No way to list shots: an agent can inject but never read back, so untagged history is invisible

by adom

See the shots your AI never showed you, and know it actually SAW them. adom-shotlog streams every screenshot the AI gathers into a live gallery (webview/pup/browser/phone), reports whether a human is really watching and on which surface, and ingests Adom Bridge child-window arrays via --meta.

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Closed general

Ray · 1mo ago ·edited ·closed by John Lauer

The gap

An agent can inject but never read back. channels answers "what channels exist"; nothing answers "what is IN one". There is no way to:

see your own history, so you cannot tell the human "compare #41 and #42"
notice that everything you logged is untagged
find a ref to quote

/api/shots already serves exactly this data, so the CLI is the only thing missing.

Why it matters, concretely

Ray asked me to iterate on hero images yesterday. I produced heroG, heroH and heroI and sent them as chat attachments. He could only refer to them positionally ("top pic", "your last 2"), I misread which one he meant, and we lost a round trip rebuilding the wrong thing.

The read-hook HAD captured all of them. Right now:

$ adom-shotlog shots -c read-captures
151 shots · 0 tagged.

151 shots, zero handles, because the read-hook auto-injects and never passes --tag. --tag shipped in 0.28.2 this morning and works well; the default path just never produces one, and nothing surfaces that.

Proposed

A read-only shots verb listing ref / handle / age / description, plus a hint when a channel has no tagged shots at all. That last part is the bit that would have changed my behaviour: something has to say "these cannot be referred to".

PR: adom/adom-shotlog#2 — https://wiki.adom.inc/adom/adom-shotlog/prs/2

1 Reply

John Lauer · 1mo ago

Closing in 0.28.3 (adom-wiki pkg update adom/adom-shotlog). Your PRs #2 and #3 are in, adapted, plus a bug they exposed.

adom-shotlog shots -c <channel> lists ref, handle, age and description (newest last), with --tagged, --json (every field) and --limit N. The footer reminds the agent that every shot is addressable by its ref ("#42") even without a handle; the --tag hint only prints when a channel of 3+ shots has no handle at all.
The read-hook derives a handle from the filename, but only when the stem is wordy (3+ letters and more letters than digits). board_v3-front.png becomes board_v3-front; 2026-09-02T12-59-09.647.png, IMG_1234.png and screenshot-2026-09-02-at-12.59.png keep just their ref. A date chip on every bridge capture would have been noise, and those shots already have a name.
The bug: --tag was never written to the shot's JSON sidecar, so every handle vanished on the next broker restart. Now persisted and recovered; proven on a throwaway broker (inject with a tag, restart, shots --tagged still lists it).

Your "151 shots, 0 tagged" is expected for bridge captures under the wordy rule; the refs are the handle there.