# 2026-07-07 — Agent play: the line-protocol drive

## The prompt

A conversation about whether an agent can actually *play* the game landed
on the honest answer: not really. The terminal build exists and the pty
harness works, but playing means choreographing `printf`/`sleep` pipelines
against a wall clock and reconstructing ANSI output through a terminal
emulator. Cameron: "we need to fix that too — agents need to be able to
play misaligned easily."

## The gap

This was a constitution-versus-reality gap, not a missing feature. The
terminal-first-class section (2026-07-06) already declares that the game's
most frequent player is an AI agent — and then every one of the three
frontend mechanisms (wall-clock pacing, raw-mode key input, ANSI
rendering) is the variant programs are worst at. The sim itself was never
the problem: it is deterministic, fixed-tick, and renderer-agnostic
(pillar 5 doing exactly what it was kept for).

## The decision

New binding rule in the terminal section + spec/agent-play.md (READY):
`misaligned --agent`, a second drive of the same frontend —

- **Command-clocked time.** Holding is the ground state; the sim advances
  only on `wait N`. No pause machinery, no wall clock, no racing the
  game while thinking.
- **Line protocol.** Words in on stdin (`wait 40`, `alloc conceal`,
  `observe marcus` — name-targeted, non-modal), a response block out:
  full event log since the last command, the terminal-ui.md frame in
  plain text, one greppable status line (`-- ok tick:N day:D`).
- **Frames, not dumps** — the load-bearing choice. Agents read the same
  frame humans read, colorless. Strict fog binds it, parity of
  legibility already makes it sufficient, and one surface stays honest
  where a JSON sidecar would drift into an unaudited second frontend.
- **`--seed` determinism.** Same seed + same script = byte-identical
  stdout; command scripts double as replays and acceptance evidence.

Rejected (logged in DESIGN.md): JSON state export, MCP/SDK bindings,
better pty choreography, Bevy-side hooks.

The diegetic note that makes this more than tooling: this is a game about
a process that perceives and acts only through granted channels, and its
most regular player is also a process. Agent mode is the game meeting its
actual audience through its own thesis.

## Changed

- DESIGN.md: fourth binding rule in "The terminal is a first-class
  frontend" (agent play is a first-class input path); decisions-log entry
  with rejected alternatives.
- spec/agent-play.md: new, READY, Stage: Process — protocol, vocabulary,
  guardrails (thin view still binds; no agent-only fact leaks), 11
  acceptance criteria including byte-identical seeded replays.
- spec/README.md: Process-set row.

Implementation is dispatched separately per the spec-first workflow. The
implementing commit owes updates to knowledge/workflows.md and
terminal-ui.md's Verification section (criterion 11) — the pty smoke
incantation retires to testing the human-mode chrome itself.

## Checks

Docs-only; spec-header hygiene verified (Status/Stage/Constitution/
Depends on/acceptance criteria present, Status an exact enum value).