internal/observation.md) keeps nested
invocations independent. A callback's arbitrary model calls cannot simply be
assumed to belong to the enclosing revision's totals.

**Recommendation:** preserve independent run accounting and add explicit
relationships between a sequence, its revision attempts, and associated runs.
Choose a small association mechanism, such as a scoped observation facility or
explicit execution references, so consumers need not rebuild lifecycle tracking.
Shared initial work should be referenced by branches and counted once when
reporting the combined operation. Report available usage with its existing
presence/completeness meaning; do not promise complete cost accounting.

**Alternative:** have PromptKit automatically capture every nested run during an
assessment callback. This minimizes explicit association but can include
unrelated work and changes the existing invocation-isolation boundary.
Another simpler option is to report revision usage only and let applications
attach validator accounting; that leaves more work in Audita and needs checking
against its stated reporting requirement.

**Details to settle:** association of concurrent validator calls, observer
composition, failure-path diagnostics, and which totals include which child
executions. A revision budget bounds revision attempts, not all provider calls
performed by structural repair, transport retries, or application validators.

### 6. Where Should Continuation Inspection Live?

**Status: open.** Clarify the request's references to inspection without changing
the established resource-inspection boundary.

**Recommendation:** expose originating exchange, follow-up prompt, and execution
relationships in continuation details, prepared execution metadata, sequence
reports, and observations as appropriate. Keep `InspectPrompt`, `InspectProfile`,
and `InspectBackend` focused on their configured resources. Reuse the existing
approach to generically renderable inspection data where new details are exposed.

**Alternative:** introduce a dedicated conversation inspection API. This may
be useful if a retained exchange needs a richer view, but should be justified
against a simple details method. Extending resource inspection with execution
history would give those APIs a different responsibility.

**Details to settle:** the minimum inspectable metadata, how callers explicitly
access captured message content, and separation of content-bearing details from
metadata-only observations. Public type names and serialization details belong
in implementation planning after this boundary is settled.

## Proposed Delivery And Validation

Resolve the decisions above before selecting exact public signatures or writing
an implementation plan. The recommended sequence is:

1. Deliver capture and independent continuation through the public facade,
   allowing Audita to remove its reconstruction and prefix-verification work.
2. Build the single-branch revision coordinator on that capability, reusing
   ordinary execution, validation, capacity, and observation machinery.

Use [Audita's acceptance scenarios](audita-request.md#suggested-delivery-and-acceptance-scenarios)
as the consumer checks. Additional proposed coverage should establish:

- The selected conversation history when the initial run needed structural
  repair, including use of its full final assistant content.
- Continuation after the original input files change or disappear, without
  altering the captured history.
- Independent branches retaining their own history and outcomes.
- Assessment calls against the same backend at capacity one, without capacity
  retained by the coordinator blocking them.
- Associated validator usage and shared initial usage reported without
  double-counting, including incomplete usage and operational failures.

These are planning targets, not new implemented guarantees. Keep additional
mechanisms and constraints tied to the selected decisions and demonstrated
consumer needs.