The workspace agent's prefetch is an orientation overview — scale, active
peers, their cards — not the corpus. `low` is the only reasoning level that
explicitly sets TOOL_CHOICE="auto", so the model was free to skip tools
entirely, and it did: every workspace_chat call in CI run 33662772219 made
zero tool calls. It answered when the overview happened to carry the fact and
otherwise wrote out the search it should have run, then asked the caller which
option to take — at an endpoint with no caller to answer.
Add a `_tool_choice` seam alongside `_select_tools` and override it on
WorkspaceDialecticAgent to require a tool call. `execute_tool_loop` already
relaxes "required"/"any" to "auto" after the first iteration, so this costs one
search round rather than pinning the loop, and the model can still stop and
synthesize. Any value a level configures other than None/"auto" passes through.
The pair agent is unaffected: it prefetches the observations for its query and
can legitimately answer from context alone.
Also tell the workspace prompt it is non-interactive. It had "Do not narrate
tool use" but never said the caller cannot reply, and three of the five traced
responses ended in a menu of lookups.
Unified subset goes 1/5 -> 5/5, and search_memory — the recall path that never
once ran — now fires on 6 of 7 workspace queries. workspace_chat_scope is the
notable one: its two not_contains assertions were passing vacuously because
nothing was ever retrieved, and it now recalls the in-scope fact while still
excluding the out-of-scope vault code.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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