ADR 0106 — An Answer Let Go Before It Played Is Recorded as Never Spoken

Status: Accepted · Date: 2026-10-01

Context

The next turn’s state says where the last spoken answer stopped, read from the playback rows L5 writes for it (surface.playback_started and its checkpoint and terminal). No playback row reads as heard whole: that is also what a typed turn, or a boot without TTS, leaves.
L5 lets an answer go without ever giving it a lease in three places: a stop that names an answer parked while Allen talks (ADR 0053) or queued behind another; a foreground grant that displaces the queued successors; and L3 ending the run while the answer is still buffering. The answer is already on screen and in memory.db, and nothing durable says it was never heard; only the companion’s spoken … dropped broadcast, which is not in the Event Log.
The next turn then treats words Allen never heard as said, and the model refers back to them (handoff §3.1 item 5, open since 69f3fae).
A playback row needs a session and a generation. An answer that never reached a lease has neither, so the existing terminals cannot carry this.

Decision

When L5 lets a registered answer go before any of it played, append one surface.speech_dropped row naming the response, its turn and why; the conversation projection marks that answer unspoken, and the next turn says it was never spoken aloud and was only shown on screen.

Its limits:

Only an answer that never started: once a lease exists, the playback terminal and its cursor say what was heard, as before.
The look-back goes on past an unspoken answer, the way it goes past one that started without a sample, so the answer Allen last heard is still named.
The row is best effort: letting the answer go never waits on it or fails because of it.
A power transition that clears the queue writes none; it is not a turn Allen is still in.

Alternatives rejected

Infer it in L3 from the missing playback rows on a voice turn. A boot without a MiniMax key has no playback rows for any answer, so every voice turn would be told the last answer was never spoken while Allen read it.
Write surface.playback_failed for it. Its schema requires a session and a playback generation that a never-activated answer does not have; a made-up generation would enter the generation-ownership checks PlaybackHistory runs on every playback row.
Leave it to the companion’s dropped broadcast. It is not durable: a daemon restart, or a turn folded from the Event Log alone, never sees it.

Consequences

One more L5 event type in the Event Log, written on every stop of a waiting answer and every displacement.
Two model-facing lines can now stack: never spoken, then where the answer before it was cut.
An answer dropped by an older build, before this row existed, still reads as heard whole.

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