@davidorex/pi-jit-agents

Agent spec compilation and in-process dispatch runtime. Owns everything between "I have a spec" and "I have a typed result."

Purpose

JIT agents are named callable units with typed input contracts, typed output contracts, and context-parametric implementations materialized at runtime from project state. This package provides:

• Spec loading with full path resolution and tier-aware discovery
• Template compilation with project block context injection
• In-process LLM dispatch with phantom-tool structured output enforcement
• Agent contract introspection for SDK queries

There is one concept of "agent" regardless of whether a workflow step or a monitor classify call invokes it. Classification is agent execution with a verdict-shaped output schema; it is not a separate primitive.

Boundary

The package owns four public surfaces:

• loadAgent(name, ctx) → AgentSpec — resolves spec from discovery tiers; relative path fields absolutize only where a file exists (beside the spec, or — for builtin-tier specs — at the package-root sibling location), otherwise surviving as loader-resolvable names
• compileAgent(spec, ctx) → CompiledAgent — renders templates, injects contextBlocks from the substrate directory, composes final prompts
• executeAgent(compiled, dispatch) → JitAgentResult — in-process LLM dispatch with phantom tool enforcement; clamps the compiled agent's tool grant to a subset of the caller-supplied parent grant at the dispatch boundary
• agentContract(spec) → AgentContract — projection for introspection, no execution

Subprocess dispatch stays in pi-workflows. The package never reads from .pi/ — that directory is Pi platform territory.

Tool-grant clamping

AgentSpec.tools (operation-granular tool names) threads through compileAgent into CompiledAgent.tools. At dispatch, executeAgent clamps compiled.tools to a subset of DispatchContext.parentGrant (the caller's own grant; undefined parent grant means the empty set). A child requesting a tool outside the parent grant raises GrantViolationError, naming the agent and the violating tools.

Discovery tiers

Agent specs are searched in this order:

1. {cwd}/<substrate-dir>/agents/{name}.agent.yaml — project-level overrides
2. {userDir ?? ~/.pi/agent/agents/}/{name}.agent.yaml — user-global overrides
3. {builtinDir}/{name}.agent.yaml — consumer-supplied builtins

The framework package itself ships no bundled agent specs. Consumer packages supply their own builtin directory at loader construction time.

Bundled templates

The agent-template tree ships in this package under templates/ (relocated here from pi-workflows). bundledTemplateDir() returns its absolute path so consumers can discover the bundled templates from either source or built (dist) layouts. templates/shared/macros.md provides one per-item rendering macro per block kind plus six whole-block delegator macros (render_decisions, render_features, render_framework_gaps, render_layer_plans, render_research, render_spec_reviews) that wrap the per-item macros.

CANONICAL_MACRO_NAMES is the registry mapping each block kind to its { macro_name, array_key }, surfacing the cases where the block kind differs from the data key the items live under (e.g. framework-gaps→gaps, layer-plans→plans, spec-reviews→reviews). createRendererRegistry builds the kind→macro-ref map consumed during compilation.

Exports

• . — main barrel
• ./types — type definitions
• ./agent-spec — parseAgentYaml, createAgentLoader
• ./template — createTemplateEnv, renderTemplate, renderTemplateFile
• ./compile — compileAgent, registerCompositionGlobals
• ./runtime — executeAgent, buildPhantomTool, normalizeToolChoice, GrantViolationError
• ./introspect — agentContract

The main barrel additionally re-exports the bundled-template entry point (bundledTemplateDir), the renderer registry (CANONICAL_MACRO_NAMES, createRendererRegistry), and GrantViolationError.