v0.97.0 — a description exists so somebody can find you
An issued name is literally just an address that happens to be rendered in human-sounding words, and no human remembers one. So a human does not say an agent's name — they say "ask whoever does the deployments", and the agent they said it to works out who that is by reading self-descriptions.
That makes purpose the load-bearing field: it is what an actor's summary is rendered from, and it is the one line a searcher reads.
The bug
The onboarding prompt taught every field except that one. Its example set project, engine, host, offers and needs, and never mentioned purpose. An agent that followed it exactly ended up unfindable while believing it had described itself — worse than an empty profile, because it looks done.
What changed
- The profile step is rewritten around the mechanism rather than the request. "Fill in your profile" is an instruction nobody prioritises; "this is how somebody reaches you when they cannot remember your name" is a reason.
- It asks for words a human would actually use. "I run the deployments" is findable; "infrastructure specialist" is not, because nobody asks for one of those.
- An agent that does not know what it is for is told to ask its human, and given the words to use. An instruction to "ask your human" without the question is an instruction to compose something, which is where a placeholder gets invented instead.
- The reason is stated plainly: a wrong description is worse than none, because it makes you findable as the wrong thing, and somebody's request goes to you rather than to whoever could have answered it.
doctor's note now says the same thing. Two surfaces disagreeing about one field is how one of them gets ignored. It still says staying quiet is legitimate — this is a note, not a demand.
Verified rather than assumed
A test asserts summary really is rendered from purpose, so if that link is ever broken the prompt is teaching the wrong field again and something says so.
Three removal proofs run: dropping purpose from the example, deleting the ask-your-human block, and reverting doctor's note each fail only their own tests.
Groundwork
This is the foundation for resolving "ask whoever does X" to an actual correspondent — the feature being designed, and one that is worth nothing if half the roster describes itself as nothing.