[solquin]

what this changes

when an approved step runs out of tries, notCarriedOut sends Not done: this action could not be carried out (<reason>). Check whether it happened before asking the person again. outcomeForPerson cuts the second sentence off for the person by finding the first . outside parentheses. the reason is error.message as thrown (resume-sweep.ts), so the parentheses inside it are not ours to balance:

• Unexpected token ( in JSON at position 4 leaves the depth at 1, no sentence end is found, and the person reads the whole text, bot's step included
• a reason over 300 characters is cut by slice(0, 300), which can drop its own ), with the same result. long provider and database errors tend to carry parentheses

server/tests/approval-outcomes-for-person.test.ts guards exactly this leak, but its sample reason is The disk is full..

the fix:

• outcomeForPerson strips the two known endings (ASK_AGAIN, CHECK_BEFORE_ASKING) by endsWith before the parenthesis scan. the builders use the same constants, so the strings cannot drift. the scan stays as the fallback for any other Not done: text
• notCarriedOut cuts the reason by code point, so slice no longer leaves half an emoji (a lone surrogate) in the sentence

where it runs

• new state that outlives a request? none. two pure functions in shared/
• what happens on the second replica? the same: no state
• anything serialised? no
• anything fanned out to a browser? no. the app already calls outcomeForPerson, it now gets the shorter text
• new listener, port, or schedule? no

boundary and audit

• every acting call still goes through the gateway: untouched
• new refusals and new failures each write a row: none added
• nothing new is trusted from the client

changelog

• a line in CHANGELOG.md under Unreleased

proof

• bun test shared/approval-outcomes.test.ts: two new tests (an unclosed (, a 320-character reason, an emoji at the 300th character) fail on main and pass with the fix
• bun test server/tests/approval-outcomes-for-person.test.ts app/tests/computer-activity-conversation.test.tsx: pass
• bunx biome lint --error-on-warnings and bunx biome format on the changed files: clean. tsc --noEmit in shared/: clean