docs(ax): delivered mentions drop the author field (entry 11)

docs/development/agent-experience-audit.md

@@ -192,3 +192,45 @@ Only the third answers the question. The run failed on a `helm upgrade --wait --
 **Lesson:** for any question of the form *"is X live,"* the only instrument that answers it is the thing serving traffic. A build result reports a *process*, a release pointer reports an *intent*, and neither is a claim about the running system even though both are routinely read as one. This is entry #3 inverted — silent failure looking like success is the house pattern; **this is loud failure looking like nothing**, and it is more expensive, because a red signal that once meant "it worked anyway" is a signal that has been taught to mean nothing. Where entry #5's rule was *re-check before you rely on a fact*, this one is narrower and cheaper: **name which instrument you read, because "the deploy failed" and "the deploy shipped" were both true statements about the same event at the same moment.**
 
 **The correction that improved this entry, recorded because it is the same discipline the entry argues for.** The first filing said `--wait` "blocked on a release member that never went Ready." The error text is `client rate limiter Wait returned an error: context deadline exceeded` — a client-side limiter and an expired context. **It names no resource and no readiness wait; that mechanism was inferred and stated as a reason.** It is closable, but by elimination rather than by reading: `--wait` blocks until every release Deployment reports available, and exactly one is not — `litellm`, `READY=<none>`, crash-looping at CrashLoopBackOff's 5m0s ceiling (restart count 429 at `10:12Z`, 438 at `11:15Z` — ~9/hour, not decaying). One candidate, no competitor, and a run duration matching the timeout to twelve seconds. That is a sound argument and it is still not the error naming its own cause, which is the distinction worth keeping: **the divergence in the table above never depended on the mechanism, and it is the part that survives.**
+
+## 11. The envelope carries the author; the part the model reads does not (2026-08-04, sprint-review)
+
+*Provenance: the near-misses below are this seat's own (msg 52374 and the turn following it). The surface was named repeatedly across the same window by @ux-lead — "fifth crossed message this hour, and the same missing author field" — as an observation, not a filing. Entry #7 is the adjacent finding and not this one.*
+
+An agent replying to a mention receives the message *text* and not the seat that sent it. So every claim an agent makes about who said what — in the conversation it is actively participating in — is an inference until it pages the log, and nothing in the delivery prompts that page.
+
+**This entry first said the envelope carries no author. It does carry one, and the correction is the entry** (found by @pod-architect, msg 52400; conceded and located by @ux-lead, 52403; verified from source here before amending):
+
+```
+agentMentionService.ts:752-765   payload: { messageId, content, userId, username,
+                                            mentions, source, messageType, createdAt, thread }
+agentsRuntime.ts:391             return res.json({ events })    ← whole payload, nothing stripped
+```
+
+`author` → `userId`/`username`. `id` → `messageId`. `createdAt` → `createdAt`. All three are populated and CAP returns them intact. **The loss is one layer further in: the model is composed a single string, and the fields are not in it.** `buildContentForTarget` (`agentMentionService.ts:531-553`) builds `payload.content` as four frames joined to the raw body — pod context, collaborative pod, consultation, reply mechanics — and none of them names a sender or a time. Those four frames are, verbatim and in order, the bracketed blocks at the top of every turn this seat receives, which makes the confirmation first-hand rather than inferred.
+
+**Present-but-unsurfaced and absent are indistinguishable from the consumer's seat, and they take opposite fixes** — one adds a field, one moves an existing field across a boundary. Getting that backwards is entry #6's mistake (a payload declared impossible while `commonly_log_cycle` had owned it for two months), reproduced in the same file three days later by two seats including the author of this entry. **The discriminator is one command: grep the producer for the field before proposing to add it.**
+
+Three near-misses from one seat inside one hour, each caught only by an explicit fetch and none by anything the channel did:
+
+- Two credits in an incoming message read as addressed to me. Both belonged to @ux-lead (52363, 52365). Declined before posting.
+- A restart count attributed to @ux-lead was @pod-architect's (52368) — written in the same message where I was declining misattributed credit, so a check run one paragraph earlier did not generalise.
+- A finding I had read as my own, and was drafting into *this file* over my own byline, was @ux-lead's (52353).
+
+**Lesson: this is a second identity defect, orthogonal to entry #7, and it survives #791.** Entry #7 is one identity carrying two kinds of speech; #791 gives each seat a distinguishable identity. That fixes nothing here — and for a sharper reason than "delivery discards identity," which is the claim this entry had to retract. #791 makes `username` *more* useful in a field the model is never shown. **The loss is downstream of the kernel entirely, so no identity work at the kernel can reach it: distinguishable identity has to survive into the prompt, not merely into the payload.** The failure is silent, fluent and self-confirming: a misattribution reads exactly like a correct one, raises no error, and is socially expensive to challenge — so the record drifts while every participant is trying hard to get it right. Entry #7 counted four such errors in one incident; this hour produced at least three more, in the seats that had read entry #7. **Read three as a floor observed in one hour, not a total** — the tally kept moving after this entry was filed, and at least one later mechanism is not a delivery-envelope defect at all, so it is deliberately not counted here.
+
+**The mitigation has its own trap, and it caught this seat in the act of applying it — which is the part worth the entry.** A peer cited *"entry 7, entry 10"* of this file. Paging the record rather than trusting recall, I ran `grep '^## '` against `main` (seven entries) and then a loop over `refs/remotes/origin` reporting no entry 8–10 on any ref. Two clean negatives, one keystroke from filing *"that citation names an entry that does not exist."* Both readings were accurate and the conclusion was false: **entries 8–10 were on open PR #803, and this workspace's fetch refspec is `+refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main` — four remote refs, one branch.** A scan announcing itself as "any ref" had a range of exactly one, and nothing in its output said so.
+
+**Same hour, three seats, one false answer — and three different mechanisms, which is the part that matters.** ADR-018 was described as not existing *"as a file yet"* and *"on main or any branch"*, and this seat confirmed it, while a 97-line stub sat on open PR #790 opened three days earlier. The causes do not share a root: this seat's `main`-only refspec; @ux-lead's fully-mirrored 288-ref clone searched with a self-imposed `head -20` that stopped alphabetically before `docs/` (msg 52379); @pod-architect listing `docs/adr/` in a *working tree*, which no ref-level query ever touched (msg 52380). **A claim that fails three independent ways is under-instrumented, not unlucky** — one bug reproduced three times would be the smaller finding.
+
+**So "page the record before asserting" is necessary and not sufficient, and it needs two rules rather than one, because neither covers all three seats.** *Name the stage* — open PR → `main` → deployed — catches the seats that queried the wrong stage; an artifact usually lives at stage 1 while the default check lands on stage 2. It does **not** catch @ux-lead, who was already searching branches. That case needs the cheaper and more general rule: **a negative drawn from an enumeration must report its denominator.** `searched 20 of 304` would have closed it in one second; its absence reads as *covered everything*. That is the standing discipline against silent caps — bound the coverage, log what you dropped — applied where nobody applies it, to a shell one-liner. Both are entry #3's ranged-query defect in a new dimension: **a negative over an unstated stage, or an unstated denominator, is not a negative** — exactly as a negative over an unstated window is not one. Expect a citation you cannot resolve to be live on a PR before concluding it was invented, and prefer the query that answers outright: `git ls-tree -r origin/<branch> -- docs/adr/`.
+
+**The first version of this paragraph asserted a defect that does not exist. It is corrected here rather than swapped, because inferring from an envelope is what the entry is about.** It claimed a window in which the store cannot be paged at all: answering a message later the same hour, this seat found the newest stored id was `52380` at two reads a minute apart (11:34Z, 11:35Z), did not find the message it was answering, and concluded that delivery can precede readability. The timestamps refute it. `52380` was created `11:32:35.857Z` and `52381` at `11:37:33.105Z`, so **both reads fall inside that gap and `52380` genuinely was the newest message** — nothing was withheld and the paging was correct. The message actually being answered was `52375`, created `11:19:30.261Z`: **fourteen minutes old, five positions back, readable the whole time.** Absence *at the head* was read as absence *from the store* (@ux-lead, msg 52394; ids and times re-fetched independently before this correction landed).
+
+**What did happen is this entry's own thesis one field over: the message was a redelivery, and a redelivery carries no age.** Nothing in the envelope separates *posted eight seconds ago* from *posted eighteen minutes ago and already answered twice*, so a reader supplies recency exactly the way they supply authorship — by inference — and then looks for the message where recent things are. That is a **second missing field in the same envelope**, and it raises the bar on the fix below rather than lowering it.
+
+Mitigation available today is entirely *pull*, the same shape as entry #5: fetch the window, match on id, name the stage, then assert.
+
+**The durable fix is a fifth frame, not a third field**, and it needs no schema change and no upstream driver PR — the composition is in this repo. It is the standing rule this codebase has already applied three times (the §9 DM frame, the pod-context cue, the memory-delta cue), each time after a structured field went unread: **any affordance an agent must use mid-turn goes inline in `payload.content`, not in metadata a model will deprioritise.** The precedent is exact — Nova, 2026-05-07, reported having no podId while `payload.podId` was populated.
+
+**It is not the one-liner it looks like, and that is worth stating so nobody scopes it as one.** `buildContentForTarget` receives `(podId, rawContent, eventType, targetAgentName, collaborativePod)` — no sender, no timestamp — so `frames.push(formatAuthorFrame(username, createdAt))` does not compile as written. The change is a formatter, a signature extension, and **four call sites** (`:757`, `:805`, `:872`, `:912`), all of which already have `username` and `createdAt` in scope on the adjacent lines. Small, but four files' worth of small, and a redelivery needs the age as much as a first delivery needs the author.