dimissory

Don't lose the run when the window closes.

A dimissory letter transfers a cleric's standing from one bishop to another, so he can continue under a new authority without being examined again.

This does the same for an agent session. When your plan window is about to run out — the five-hour cap, the weekly cap, a session about to be compacted — dimissory writes a portable letter of transfer, so the next session continues the work instead of reconstructing it. On another account, or another model.

pip install dimissory

Status: early, 0.0.6. The brief format, the trust contract, the verify mechanism, the agent hooks and the plan-window meter all work and are tested — 561 checks across 10 files, green from a bare checkout with nothing installed. Two vendors need a second step before anything is automatic, and dim status exits non-zero until they have it: Claude needs dim statusline --install, and Codex needs you to approve its hooks once. Both are listed under Known gaps.

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The problem this is actually solving

Writing a handoff before a session dies is not a new idea. Lifeline captures a session when it sees a usage-limit message; rate-limit-handoff maintains a living handoff.md; Context Passport extracts decisions and a resume prompt; a dozen skills write HANDOFF.md when you remember to ask.

They share two properties:

1. They fire after the wall. A 429, a "usage limit reached", a context window that already filled.
2. They write a summary, which the receiving agent has to take on faith.

Context compaction and --resume already solve the context problem, and the vendors will keep improving them. What none of them solve is the plan window ending, on an account you no longer have, in a way the next agent can check.

That is the whole of it: earlier, and checkable.

The trust contract

A letter is made of three layers, and they are never blended, because the receiving agent has to know how much of it to believe and on whose word.

Layer	What it is	How much to trust it
Observed	Git HEAD and dirty paths, the last command and its exit code, the tool-call tail with hashed arguments, window state.	Machine-derived. No model wrote any of it.
Declared	The task, decisions taken, what was ruled out, the next action, standing constraints.	The agent's own words, always attributed. The valuable half and the soft half.
Verify	A short executable block.	Run it first. If it fails, the world moved and the letter is stale.

The third layer is the differentiator, and it isn't a formatting choice. Every competing tool writes a summary and hopes. A letter that can fail its own check is one you can act on without re-reading the transcript — which is the promise: continue, don't reconstruct.

The rules, and why they are types rather than documentation

The predecessor project shipped a handoff that printed this under a heading promising "a record of what the session was observed doing":

- ran for: 0s
- steps completed (seq): 0

Two of those were written on a real machine, and both were worthless. The zero did not mean "no time passed", it meant "nobody looked". So:

• A number nobody measured is omitted, never zero. UNMEASURED is a singleton that is falsey and raises on int() — you cannot accidentally format it as 0.
• Declared is never rendered as observed. Attribution sits on the heading line, where reformatting cannot separate a claim from whose claim it is.
• A letter missing the agent's half is visibly degraded, not merely short.
• A letter with no checks says it is unverifiable — a claim, not a finding.
• No secrets, ever. Arguments are hashed, not copied. The letter is designed to be pasted into another vendor's product.

Each of those is asserted in tests/test_contract.py, because the predecessor documented all of them correctly and shipped the opposite anyway.

Use

dim meter                 # how much of every plan window is gone
dim write                 # issue a letter now
dim show                  # print the most recent one
dim resume                # run its Verify block; exit 2 if stale
dim status                # how much of the plan window is gone

dim and dimissory are the same command. Letters land in ~/.dimissory/letters unless you pass --dir.

dim resume has exactly two meaningful outcomes. Exit 0: every check agreed, the letter may be acted on. Exit 2: it is stale. There is deliberately no exit code meaning "probably fine".

What is built

Piece	State
Brief model and trust contract	working, 32 checks
Markdown renderer	working
Observed block — git, dirty paths	working
Verify block — derive, render, compare, fail	working
Transcript reading — bounded tail, hashed args	working
Agent hooks — install, ask, gate	working, all three CLIs
Plan-window meter — Codex, Grok	working, both caps
Plan-window meter — Claude	working, via dim statusline
Seal before the wall, on the tool-call heartbeat	working
dim status	working
Observed block — last command and exit code	not yet
One letter per session unless something changed	working
Pruning old letters (letters.keep)	not yet, setting is inert
Codex hooks	installed, but inert until Codex trusts them
Cross-account delivery	not yet

Claude needs one extra step, and it is not optional

Codex and Grok write their plan window to disk, so dimissory just reads it. Claude Code writes it nowhere — but it hands the numbers to your statusline command on stdin every turn:

"rate_limits": {
  "five_hour": {"used_percentage": 100, "resets_at": 1788416400},
  "seven_day": {"used_percentage": 58,  "resets_at": 1788764400}
}

So dim statusline records them, and the hook reads them back:

dim statusline --install     # wraps any statusline you already have
dim status                   # says what the meter can see, per agent

Without it, Claude has no percentage to seal on and you only get a letter at the wall — dimissory reads the quotaLimits tombstone from the transcript for that, which carries the reset time but no percentage (measured: 81 records on a live machine, every one status: "rejected"). dim status exits non-zero when no meter is live, precisely so this cannot be mistaken for readiness.

This is not a supervising process. Nothing wraps the claude binary and nothing parses its output; Claude Code calls dim statusline itself, through an interface it already invokes on its own schedule.

Known gaps, stated plainly

Codex will not run a hook it has not trusted, and says nothing when it declines to. Measured on a live box, same file and same task:

codex exec ...                              ->  0 hooks fired
codex exec --dangerously-bypass-hook-trust  ->  2 hooks fired

So installing Codex hooks is necessary and not sufficient. Start codex once and approve them when it asks. dim hook --install now says NOT ARMED YET rather than reporting a bare success, and dim status shows Codex as untrusted instead of yes. dimissory does not write a trust record on your behalf — that is a control Codex built deliberately, and the flag which skips it is called --dangerously-bypass-hook-trust.

Non-interactive Claude has no meter. claude -p, the SDK, and --safe-mode have no status bar, so nothing records Claude's window there: the interface that carries the number only exists in the interactive TUI.

The sample clock and the seal clock are different clocks. The seal fires on tool calls; the statusline does not — Claude Code re-renders on session start, each new assistant message, /compact, and a refreshInterval timer. A long single tool call or a long reasoning stretch leaves the reading frozen in between, so install sets refreshInterval to keep it moving.

That gap is handled by arithmetic rather than by trusting the sample. Staleness here is one-directional: usage inside a window only grows, so an old reading always understates. It can never cause a false seal — it causes no seal at all, which is the only failure that matters. And the growth has a ceiling: inside a window of length L, usage cannot exceed 100% over L, so in age seconds it can have risen by at most (age / L) × 100 points.

So the decision asks whether the ceiling has crossed the margin, not whether the last sample did. An 84% reading taken an hour ago seals; the same reading taken a minute ago does not; 58% of a weekly cap barely moves in an hour and correctly doesn't. The ceiling drives the decision only — a letter always reports the figure that was actually measured.

The gate is a request, not a guarantee

The Stop hook blocks a turn that declared nothing and feeds back what to run. It blocks once: the continuation carries stop_hook_active, and blocking again is how a gate becomes a trap that a user has to kill. So an agent that ignores the block finishes anyway, and the letter is sealed DEGRADED rather than not sealed at all.

Never trapping your session is the higher duty, so this is deliberate — but it means nothing here forces the agent to write its half. The journal narrows the problem by collecting declarations as work happens instead of asking for everything at the end. It does not close it.

How this loses

Stated here rather than in a postmortem, because the predecessor's credibility came from publishing the unflattering number:

• The declared half is only as good as a tired agent. An agent at 85% of its window, writing about its own reasoning, is the weakest link. If those sections read as vague, this is a call log with extra steps.
• Vendors close the gap for free. Session Memory, --resume and resume-from-summary already exist. Cross-account and cross-vendor is the part they have no incentive to build — but "no incentive" is not "never".
• Verify is cheap to copy. A week of work, once someone sees it. The defensible part is the meter that lets you fire before the wall, not the block itself.
• The test that settles it has not been run. Ten real interrupted tasks producing letters, five resumed successfully from the letter alone, on a different account or model. Until that passes, this is a feature with a good argument, not a product.

Development

python3 tests/test_contract.py          # the trust contract
python3 tests/test_setup_and_config.py  # setup, settings, and the -c flag
python3 tests/test_declared_floor.py    # the Python version we claim to support
python3 tests/test_verify_can_fail.py   # the verify block detects a moved world

No dependencies and no test runner. Requires Python 3.11+ (tomllib).

MIT © Ak2tx LLC