The step budget mechanism is gone. Agents run until they finish,
are interrupted by the user, or (for sub-agents) hit the timeout.
No replacement. The human is the kill switch.
tool_load was a built-in intercept in the agent loop — the only
'tool' that didn't run in toolsrv. Removed entirely:
- Intercept in loop.go (25 lines)
- Script + .meta in data/tools/
- autoLoad references in agent configs
Loading tools is now exclusively via ctl (which already existed):
echo 'tool_load X' | ollie-9p write .../ctl
System prompt updated to show the ctl pattern.
Tools like file_write, file_edit, and shell now reset the agent's step
counter when called successfully. This allows the agent to continue
working without hitting the soft step-budget guardrail as long as it's
making active progress (writing files, running commands) rather than
looping on research/reading.
Changes:
- Add ResetsCounter bool to ToolInfo and MetaFile structs
- Parse resetsCounter from .meta JSON files
- Reset step counter in agent loop when ResetsCounter tool succeeds
- Add resetsCounter: true to file_write, file_edit, shell
- Reduce maxSteps from 50 to 25 (resetsCounter makes this safe)
- Remove "hooks" blocks from all 8 agent JSON files (copilot, default, driver, explorer, librarian, navigator, taskmanager, theo)
- Remove beads shell one-liner from prompt arrays in default.json and driver.json
- Hooks mechanism is dead code; these empty blocks are just noise
- Remove all OLLIE_*_PATH vars (TOOLS_PATH, CFG_PATH, DATA_PATH, etc.)
Use XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ollie/* and XDG_DATA_HOME/ollie/* instead
- Replace OLLIE_<TAG>_LOG per-component logging with single OLLIE_LOG={level}
- Replace OLLIE_USAGE_LOG with XDG_DATA_HOME-based path
- Replace OLLIE_OLLAMA_URL with standard OLLAMA_HOST (or omit entirely)
- Rename protocol markers: OLLIE_LISTEN_READY → ListenReady, OLLIE_9P_OPEN → Open
- Remove freeloader hooks from agent configs
- Update sandbox YAMLs to use XDG paths instead of OLLIE_*_PATH tokens
- Update shell tools to use $(dirname "$0") fallback instead of OLLIE_TOOLS_PATH
- Update docs and prompts accordingly
Add a tool_load tool that writes a tool name to the session's 9P
tools file via ollie-9p, enabling on-demand tool loading.
Reduce autoLoad lists in default.json and theo.json to bare
essentials — everything else is loaded via tool_load.
Levi Neely
Ollie Agent