Root cause of #82616: gateway session identity (session_key/chat_id/
origin_json) was written best-effort in a separate UPDATE after row
creation, both reset-path DB writes swallowed failures silently
(logger.debug / bare print), transcript reads ignored the reroute map
that writes follow, and restart recovery ranked candidate rows by
started_at while hard-rejecting empty rows. A single failed write could
therefore strand the live conversation in an unroutable orphan row while
a days-old zombie kept the routing key — after any gateway restart the
chat silently resumed the zombie (user-visible context loss, 5 confirmed
incidents on one install since June).
Four class fixes:
1. Identity lands atomically in the session INSERT: origin_json and
display_name join _insert_session_row's column list + COALESCE
backfill; both gateway creation paths (get_or_create + reset) pass
full identity including parent_session_id lineage (fixes#12857).
2. record_gateway_session_peer self-heals: when the target row is
missing (failed/deferred create, crash window) it INSERTs the row
with full identity instead of silently no-opping — every per-turn
peer refresh is now a repair opportunity, and an identity-less lazy
writer (update_token_counts/record_auxiliary_usage) can never leave
a gateway session permanently unroutable.
3. load_transcript follows the write-side reroute chain and the durable
compression tip before querying, so reads can no longer return 0
rows for a session whose messages live under its compression child;
read exceptions are WARNING, distinguishable from an empty result.
4. find_latest_gateway_session_for_peer ranks by
COALESCE(last_activity_at, started_at) (message-bearing rows first)
and returns an empty-but-keyed row instead of None — a zombie
predecessor can no longer beat the live conversation, and recovery
never mints a fresh id when a keyed row exists.
Reset-path DB write failures now log at WARNING with the routing
consequence spelled out.
Tests: tests/gateway/test_session_continuity_82616.py (11 tests) —
sabotage-verified: 6/11 fail without the fixes. E2E incident replay
(real SessionDB, temp HERMES_HOME) confirms the production shape now
resolves to the live session.
Fixes#82616. Related: #12857, #78182 (read-path half), #79576.
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