NTM — optional pane adapter

NTM — optional pane adapter

NTM hosts explicit agent roles in persistent panes. It is transport, not an AgentOps lifecycle controller. The caller chooses the panes, roles, commands, write scopes, and stopping point.

Robot surfaces work because they report what the pane is doing, not what was sent to it; a dispatch layer that only proved delivery would let every dead worker look busy.

Judge pane liveness by the truth-stack, strongest first: new artifacts on disk, then transcript growth, then robot state and attention flags, then bare process existence. A successful prompt send sits below all of these and proves nothing about work.

Named failure mode — kill-the-witness: restarting a stuck pane before capturing its state, destroying the only evidence of why it stalled.

Anti-pattern: restarting an unresponsive pane as the default remedy. Corrective: rescue before restart — snapshot robot state and transcript, attempt a nudge, and restart only when the truth-stack shows no liveness at any level.

Boundary

• Never start or probe NTM merely because it is installed.
• Discover the live command contract with ntm --help, ntm --robot-capabilities, and ntm --robot-snapshot before unfamiliar actions.
• Dispatch each caller-supplied command once. NTM does not select work, retry a failed command, validate a candidate, integrate changes, or decide what runs next.
• Pane roles are descriptive. They grant no ownership, admission, Git, release, or delivery authority.
• Concurrent writers require caller-supplied disjoint scopes and whatever isolation the repository requires. NTM does not infer safe concurrency.
• Safety, lock, mail, and pipeline features remain substrate facts. Their state cannot change an RPI phase result or semantic verdict. The adapter cannot select AgentOps semantics, issue a binding verdict, or turn factory completion into delivery or validation proof.

One-shot dispatch