Archive — history, not state. Kept for its reasoning and its evidence; its plan is closed.

CLI reply deadline

Status: superseded by the canonical one-shot transport contract.

The earlier experiment let actor HELP descriptors publish reply_timeout and copied it into REPLYTIMEOUT. That mixed actor vocabulary with transport policy, made deadlines depend on a successful implicit help probe, and let untrusted program metadata choose how long the CLI connection remained open. It has been deleted.

Every daemon-listener terminal session, and the no-daemon in-process terminal session, now starts with a fixed bounded 600-second reply timeout. This bounds the complete call/response operation, including cold realization and program work. A future per-invocation override belongs on the terminal transport request, never in an actor’s HELP descriptor or canonical CLI message.

Terminal-owned one-shot actors retain ar_timer: -1: waiting on asynchronous build work must not make a healthy command look unused. The terminal-child coupling and the bounded terminal reply deadline still stop abandoned work, and successful one-shots are stopped after their reply. Detached actors do not use this one-shot lifetime policy.

Source: plans/archive/perf-2026-07/perf-cli-reply-timeout.md