Event System

One-liner: DSH has two event families. Cordis in-process events (ctx.on, a hook chain for inter-plugin communication) and SessionEvent session logs (persistent, event-sourced). They are not the same thing: don't conflate "listening" with "persisting".

Audit baseline 0.1.5-alpha.1 @ 5dda764ed3: event names, dispatch modes, and envelope fields are all verified point-by-point against the official source.

This page is the master overview of "how plugins communicate, and how sessions are recorded". After reading it you'll know: when to use ctx.on, when to use session.append, what events exist, and the difference between (plural tools/) and (singular tool/).

1. Two event planes

	Cordis in-process events	SessionEvent session logs
Carrier	memory, ctx.on/ctx.emit	session append-only log (default zstd-compressed)
Semantics	transient notifications, hook chains	event sourcing, recoverable session facts
Lifetime	auto-unregistered on plugin unmount	persisted, survives restarts
Examples	agent/status, tools/pre-execute, session/created	user/message, request/header, tool/call, tool/result

Key: the session log ("single source of truth") carries telemetry, projections, and recovery; Cordis events are in-process reactive extension. Don't think mounting ctx.on persists anything: for persistence use session.append.

2. Five dispatch modes (ctx.emit/*)

Cordis event dispatch modes determine how listeners get composed:

Mode	Semantics	Typical
emit	fire synchronously, don't wait for listeners	agent/error
parallel	async in parallel, await all	session/flush
serial	serially, one by one	some agent/*
bail	stop at the first bail result	—
waterfall	listeners form a next() chain; next()'s return value flows to the next	tools/pre-execute, agent/request

waterfall must call next(): missing it short-circuits the entire chain. Publishing side uses ctx.emit() / ctx.parallel() / ctx.waterfall().

3. agent/*: agent lifecycle and control plane

Event	Timing / dispatch
agent/created / agent/disposed	created / destroyed (paired)
agent/status	running-state transitions
agent/pre-step	per-step assembly (waterfall)
agent/request	request-assembly replacement (waterfall)
agent/request-error	model-request failure recovery (waterfall; dsh-llm-retry hangs here)
agent/turn-stopping	a turn begins stopping (serial)
agent/error / agent/session-start	error / session start
agent/inbox/*	inserted / claimed / discarded (see the main loop)

agent/* is the control plane; the actual conversation content flows through the session log.

4. The tools pipeline (Cordis, plural tools/)

The extension points of each tool call, extending from Agent Main Loop:

tools/result (plural, a Cordis notification) ≠ tool/result (singular, a session-log event): the former is an in-process notification, the latter a persisted session event. This is the pair that's easiest to confuse.

5. SessionEvent session-log vocabulary

Singular tool/, persisted. One session log:

{"type":"session","version":3,"id":"...","createdAt":0,"isSeeded":false,"delegationDepth":0}
{"type":"user/message","seq":1,"time":0,"data":{...},"surfaceOp":"append"}
{"type":"request/header","seq":2,"time":0,"data":{...}}
{"type":"tool/call","seq":3,"time":0,"data":{...}}
{"type":"tool/result","seq":4,"time":0,"data":{...},"surfaceOp":"append"}

Common types: system/message, user/message, assistant/message, assistant/attempt, request/header, request/context, tool/call, tool/result, step/start, step/end, turn/start, turn/end, session/end-seed, compaction/*, permission/preset, feedback/record, todo/write, goal/change, llm/retry, llm/retry-started. For the full catalog see $SRC/packages/core/session/src/known-event-types.ts.

Event-envelope fields (optional by event type):

Field	Meaning
seq	the monotonically increasing persisted ordering key
time	Unix epoch milliseconds
sourceEventSeqs	seqs of the source events referenced (compaction replacement→shadowed entries); present only on surface events
surfaceOp	append or { op:'replace', startSeq, endSeq }, only valid for system/message/user/message/assistant/message/tool/result
ignorable	unknown types with this set can be skipped; absent = required, unknown types reject rebuild

6. Event-type conventions and the format gate

• seq is monotonically increasing (the ordering key)
• format-version gate: when the log's first-line version is newer than the current SESSION_FORMAT_VERSION (=3), loading rejects outright and prompts upgrading the harness; released v0/v1/v2 are migrated to v3 by the format catalog
• unknown types: no ignorable → reject; with ignorable → skip
• telemetry / projection / recovery consume the same event stream (that's what "the log is the single source of truth" means)

7. The two ways a plugin participates

What you want	How to do it
listen for reactive extension	ctx.on('tools/result', handler) (Cordis)
publish a persisted fact	session.append(type, data), then await ctx.sessions.flush(session)
custom persisted events	first declare module '@deepseek-ai/dsh-session/types' to augment SessionEventMap, otherwise append rejects unknown types
custom Cordis events	ctx.emit, auto-cleaned on plugin unmount

Details on the two event planes + code in Listening to Events.

8. Several seams consuming the same stream

Seam	What it does with the event stream
session-persistence	storage/reload (eager write-behind)
session-projection	derived views (cache)
session-telemetry	OTel export
session-title	title generation
UI	session/event + agent/* control events render the conversation

9. Verification

# the event stream = the full session log (default zstd-compressed, two-level directories)
zstdcat ~/.dsh/sessions/*/*/session*.jsonl.zstd | jq -r '.type' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -12

# inspect agent control events
zstdcat ~/.dsh/sessions/*/*/session*.jsonl.zstd | grep -E '"agent/' | head

Next steps

• Session System: how events get persisted (surface/log)
• Listening to Events: listen/publish hands-on
• Agent Main Loop: where agent/* and inbox events come from