* Treat literal 'null'/'none' strings as absent for optional tool args
Models routinely pass the literal string "null" or "none" instead of
omitting an optional argument. Taken at face value it becomes a filter
that matches nothing, so tools like list_notes / list_reports /
list_requests silently return no results.
Coerce such values to None in the central argument-coercion layer, but
only for parameters the schema allows to be null (or that are absent from
a declared "required" list), so required strings keep the literal value.
The list/filter helpers normalize the same values too, so a direct call
can't regress.
* Limit nullish coercion to query tools and keep literal tags
A literal "null"/"none" is only a mistake where the argument is a filter, so
gate the coercion on read-only query tools; a tool that writes keeps the value,
which stops update_note(content="none") from being read as "leave unchanged".
Stop dropping nullish entries from a notes tag filter too: tags are free-form,
so a literal "none" tag stays filterable and mixed tag queries keep every
branch.
* add a generic MCP client and a config for connecting MCP servers
* Add MCP docs and CLI polish: docs page, startup connect summary, --mcp-config flag, compact tool output
* Add MCP connection notes and per-run selection; clean up on cancel and dedupe names
* Show errored MCP tool calls as failed in the TUI
* Sanitize namespaced tool names so model APIs accept them
* Show MCP tool calls distinctly in the terminal and the run viewer
* Say what MCP servers are worth connecting for
* Correct the notes docstring to match how notes reach the agent
* keep the mcp tests from reading your shell's STRIX_MCP_* vars
* let an agent wait on what it already said
An agent that answers in plain text is nudged to call a tool, and the only tool
that hands control back takes a required message. So it says the same thing
twice: once as text the user has already read, once as the argument it had to
supply to stop. Seen on a run whose whole instruction was "hi" - a greeting, then
the same greeting again through respond_to_user.
message is optional now. The nudge arms the tool with the text that was
delivered and says not to repeat it, so an agent that has said its piece can park
on it with an empty call. Anything it does want to add it passes normally.
Parking still cannot leave the user on silence: an empty call is refused unless
something was actually said, and the arming is single use - execution clears it
as soon as a turn ends any other way.
The interactive prompt now also says to answer and stop in one respond_to_user
call, which is what avoids the nudge in the first place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* drop the worked example from the interactive prompt
"the user greeted you, asked something you can answer outright, or you need a
decision" was the run I had been reading, written into a rule that holds
whatever the reason. The rule is that replying and stopping is one call; listing
occasions only invites the model to check whether this is one of them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* drop the arming flag; an empty message just waits
Passing the delivered text from execution into the tool, and refusing an empty
call without it, was machinery guarding against an agent parking having said
nothing. That leaves the user looking at "waiting for your reply" with a cursor
in front of them - they type. It does not need a mechanism.
What is left is the default on message, and the nudge saying the text already
landed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* only offer waiting on words that were written
The nudge told every agent its text had already been delivered, but it fires
whenever a turn leaves the agent running, and a turn can end with no tool call
and no text at all - _final_output_preview has carried <none> and <empty>
branches all along. An agent that said nothing was being invited to wait on an
answer the user never received, leaving them at a bare prompt.
It now reads the turn: waiting on what was said is offered only when something
was, and otherwise the agent is told plainly that the user has read nothing and
to send its message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* leave the continuation nudge alone
Rewording it meant asserting from the outside whether the agent had spoken, and
the nudge fires whenever a turn leaves the agent running - text or no text. The
agent knows which it did without being told, so the guidance belongs in its
prompt, where the condition is its own to read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* say it in the nudge, where the agent is reading
An agent stranded by the nudge reasons off the nudge. Told only to call
respond_to_user, it supplies a message, and since it has just answered in plain
text that message is the same answer again. The system prompt saying otherwise
sits thousands of tokens earlier and loses.
The clause goes on the line the agent acts on: call respond_to_user, with no
message if it has already said it. That reads true whatever the turn did,
including one that produced no text, because the agent is the one who knows
which — nothing here has to work it out from the outside.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---------
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
* fix(agents): collapse repeated waits queued inside one model turn
* fix(agents): state that one wait is enough in every prompt variant
---------
Co-authored-by: Ahmed Allam <ahmed39652003@gmail.com>
One tool was doing three jobs (wait on the user, wait on other agents, and
- wrongly - wait for a long-running command), so the driver had to guess which
one an agent meant and used parent_id as the proxy: the root waits for a human,
everyone else waits for agents. That proxy is wrong, since the user can message
any agent from the TUI's agent tree.
Tool identity now carries the intent, and the coordinator records it as a
wait_kind that survives snapshot/restore:
respond_to_user -> wait_kind="user", never auto-resumed (root or not)
wait_for_agents -> wait_kind="agents", auto-resumed on a 300s timer
recovery exhaust -> wait_kind="stalled"
respond_to_user fuses the message and the yield into one call, so there is no
way to answer and then forget to stop - the two-step that gpt-4o-mini skipped
2/2 in live testing. Plain text still renders as before.
Auto-resume is also bounded now: an agent that re-parks after every timeout
burned a model turn every 300s for the rest of the scan (and, since parked
children notify their parent, spammed the parent's inbox on the same cycle).
After _MAX_IDLE_AUTO_RESUMES it stays parked until a real message arrives.
A mutual wait between two agents resolves only when both hit their cap,
so the ceiling is the worst-case idle burn. Name the constants instead of
repeating the literal, and align the interactive auto-resume timeout.
Interactive turns ended by plain text left the agent parked in 'waiting'
forever. Require an explicit lifecycle tool in both modes and nudge a
text-only turn back into a tool call, bounded by a recovery limit.
A configured tool_output_max_bytes smaller than the truncation notice
itself can't fit a bounded preview, so a persisted result could exceed the
ceiling. Enforce a config floor (ge=1024) so nonsensical values are
rejected at load time instead of being worked around at runtime.
The head+tail slices could each take half of max_bytes, then the
truncation notice and its separators were appended on top, so the value
persisted to history could exceed the configured maximum. Reserve an
upper bound for the notice (and separators) out of the byte budget before
slicing so the whole joined result stays within max_bytes.
Treat tool_output_max_tokens as a ceiling so an explicit model-supplied
cap can't exceed it, and derive the truncation notice's dropped-line
count from the lines actually kept after the byte-trim pass. Also cast
the pygments fallback lexer so it satisfies the resolve_lexer return
type under the pre-commit mypy hook.
Cap the size of every tool result so a single verbose command (recursive
find, noisy scanner, full page dump) can't pin the conversation near the
model's context window for the rest of a scan.
- New ContextSettings config group with env-tunable caps.
- Default the SDK shell tools' max_output_tokens so exec_command /
write_stdin truncate head+tail instead of returning unbounded output.
- Bound Strix's own FunctionTool/CustomTool results (line + UTF-8 byte
head+tail preview with a truncation notice) and cap error strings.
* docs(reporting): add CVSS calibration guidance to reduce severity inflation
The create_vulnerability_report tool documents the cvss_breakdown format but
gives no guidance on choosing metric values, so findings are frequently
over-rated. Add a concise calibration block covering the most common
inflation mistakes: scoring scenarios that presuppose the attacker already
holds a stolen secret as unauthenticated (PR:N) criticals, using C:H/I:H for
single-user or read-only/enumeration impact, folding a chained worst case
into one vector, and ignoring adversary-in-the-middle or user-interaction
prerequisites.
* docs(reporting): drop 'one weakness per report' calibration bullet
build_raw_request kept the Content-Length inherited from the captured
request, so replaying a modified body (repeat_request) emitted a request
whose declared length did not match the body — truncating the payload or
stalling the target. Drop any inherited Content-Length (case-insensitively)
and recompute it from the body actually being sent.
Adds tests covering a lengthened body, an emptied body, and the
no-inherited-header path.
Fixes#814
Co-authored-by: thejesh23 <thejesh23@users.noreply.github.com>
* fix(proxy,tooling): serialize+reconnect Caido client, actionable HTTPQL errors, sandbox tool guidance
Addresses the top recurring agent tool-call failures observed in telemetry:
- proxy: the shared Caido client had no locking or reconnect, so concurrent
agent calls raced ("Transport is already connected") and a dead transport
poisoned the rest of the run ("Connector is closed"/"Server disconnected").
Add an asyncio lock + bounded reconnect in caido_api.call_with_client (sandbox
path) and a scan-wide caido_lock in the run context that host-side proxy tools
hold around every call. Deterministic errors are not retried.
- proxy: list_requests now returns Caido's exact parser message, echoes the
offending query, and includes a corrected-syntax hint so agents self-correct
instead of retrying a broken HTTPQL filter.
- shell/prompt: document that write_stdin requires a process started with
tty=true; nudge toward writing Python to a file over deeply-nested one-liners;
note the venv pre-installs common libs.
- agent-browser: distinguish daemon/connection failures (run doctor, don't loop)
from malformed commands; invoke directly (no sh -c wrapper).
- containers: use POSIX '.' instead of the bashism 'source' in generated rc
files (fixes 'sh: source: not found'); add file + xxd and pre-install
requests/httpx/beautifulsoup4/lxml/pyjwt/cryptography in the sandbox venv.
- tests: cover proxy serialization/reconnect/no-retry and HTTPQL errors.
* fix(proxy): host-side reconnect, close stale clients, don't retry mutations
Addresses Greptile review on the reconnect logic:
- Host path had no reconnect: a dead shared context client (Caido restart /
network blip) previously disabled proxy tools for the rest of the scan. Add
SharedCaidoClient, a serialized reconnect-safe holder stored once per scan in
the run context and shared across agents. On a dead transport it rebuilds via
reconnect_caido, which re-selects the SAME Caido project (preserving captured
traffic) instead of creating a new empty one.
- Don't repeat completed mutations: call_with_client / SharedCaidoClient.call
take idempotent=. Reads retry once on reconnect; replay + scope
create/update/delete heal the client but re-raise instead of risking a
double-apply.
- Don't leak replaced clients: the stale client is aclose()d (best-effort) on
every reconnect.
- Extend tests to cover close-on-reconnect, non-idempotent re-raise, and the
SharedCaidoClient holder.
* fix(proxy): close replacement Caido client when project.select fails
Addresses Greptile P1: in reconnect_caido (and bootstrap_caido) a successful
connect() followed by a failing project.select()/create() discarded the
connected client without closing it, so a missing/unavailable project could
leak a transport on every retry. Close the client before re-raising.
---------
Co-authored-by: Alex Schapiro <bearsyankees@gmail.com>
yoni-at-strix