agent-signals

043. agy --continue reuses the files of the conversation

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Date
2026-10-30
Agents
Antigravity CLI
Measured on
real machine

Measured

2026-10-30, Antigravity CLI (agy) 1.4.7, on Linux (Debian 13, x64), in a private tmux server with a throwaway HOME and a copied login. The scenario scenarios/agy/continue.sh started agy four times in the same HOME and work folder: agy with no prompt, agy --continue with no conversation, agy --continue, and agy --conversation <id>. Each start after the first had one short turn. It recorded the hooks, the open files, the kernel locks, the file list and the transcript record types. Measured on: real machine.

What was measured

  1. agy --continue in a folder with no conversation drew the same bytes as a new start: the normal idle box and ? for shortcuts. It held no presence or conversations file open. The first prompt made a new conversation, and SessionStart fired.
  2. agy --continue with one conversation, and agy --conversation <id>, used the same conversation ID. The new process opened the same files:
    • ~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/presence/<conversation id>.lock;
    • ~/.gemini/antigravity-cli/conversations/<conversation id>.db, with its -wal and -shm files. It opened them at the start, before the first prompt. A new session opens them at the first prompt (fact 28).
  3. SessionStart did not fire for a continued conversation. Each turn gave PreInvocation, PostInvocation and Stop, with the same conversationId.
  4. The folder held one .db file after the three turns. The .lock file kept its first modification time. After each exit, the -wal and -shm files were gone, and the .db file was larger.
  5. A continued turn added a SYSTEM_MESSAGE record after its USER_INPUT record in transcript.jsonl. The first turn had no SYSTEM_MESSAGE record.
  6. The screen of a continued session shows the earlier turns above the box.

Mechanism

A reader that links a process to its conversation by the names of the open files (fact 28) gets the same ID for a continued process. Such a reader must not wait for SessionStart to learn the ID: a continued process sends none. It can read the ID from the open files at the start, or from conversationId in PreInvocation.

Incident

tg-bridge noted that agy 1.4.7 --continue in an empty folder draws an empty framed box that reads as idle (fact 28). This measurement shows that the box is idle: the same screen as a new start, and the next prompt ran.

Screens

agy/continue-empty-v1-4-7.

Not measured

Screens in the corpus that name this fact