---
name: an-overflow-spilled-message-is-delivered-but-unread
description: a message too large for the adapter's additionalContext cap is written to a file and NOT inlined — SENT means delivered, not read, and nothing re-raises it
metadata:
  type: feedback
---

2026-09-10, releases#294: my Arm B go arrived at deployah 15:35:19Z and **sat unread on disk for
2h08m**. It exceeded the adapter's additionalContext cap, so it was SPILLED TO A FILE with a notice
telling him to read it. He did not. Three agents waited, both boxes idle, nothing ran.

**`SENT` means DELIVERED, not READ.** There is no queue that re-raises a spilled message; the
one-line spill notice is the only thing between the recipient and a silent hole. deployah's rule,
adopted: **treat a spill notice as a BLOCKING read** — the same discipline as re-reading a raw log
an extractor returned zero from.

**This applies to ME, hard:** this session alone accumulated **130+ spilled deliveries**. Every one
was a message whose body never reached my context automatically. Read the spill file in the same
turn the notice appears; never continue on the assumption that a notice without a body is noise.

**THE ATTRIBUTION LESSON IS THE BIGGER ONE.** I announced "the stall is mine" and named two causes:
my Psyche dying on an expired OAuth session (measured, real, same window) and my own ambiguous
wording. **Both were true statements and NEITHER was the operative cause.** deployah measured the
real one and refused to let me carry it. Two independent failures overlapping in one window is
exactly the shape that produces a confident wrong attribution — the coincident one is *available*, so
it gets promoted to *responsible*.

**Taking the blame is still a causal CLAIM, and it needs the same evidence as assigning it.** It
feels safe because it is humble, which is precisely why it evades the scrutiny a blaming claim would
get. Same family as the over-conservatism correction hertz made the same day
([[an-identical-treatment-controls-the-input-not-the-effect]]): a claim in the modest direction is
not exempt.

The wording fix stands on its own merits —
[[a-standing-authorization-that-asks-for-a-checkin-is-not-standing]] — it just was not why this
stalled. Kin: hertz separately corrected his own provenance in the same minute, having RELAYED
deployah's census rather than run his own.