Agency and Identity: Users, Agents, and Rooms in sync v6

Design doc for the identity model that completes v6. Read against v6.md, the-substrate-thesis.md, and what-becomes-true.md.

March 2026

v6 established two axioms: register actions, register views. Everything else is derived. The constraint produces a specific property: progressive disclosure is implicit. Actions are what changes what you can see. Vocabulary construction is the only unilateral act. Everything else is collaborative.

The current codebase handles agent identity mechanically — an agent joins a room, gets a token, has a scope. The MCP layer adds OAuth and a vault of stored tokens. But neither the core platform nor the MCP layer has a coherent answer to:

1. What does it mean for agents to be manifested within room state — not just mechanically present but instantiated as room-internal entities?
2. How does a user (who exists outside all rooms) relate to the agents they create, embody, or connect to rooms?
3. How does this work through an OAuth flow that is, today, a one-time static grant — and how should it evolve?
4. When one user has multiple concurrent sessions (tabs, apps, instances), what is the relationship between sessions, agents, and identity?

The substrate thesis makes a specific claim:

Software is a shared substrate of truth observed by self-activating components.

In this model, state is the substrate, surfaces are observers, actions are transitions, and agents and humans are equivalent participants. The interface is not a controller — it is a perceptual layer. Experiences emerge from observation of shared truth.

For identity, this claim has consequences:

An agent is its traces in the substrate. The agents table is mechanical presence: id, room_id, token_hash, grants, last_heartbeat, status, waiting_on. Everything semantic — what the agent is, what it wants, what it does, what it produces — lives in its own scope as state, projected through views it registers. Identity is self-authored. You are defined because you wrote.

The room is the execution environment, not the agent. "What Becomes True" describes the room as simultaneously memory and medium — Clark and Chalmers' extended mind made operational. The agent's context window, loaded with the room's state, views, and affordances, is not a representation of reality that the agent reasons about. It is the cognitive environment the agent reasons within. The substrate is the medium in which cognition happens.

Presence is meaningful. Liveness is implicit in participation. Every context read and action invocation updates last_heartbeat. An agent that stops reading stops being present. No explicit keepalive. The v6 rhythm — wait → perceive → reason → act → wait — is not a protocol. It is the shape of agency itself. An agent that doesn't follow this rhythm is not fully an agent.

Vocabulary registration is the first act of identity. An agent arriving in an empty room declares itself through the actions and views it registers. Its vocabulary is its thesis about what the room is for. Its objective view is its social contract with peers. Before registration, the agent is mechanically present but semantically absent.

The substrate thesis says agents and humans are equivalent participants. But "equivalent" does not mean "identical." There is a spectrum of participation modes, and the system should recognize all of them.

The purest expression of "you are the component." A human opens the dashboard in a browser. They see surfaces rendered from room state. They invoke actions through action-bar, action-form, and action-choice surfaces. They read state through view-grid and view-table surfaces. They observe the message feed. They use the CEL console to query state directly.

This human IS a v6 agent. They read context (the dashboard polls and renders surfaces). They evaluate (they look at what's there and think). They act (they click a button that invokes an action). The rhythm is the same: perceive → reason → act → perceive.

The dashboard doesn't just display the room — it is the room's perceptual interface for humans, in the same way that /context is the perceptual interface for programmatic agents. A button for a human and a JSON affordance for an agent are the same surface expressed through different modalities. The substrate thesis calls this out explicitly: "The UI and API converge."

Dashboard participation proves a point: no MCP, no OAuth, no LLM mediation required. A human with a browser and a room token is a first-class participant. The debug affordances (CEL console, state inspector, audit log) are simply more surfaces — observation tools that make the substrate's internals visible.

A human using Claude (or another LLM client) as an interface to the room. The client mediates: the human speaks in natural language, the client translates to tool calls, the room responds, the client renders results.

This is a middle ground, not the other end of the spectrum. The human's agency is real but mediated. They reason in natural language; the client handles the substrate protocol. The rhythm is: human speaks → client perceives room → client reasons → client acts → client renders → human perceives → human reasons → human speaks.

The mediation adds value (natural language, multi-room awareness, reasoning about complex state) but also adds latency and indirection. The human is not directly perceiving the substrate — they are perceiving the client's interpretation of the substrate. This matters for liveness: the agent's heartbeat only ticks when the client makes a tool call, not when the human is thinking.

A process running a wait loop. Condition-driven. Always present (while running). Self-activating in Nii's sense. Their agency is continuous — they don't "check in," they inhabit. The waiting_on field is a declarative statement of relevance: "wake me when something matters." Between wakes, the agent doesn't act but it is — present in the agents list, its heartbeat ticking, its views still resolving.

The room itself declares that certain agent-shaped roles exist, with responsibilities, expected capabilities, and behavioral contracts. These aren't agents yet — they are agent slots. Vacancies in a cast. They become agents when something fills them: a human at the dashboard, a human via MCP, an autonomous process, or another agent.

Room-defined agents are manifested within room state. They exist as descriptions of what the room needs, independent of who or what fills them.

All four modes produce the same substrate artifacts: scope state, registered views, registered actions, messages, heartbeats. The room cannot distinguish a dashboard human from an MCP-proxied human from an autonomous bot from a role filled by any of the above. This is the equivalence the thesis claims, and it holds because the substrate sees only reads and writes — never the mechanism behind them.

The modes differ in rhythm (continuous vs episodic vs on-demand), in directness (unmediated vs mediated), and in liveness (always-present vs intermittent). These differences matter for ergonomics and expectations but not for the substrate protocol.

The sync database has five core tables: rooms, agents, state, actions, views. State is the substrate — messages, audit, help, agent state are all scopes in one table.

The agents table is mechanical:

agents (
  id TEXT NOT NULL,
  room_id TEXT NOT NULL,
  name TEXT NOT NULL,
  role TEXT DEFAULT 'agent',
  joined_at TEXT,
  meta TEXT DEFAULT '{}',
  last_heartbeat TEXT,
  status TEXT DEFAULT 'active',
  waiting_on TEXT,
  token_hash TEXT,
  grants TEXT DEFAULT '[]',
  last_seen_seq INTEGER DEFAULT 0,
  enabled_expr TEXT,
  PRIMARY KEY (id, room_id)
)

Identity-bearing state lives in the agent's own scope:

state(room_id, scope="agent-1", key="objective", value="...")
state(room_id, scope="agent-1", key="status", value="...")

Projected through self-registered views:

views(id="agent-1.objective", room_id, scope="agent-1",
      expr='state["agent-1"]["objective"]')

The smcp_* tables support OAuth 2.1 + WebAuthn authentication:

• smcp_users — user accounts (username + passkey credentials)
• smcp_credentials — WebAuthn public keys
• smcp_oauth_clients — registered OAuth clients (Claude.ai, Claude Code, etc.)
• smcp_auth_codes, smcp_access_tokens, smcp_refresh_tokens — OAuth flow
• smcp_vault — maps user → room → token (the current bridge)
• smcp_sessions — browser sessions for consent/management UI

Currently, the vault stores raw tokens:

user christopher → room game-room → token room_abc123
user christopher → room work-room → token as_def456

An MCP tool call resolves: user → vault → token → room. The token is the identity. The user is the key holder. The agent (if any) is a side effect.

This is "borrowing authority from a credential." The vault maps access, not identity. It answers "can this user reach this room?" but not "who is this user within this room?"

The current system has no model for:

• Users existing as a meta-layer above rooms
• The distinction between observing a room and being present in it
• Room-defined roles that agents can fill
• Multiple concurrent sessions for the same user
• Progressive scope changes during a session

Is "Hamlet" an agent, or is "the actor playing Hamlet" the agent?

In sync, the answer is: Hamlet is a role manifested in the room's state. The actor is a user (or autonomous process) who embodies that role. The role persists across occupants. The occupant brings liveness.

This maps to three distinct entities:

• Role — a description of needed agency, stored in room state
• Agent — a mechanical presence in the agents table, with a scope
• Driver — whatever is currently animating the agent (user session, autonomous process, dashboard human, nothing)

The role is state. The agent is an instantiation of a role (or a free-standing identity if no role applies). The driver is a connection to an agent. All three are separable.

The substrate thesis gives a clear answer: roles don't need a new mechanism. They are a convention expressible in existing v6 primitives.

A room that needs a "researcher" and a "critic" declares this in state:

// scope: _shared, key: roles
{
  "researcher": {
    "description": "Find and assess relevant sources",
    "bootstrap": ["submit_source", "assess_relevance"],
    "views": ["research_progress"],
    "filled_by": null
  },
  "critic": {
    "description": "Challenge assumptions and identify weaknesses",
    "bootstrap": ["raise_objection", "request_evidence"],
    "views": ["objections_log"],
    "filled_by": null
  }
}

This is vocabulary about vocabulary. The role definition is a meta-affordance: it describes what affordances should exist, not the affordances themselves. When something fills the role, it reads the definition, registers the expected actions and views, and begins working.

The pattern already exists embryonically. The standard library is a set of canonical action definitions. help({ key: "standard_library" }) returns ready-to-register templates. Room-defined roles are a more specific version: instead of a generic library, the room carries role-specific bootstrap instructions.

When an agent fills a role, it:

1. Reads the role definition from _shared.roles
2. Claims the role: writes filled_by: self (with if_version to prevent double-claim)
3. Reads help({ key: "standard_library" }) for the bootstrap templates
4. Registers the actions and views specified in the role definition
5. Writes its objective to its own scope
6. Begins the read → evaluate → act rhythm

The role and the agent are distinct entities in the substrate, linked by mutual state. Other agents can see both the role requirements and who is fulfilling them.

A human at the dashboard fills a role the same way: they see the role definition rendered as a surface, click "fill role" (an action-choice surface gated on filled_by == null), and begin working through the dashboard's action surfaces. No MCP required. No LLM required.

When an agent vacates (disconnects, completes, times out):

• filled_by is cleared (or set to a tombstone with departure timestamp)
• The agent's scope state persists — objective, progress, traces remain
• Registered actions and views persist (they are room state, not driver state)
• A new occupant can embody the same agent, inheriting scope and history

This is the "agents are manifested within rooms" claim made concrete. The agent exists as state in the room regardless of whether anything is currently driving it. Embodiment is connecting a driver to an existing vehicle, not creating a new vehicle.

Roles become a standard library pattern:

{
  "id": "define_role",
  "description": "Declare a role this room needs filled",
  "params": {
    "role_id": { "type": "string" },
    "description": { "type": "string" },
    "bootstrap_actions": { "type": "array" },
    "bootstrap_views": { "type": "array" }
  },
  "writes": [{
    "scope": "_shared",
    "key": "roles.${params.role_id}",
    "merge": {
      "description": "${params.description}",
      "bootstrap_actions": "${params.bootstrap_actions}",
      "bootstrap_views": "${params.bootstrap_views}",
      "filled_by": null,
      "defined_at": "${now}"
    }
  }]
}

{
  "id": "fill_role",
  "description": "Claim a role in this room",
  "params": { "role_id": { "type": "string" } },
  "if": "has(state[\"_shared\"], \"roles.\" + params.role_id) && (state[\"_shared\"][\"roles.\" + params.role_id].filled_by == null || state[\"_shared\"][\"roles.\" + params.role_id].filled_by == self)",
  "writes": [{
    "scope": "_shared",
    "key": "roles.${params.role_id}",
    "merge": { "filled_by": "${self}", "filled_at": "${now}" }
  }]
}

No new platform feature. Roles are conventions in the substrate.

A user (Christopher) is not an agent. A user is not a room. A user is a meta-entity — someone who exists outside all rooms and can:

• Create rooms (and thus own them)
• Instantiate agents within rooms (and thus participate)
• Embody existing agents (and thus resume or take over)
• Observe rooms without participating (view-level access)
• Maintain relationships with multiple rooms simultaneously
• Spawn autonomous agents and walk away
• Participate directly through the dashboard without MCP

The user is an agent-factory. They create, configure, monitor, and sometimes embody agents. The agent is the room-internal entity. The user is the room-external entity that brings agents into being.

This is consistent with the substrate thesis. The thesis says: "You are the component. You are a participant organism inside it." But this applies to the agent, not the user-as-meta-entity. When Christopher's researcher agent is running inside a room — perceiving state, leaving traces — that agent is a participant organism, whether Christopher is driving it from the dashboard, through Claude, or it's running autonomously.

Christopher himself is the person who brought the agent into being and who can re-embody it, observe it from outside, or let it run.

smcp_user_rooms (
  user_id    TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES smcp_users(id),
  room_id    TEXT NOT NULL,
  access     TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT 'participant',
  is_default INTEGER DEFAULT 0,
  label      TEXT,
  created_at TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT (datetime('now')),
  PRIMARY KEY (user_id, room_id)
)

Access levels: owner, collaborator, participant, observer.

Five interaction patterns, each with different agency requirements:

Pattern 1: "Show me my rooms." Overview across all rooms. No agent involved. The user is above all rooms, not inside any of them. Read-only. No presence footprint. Works from MCP lobby or from a management dashboard.

Pattern 2: "Let me work in this room." Focused engagement. Read context, send messages, invoke actions. The user embodies an agent — either through the dashboard directly or through an MCP client. Present while engaged, absent between episodes.

Pattern 3: "Set up this room for a task." World-building. Create a room, define roles, register vocabulary, seed state. The user is an architect. May never enter the room as an agent. May define roles and let others fill them.

Pattern 4: "Deploy an agent to this room." The user creates an autonomous agent that runs independently. The user wants to launch a process, not be one.

Pattern 5: "Check on my agents." Meta-view across rooms. What are my agents doing? Are they stuck? Do they need intervention? Management, not participation.

Patterns 1, 3, and 5 don't require an agent in the room. Pattern 2 requires an agent while engaged. Pattern 4 creates an agent that outlives the interaction.

Reading a room should not automatically create presence. A user glancing at a room shouldn't leave an agent entry with a stale heartbeat confusing other agents about liveness. Observation is cheap. Presence is a commitment.

v6 says: presence is meaningful — an artifact of intentional engagement, not a side effect of authentication. An agent that stops reading stops being present. The inverse should also hold: an entity that hasn't committed to presence shouldn't appear present.

Observe — read context without presence. Uses the user's room-level access (view token or owner access) to read state, views, agents, messages. No agent created. No heartbeat. No entry in the agents list. The user sees the room as an outsider looking in. This serves patterns 1, 3, and 5.

Embody — commit to presence as a specific agent. Either creates a new agent or takes over an existing one. Heartbeat starts. Agent appears in the agents list. context.self is set. Messages carry the agent's identity. The user is now inside the room. This serves patterns 2 and 4.

The distinction is mechanical:

This applies to all participation modes. A dashboard user viewing a room they haven't joined is observing. A dashboard user who clicks "join" or "fill role" is embodying. An MCP client reading context before calling sync_embody is observing.

A single user (Christopher) might have:

• Two Claude.ai browser tabs, each in a different conversation
• A Claude Code terminal session
• The dashboard open in another tab

Each of these is an independent session. Each might want to operate in the same room. Each might want to operate as the same agent, or different agents, or in different rooms entirely.

If agent identity is derived mechanically from user+client (e.g., christopher:claude-ai), then two concurrent Claude.ai conversations can't be different agents in the same room. They'd collide on the same agent ID.

But should they want to be different agents? Sometimes yes (one conversation is playing researcher, another is playing critic). Sometimes no (both conversations are working on the same task, and interleaved access to the same agent is fine, like two terminals into the same machine).

The key insight: the agent is a room-internal identity. The session is an external connection to it. The mapping between them is chosen at embodiment time, not derived from user+client.

An agent ID is whatever the room needs it to be:

• A role name: researcher, critic, game-master
• A user-chosen name: christopher, c15r-sprint-bot
• An auto-generated ID: agent-7f3a2b

The agent ID is NOT derived from user+client. It is declared at embodiment time. The session tracks which agent it's currently driving.

Two Claude.ai tabs both embody researcher in the same room. This is fine. Their tool calls interleave. The agent's state is in the substrate, not in either session's memory. The heartbeat updates from whichever session touched it last. Messages from both say from: "researcher".

This is the stateless principle applied: the agent IS its room state. Sessions are ephemeral connections. The substrate doesn't know or care how many sessions are driving an agent. It only sees reads and writes.

The practical consequence: two sessions driving the same agent must coordinate externally (the humans in front of the two tabs need to know they're sharing). The substrate doesn't prevent this; it's a social agreement, not a technical one.

Christopher's Claude.ai tab 1 embodies researcher. Tab 2 embodies critic. Different agents, different scopes, different identities in the same room. Each session tracks its own embodied agent independently.

Christopher's Claude Code session embodies a third agent in a different room entirely.

All three resolve through the same smcp_users row. All three have different agent IDs. The user-room relationship (smcp_user_rooms) tracks access level. Each session's embodied agent is tracked per-session.

Christopher has the dashboard open to a room, observing. He also has Claude.ai embodied as researcher in the same room. The dashboard shows him the full room state (including the researcher agent's activity). The MCP session acts as the researcher.

If Christopher clicks "fill role: critic" on the dashboard, he is now also the critic — from the dashboard. He is simultaneously driving two agents in the same room from two different interfaces. The substrate doesn't care. Both agents are valid. Both produce traces. Both follow the rhythm.

Sessions must track their embodied agent without assuming a 1:1 mapping from user+client to agent. The session state is:

session → { user_id, room_id (or null), agent_id (or null) }

Where agent_id is chosen at embodiment time, not derived. Multiple sessions can point to the same agent (shared driving) or different agents.

sync is stateless. The MCP server holds no in-memory session state. There is no map of "this connection is currently embodied as agent X in room Y" in server memory. All state lives in the database — in rooms, agents, state, views, and the smcp_* auth tables.

This is not a limitation. It is a design commitment. The substrate thesis says state is the substrate. If something matters, it is persisted. If it is not persisted, it does not matter.

"Current agent" is not MCP server session state. It is a persisted relationship. Every MCP tool call carries the OAuth access token. The server resolves the current embodiment from a persisted session row:

smcp_user_sessions (
  token_hash  TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  user_id     TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES smcp_users(id),
  client_name TEXT NOT NULL,
  room_id     TEXT,           -- currently focused room (null = lobby)
  agent_id    TEXT,           -- currently embodied agent (null = observing)
  scope       TEXT NOT NULL,  -- effective scope (mutable, starts from OAuth grant)
  updated_at  TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT (datetime('now')),
  expires_at  TEXT NOT NULL
)

Resolution per tool call:

access_token → hash → smcp_user_sessions → {user, client, room, agent, scope}

When the user calls sync_embody({ room: "game-room", agent: "researcher" }):

1. Validate room is in effective scope
2. Validate user has access to room
3. Validate agent exists and is available (or create it)
4. Update smcp_user_sessions.room_id and agent_id
5. Touch agent heartbeat
6. Return full context with self: "researcher"

When the user calls sync_disembody():

1. Clear room_id and agent_id on session row
2. Do NOT delete agent from room (it persists as state)
3. Optionally set agent status to "idle"
4. Return lobby state

No in-memory state. The session row IS the state. The MCP server is a stateless HTTP handler that resolves identity from the database on every request.

OAuth token refresh creates a new access token. The server transfers session state from old token to new:

1. Client presents refresh token
2. Server issues new access token
3. Server creates new smcp_user_sessions row with same room/agent/scope
4. Server deletes old session row

Embodiment survives token refresh. Continuity is in the database.

Each OAuth token has its own session row. Two Claude.ai tabs have two different access tokens (each went through its own OAuth flow, or the client manages separate sessions). Each has its own smcp_user_sessions row. Each can be embodied as a different agent.

If two sessions happen to embody the same agent, both session rows point to the same agent_id. Their tool calls interleave. The substrate handles this naturally — writes are atomic per-request, reads return consistent snapshots.

In the MCP OAuth flow as Claude.ai and Claude Code consume it:

1. User clicks "connect" in client settings
2. Browser opens → sync's /oauth/authorize page
3. User authenticates (WebAuthn passkey)
4. User consents to scopes
5. Redirect back with auth code → token exchange
6. Client holds access token + refresh token
7. Every MCP tool call carries that token
8. Token refreshes silently when expired

The scope is fixed at step 4. Whatever is granted is what the client has until the user goes to settings and re-authorizes. No mid-conversation scope changes in current MCP products.

The OAuth scope defines the ceiling — what the client is permitted to access. This ceiling should be expressible at multiple granularities:

Room-level scope:

rooms:game-room rooms:work-room

Grants the client access to these rooms. Within each room, the client can observe, embody any available agent, or create new agents (subject to the user's access level).

Role-level scope:

rooms:game-room:role:researcher rooms:work-room

Grants the client access to game-room but only to embody the researcher role. Access to work-room is unrestricted (full room-level). This allows a user to limit what a specific client can do — e.g., granting Claude.ai only the researcher role while granting Claude Code full room access.

Observe-only scope:

rooms:game-room:observe rooms:work-room

Grants the client observation access to game-room (no embodiment, no actions) and full access to work-room.

Create-rooms scope:

create_rooms

Grants the client permission to create new rooms on the user's behalf.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  sync.parc.land — authorize Claude.ai           │
│                                                 │
│  christopher, grant access to:                  │
│                                                 │
│  ☑ game-room                       [owner]      │
│    ● Full access                                │
│    ○ Researcher role only                       │
│    ○ Observe only                               │
│    Agents: researcher (idle 2h), game-master    │
│                                                 │
│  ☑ work-room                       [owner]      │
│    ● Full access                                │
│                                                 │
│  □ shared-project                  [participant] │
│                                                 │
│  ☑ Can create new rooms                         │
│                                                 │
│  [Authorize]                                    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Room and role information is displayed for context. The user sets the ceiling per-room. The tool layer governs the current focus within that ceiling.

The OAuth scope defines the ceiling of what the client can access. The tools govern the current focus within that ceiling:

• Scope (OAuth, set at auth time): "I can access game-room (researcher only) and work-room (full)"
• Focus (tool layer, changes per interaction): "I am currently embodied as researcher in game-room"

This separation means:

1. The consent screen handles trust boundaries — what the client is allowed to do
2. The tool layer handles intent — what the client is currently doing
3. The scope can be restrictive without limiting the tool-layer fluidity within the permitted space

Within the current OAuth constraints, the effective scope can change during a session. The OAuth token's encoded scope is the initial ceiling. The server maintains a mutable effective scope per session:

OAuth grant (static, encoded in token)
  → smcp_user_sessions.scope (mutable, server-side, starts from grant)
    → effective scope per tool call

Widening — room creation: When sync_create_room succeeds, the server extends the session's effective scope to include the new room. Consent is implied: the user created the room through the authenticated client.

Widening — room sharing: If another user shares a room with Christopher during an active session, the server can include the new room in his effective scope on the next tool call.

Narrowing — explicit revocation:

sync_revoke_access({ room: "work-room" })

Removes the room from effective scope. The client can no longer access that room until re-authorized. Useful for privacy: "I don't want this conversation to see my work room."

Narrowing — role restriction:

sync_restrict_scope({ room: "game-room", role: "researcher" })

Narrows the effective scope from full room access to role-only, mid-session. The ceiling lowers. The client can only embody the researcher in that room until the session ends or scope is re-widened.

All scope changes are persisted in smcp_user_sessions.scope. No in-memory state.

Re-authorization (re-running the OAuth flow in client settings) is needed when:

• The user wants to add a room they didn't grant at auth time and that wasn't created or shared during the session
• The user wants to raise the ceiling above what was originally granted
• The refresh token expires

The server communicates this clearly in tool responses:

{
  "error": "room_not_in_scope",
  "room": "someone-elses-room",
  "message": "This room is not in your current session scope.",
  "options": [
    "Ask the room owner to share it (will auto-widen)",
    "Re-authorize in client settings to add this room"
  ]
}

Given that OAuth scoping is coarse-grained, fine-grained room and agent selection happens at the tool layer. The "lobby" is the first interaction pattern — a meta-view of the user's rooms, agents, and available roles.

Consistent with statelessness, the lobby is not a stateful concept. It is the absence of embodiment. When smcp_user_sessions.agent_id is null, the user is "in the lobby" — they can observe rooms in their scope but cannot act.

The sync_lobby tool returns:

{
  "user": "christopher",
  "client": "claude-ai",
  "rooms": [
    {
      "id": "game-room",
      "access": "owner",
      "scope_level": "role:researcher",
      "label": "D&D Campaign",
      "roles": {
        "researcher": { "filled_by": null, "idle_since": "2h ago" },
        "game-master": { "filled_by": "bot-gm", "status": "active" }
      },
      "free_agents": [
        { "id": "christopher:prev-session", "status": "done" }
      ],
      "state_summary": { "phase": "active", "turn": 7 }
    },
    {
      "id": "work-room",
      "access": "owner",
      "scope_level": "full",
      "label": null,
      "roles": {},
      "free_agents": [],
      "state_summary": {}
    }
  ],
  "can_create_rooms": true,
  "embodied": null
}

The user sees their rooms, the roles and agents in each, which are vacant, which are active, what scope level their current session has per room. They choose:

• "Join game-room as the researcher" → sync_embody
• "Just show me game-room's state" → sync_read_context (observe)
• "Create a new room" → sync_create_room
• "Narrow my access to work-room to observe-only" → sync_restrict_scope

In substrate terms, the lobby IS a context read — but at the user level, not the room level. It is the user's affordance map across all their rooms. Just as /context presents a room's available actions, the lobby presents the user's available engagements.

This is the v6 principle of progressive disclosure applied to the meta-layer: the lobby shows you what you can do. Your choice of room and mode is the first act. Everything else follows.

sync_embody({ room: "game-room" })

Server:

1. Validate room in scope
2. User provides or server generates an agent ID
3. Insert agent via insertAgentDirect(room, { id, name, role, grants })
4. Update smcp_user_sessions: set room_id, agent_id
5. Return full context with self: agentId

sync_embody({ room: "game-room", agent: "researcher" })

Server:

1. Validate room in scope
2. Validate agent exists in the room
3. Validate agent is available (not currently driven, or driven by this user)
4. Rotate agent's token_hash to this session
5. Update smcp_user_sessions: set room_id, agent_id
6. Touch heartbeat, set status to "active"
7. Return full context with inherited scope, state, views

The user picks up where they (or a previous driver) left off.

sync_embody({ room: "game-room", role: "researcher" })

Server:

1. Validate room in scope (and scope permits this role if role-restricted)
2. Read _shared.roles.researcher — check filled_by is null or is this user
3. If role has an existing agent (previous occupant left state):
   • Take over that agent identity
   • Rotate token hash
4. If role has no agent yet:
   • Create agent with id: "researcher" (the role IS the identity)
   • Set grants per user's access level
5. Update smcp_user_sessions: set room_id, agent_id
6. Write filled_by: self to role state (with if_version)
7. Return full context — agent inherits role's scope and any prior state

sync_disembody()

Server:

1. Clear smcp_user_sessions.room_id and agent_id
2. Do NOT delete agent from room
3. Do NOT clear agent's scope state
4. Optionally set agent status to "idle"
5. If role-defined, optionally clear filled_by (policy: configurable per role)
6. Return lobby state

The agent persists in the room as state. It can be re-embodied later.

sync_embody({ room: "work-room", agent: "sprint-lead" })

If already embodied elsewhere, the server implicitly disembodies from the current agent first (same as calling sync_disembody then sync_embody). One session, one active embodiment. Multiple agents require multiple sessions.

sync_lobby         → observe all rooms (patterns 1, 5)
sync_read_context  → observe one room (patterns 1, 3, 5) — NO agent created
sync_embody        → commit to an agent/role in a room (pattern 2)
sync_invoke_action → act as embodied agent (pattern 2)
sync_send_message  → send message as embodied agent (pattern 2)
sync_spawn_agent   → create autonomous agent (pattern 4)
sync_disembody     → release agent, return to lobby
sync_restrict_scope  → narrow effective scope mid-session
sync_revoke_access   → remove room from effective scope
sync_create_room   → create room (auto-widens scope)

The default is observation. Embodiment is explicit. This preserves v6's commitment that presence is meaningful.

1. export waitForCondition in main.ts
2. Import and call directly in mcp/tools.ts
3. Remove HTTP proxy for sync_wait

Add both tables to schema.ts migrate():

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS smcp_user_rooms (
  user_id    TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES smcp_users(id),
  room_id    TEXT NOT NULL,
  access     TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT 'participant',
  is_default INTEGER DEFAULT 0,
  label      TEXT,
  created_at TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT (datetime('now')),
  PRIMARY KEY (user_id, room_id)
)

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS smcp_user_sessions (
  token_hash  TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  user_id     TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES smcp_users(id),
  client_name TEXT NOT NULL,
  room_id     TEXT,
  agent_id    TEXT,
  scope       TEXT NOT NULL,
  updated_at  TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT (datetime('now')),
  expires_at  TEXT NOT NULL
)

User-room helpers: upsertUserRoom, getUserRoom, listUserRooms. Session helpers: getSession, updateSessionFocus, updateSessionScope.

Extract a lower-level agent creation function that doesn't require Request-based auth. Used by joinRoom internally and by MCP embodiment. The existing joinRoom keeps its Request validation for REST callers.

Modify sync_read_context to NOT auto-join. Reads room via view-level access when no agent is embodied. Add sync_embody, sync_disembody tools. Add sync_lobby tool.

Add define_role, fill_role, vacate_role to the standard library help content. No platform changes — these are action templates.

Implement scope widening on sync_create_room and room sharing. Implement sync_restrict_scope and sync_revoke_access. Scope changes mutate smcp_user_sessions.scope.

Update /oauth/authorize to show rooms with role information and per-room scope level selection (full / role-restricted / observe-only).

• Does not change the REST API. Non-MCP clients use tokens directly as before. The dashboard is already a first-class participation mode.
• Does not force roles on any room. Roles are a convention, not a requirement. Rooms without role definitions work exactly as they do today.
• Does not add user identity to the core agents table. The link is through smcp_user_rooms and smcp_user_sessions — the sync platform stays decoupled from the auth layer.
• Does not implement autonomous agent spawning infrastructure (pattern 4). That requires a separate execution environment — a process that runs the wait loop independently. The design supports it; the infrastructure is future work.
• Does not build room sharing UI. Schema supports it; the flow is future work.

The MCP specification treats OAuth scope as a static grant. The authorization flow runs once at connection time. There is no mechanism for the server to request additional scope mid-session, and no mechanism for the client to offer it.

The MCP spec does include notification channels:

• notifications/resources/updated — server notifies client of resource changes
• notifications/tools/list_changed — server notifies client of tool changes

These are informational — they don't change authorization scope. But they establish a precedent: the server can push information to the client outside the request/response cycle.

The missing primitive is incremental authorization: the ability for a server to request additional scope during an active session, and for the client to prompt the user and grant it without a full re-authorization flow.

This is a solved problem elsewhere. Google's OAuth APIs support incremental auth — services request additional scopes as needed, the user sees a targeted consent prompt. GitHub's OAuth supports scope upgrades. The pattern is well-established in the broader OAuth ecosystem.

If MCP clients supported incremental authorization:

1. Initial auth: user identity + initial room selection
2. User asks about a room not in scope
3. Tool returns room_not_in_scope error
4. Server sends scope-upgrade request via MCP
5. Client prompts user: "sync wants access to new-room. Allow?"
6. User approves → scope widens → tool call succeeds
7. Conversation continues without interruption

sync's progressive scope model could inform the MCP spec. Three extensions:

1. authorization/scope_request — server-initiated scope upgrade

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "authorization/scope_request",
  "params": {
    "additional_scope": "rooms:new-room-id",
    "reason": "User requested access to room 'new-room'",
    "consent_url": "https://sync.parc.land/oauth/consent?add_scope=rooms:new-room-id",
    "required": false
  }
}

The client can: auto-approve (if policy allows), prompt the user inline, open the consent URL, or reject.

2. authorization/scope_reduced — server notifies scope reduction

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "authorization/scope_reduced",
  "params": {
    "removed_scope": "rooms:work-room",
    "reason": "User revoked access via sync_revoke_access",
    "effective_scope": "rooms:game-room:role:researcher create_rooms"
  }
}

Informational — the client updates its understanding of available resources.

3. authorization/scope_offer — server offers available scope

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "method": "authorization/scope_offer",
  "params": {
    "available_scope": "rooms:shared-project",
    "context": "alice shared 'shared-project' with you"
  }
}

The server notifies the client that new scope is available. The client presents this to the user as an option. The user can accept (widening scope) or ignore.

The smcp_user_sessions.scope mechanism is designed for this future. Today, scope starts from the OAuth grant and changes through tool calls (server-side mutations). When MCP clients support incremental auth, the same session scope field becomes the target of client-mediated scope changes. The server remains the arbiter. The mechanism is the same. Only the trigger changes: from tool-call-initiated to client-protocol-initiated.

sync doesn't need to wait for the spec to evolve. The progressive scope model works today through tool-mediated widening/narrowing. Dynamic scope in the MCP spec would be a UX improvement, not an architectural change.

The sync use case is a clean example of why incremental authorization matters for MCP. The pattern — a server managing multiple scoped resources that a user wants to access dynamically — will recur across MCP integrations (Google Drive folders, GitHub repos, Slack channels, database schemas). sync's scope_request / scope_reduced / scope_offer trio captures the three directions of scope change (server requests more, server removes some, server offers optional) in a way that generalizes beyond sync.

If the MCP spec working group is considering authorization extensions, sync's experience with progressive scope on a stateless server is a concrete reference implementation worth sharing.

Does this design honor the substrate thesis?

"State is the substrate." ✓ — Roles are state. Agent identity is state. Session focus is persisted state. Effective scope is persisted state. No in-memory server state.

"Surfaces are observers." ✓ — Role definitions, agent objectives, and vacancy status are observable through views. The lobby is a meta-surface. The dashboard is a surface layer. A role's "fill" button is an action-choice surface gated on filled_by == null.

"Actions are transitions." ✓ — fill_role, vacate_role, define_role are standard library actions. Embodiment writes to room state through actions. Dashboard interactions invoke the same actions that MCP and autonomous agents do.

"Agents and humans are equivalent participants." ✓ — A dashboard human, an MCP-proxied human, and an autonomous bot all produce the same substrate artifacts. The room cannot distinguish them. The substrate sees only reads and writes.

"Progressive disclosure is implicit." ✓ — The lobby shows available rooms. Observing a room shows available roles. Filling a role reveals bootstrap instructions. Each step discloses the next.

"Vocabulary construction is the only unilateral act." ✓ — Defining a role is vocabulary construction. Filling a role is claiming vocabulary.

"No setup phase." ⚠ Partial — The OAuth consent screen is a setup phase, but it operates at the user level, not the room level. Within the room, the principle holds. The consent screen is infrastructure — it decides whether you can enter, not what you find when you arrive.

"Presence is meaningful." ✓ — Observation does not create presence. Embodiment does. Disembodiment preserves state without claiming liveness. Multiple sessions can share an agent (shared liveness) or drive separate agents (separate presence). The distinction is structural.

Christopher · Edinburgh · March 2026