ADR 0018: wisp’s own state is readable, read-only, through every face

Date: 2026-09-20. Status: accepted.

Context

wisp keeps state the operator and a calling harness need to see: the effective configuration after defaults, which model and tools a conversation has, which commands are approved and for how long, and the audit log of what actually happened. The CLI had logs, approvals, doctor, and models, but the model could not look at any of it (so it could not answer “what is your policy?” or “what did you just run?”), and an MCP client had to spend a model turn or parse a log file to learn what a delegated thread did.

Decision

• One Introspection type renders four views: configuration, status, approvals, audit. It is built once per conversation from the session’s home, config, and store, plus a status closure.
• The views are exposed three ways with the same content: the model’s inspect tool (bounded to 4 KiB, audited as a tool call), the MCP resources wisp://config, wisp://status, wisp://approvals, wisp://audit, and the template wisp://audit/{session}, and the CLI (wisp config; logs now reads through the same code).
• Everything is read-only. There is no tool or resource that changes config, approvals, or logs; those stay with the operator (config.json, wisp approvals, the file system).
• Nothing is redacted, because everything shown is local state the operator already owns and the audit log already contains command output by design (ADR 0010). What leaves the machine is governed by the model choice (ADR 0013), not by this feature: an inspect result is tool output like any other, and a private-cloud session sends it to Apple as it sends everything else.
• The status resource adds what only the server knows: live thread ids and the count of standing approvals.

Consequences

• A calling harness can reconstruct what a thread did from wisp://audit/{thread_id} today; the “receipts” backlog item becomes a summary in the result rather than the only way to know.
• A model asked to read the audit log leaves a tool.call in it; that is correct and documented.
• Adding a view means one renderer in Introspection and, if it belongs on the wire, one resource.