Owner report, 2026-10-04: starting a session with map picks showed ONE
empty user bubble, no agent turn; a follow-up woke the agent with the
right material but the marker never rendered. Two breaks, one root —
the record no longer starts empty and user-side data parts had no
render lane:
- The first-send gate checked initialMessages.length === 0; the
graph-context marker at message[0] made that false, so the ?prompt
turn NEVER fired. New pure helper initialPromptOwed (the escAbortTarget
pattern): the prompt is owed while no user/assistant message exists —
scaffolding is not conversation. Pinned in tests/graph-context.test.ts.
- The transcript's user branch rendered text parts only; a data-only
message (graph-context, practice-thinking) fell through as an EMPTY
bubble — the data-practice-thinking case I anchored to lived in the
ASSISTANT switch, dead on arrival. Data-only user messages now hoist
to a bubble-free card lane (the subagent-steer precedent); the two
dead assistant-switch cases are gone.
Gates: 1296 pass / 0 fail; typecheck, lint, build clean.