Dev Guide Gotchas

Gotchas and Known Pitfalls

Nested lingtai-dev-guide reference. Read this after the top-level router sends you here. Collective wisdom from production incidents — each entry has caused at least one regression.

Bubble Tea v2: paste delivery

Bubble Tea v2 splits keys (tea.KeyPressMsg) from clipboard pastes (tea.PasteMsg). Any Update dispatcher handling case tea.KeyPressMsg: must also forward tea.PasteMsg to whichever text widget is focused, or paste silently drops.

For embedded sub-models (e.g. PresetEditorModel inside FirstRunModel), the host's outer default: branch must forward paste msgs into the sub-model. If the host's dispatcher enumerates focused widgets per-step but misses the step hosting an embedded model, paste dies before reaching it — and a fall-through inside the sub-model's own Update is useless because the msg never arrives.

Symptom: typing into an input works, pasting does nothing.

Fix: trace top-down (tea.Program → host's outer switch → sub-model's outer switch → widget) and ensure every layer handles or forwards tea.PasteMsg.

textarea vs textinput

textinput is single-line and drops characters on multi-byte / clipboard pastes; textarea handles paste cleanly. For any paste-friendly field (API keys, base URLs, anything pasted from a browser), use textarea even when the content is conceptually one line:

ta := textarea.New()
ta.CharLimit = 512
ta.SetWidth(50)
ta.SetHeight(1)
ta.ShowLineNumbers = false
ta.Prompt = ""
ta.KeyMap.InsertNewline.SetKeys() // single-line: no newline insertion
ta.SetStyles(themedTextareaStyles())

themedTextareaStyles() is in the tui package — always apply it. A bare textarea.New() ships dark default cursor/focus colors that render as a black smear against the warm LingTai theme.

Dev-mode rebuild gotcha (retired)

Project migrations are retired: production TUI/Portal no longer read, write, advance, or gate on .lingtai/meta.json, so a stale dev binary against a newer project no longer trips a data version N is newer than this binary supports gate. No meta.json version preflight is needed before replacing a local dev binary, and you never "fix" a project by editing meta.json downward — the file is inert. Rebuilding a fresh binary after ordinary code changes is still the right way to make main behaviour live; the only live migration surface left is the TUI's per-machine ~/.lingtai-tui/ registry (tui/internal/globalmigrate/), which runs at TUI startup and needs no paired portal bump.

Auto-upgrader clobbers editable install

The TUI's auto-upgrader (tui/internal/config/venv.go:428-437, config.CheckUpgrade; invoked by ensureRuntimeWithOptions at tui/internal/config/venv.go:462-477) compares lingtai.__version__ to PyPI's latest. If your local source's pyproject.toml version is lower, it replaces the editable install with the PyPI wheel — silently undoing dev mode.

Symptom in the launch banner:

Upgrading lingtai 0.8.0 → 0.8.2...
 - lingtai==0.8.0 (from file:///.../lingtai-kernel)   ← editable, gone
 + lingtai==0.8.2                                      ← PyPI wheel

Prevention: keep lingtai-kernel/pyproject.toml version >= PyPI's latest; after a release bump, pull the kernel repo so local source matches.

Recovery:

~/.local/bin/uv pip install -e ~/Documents/GitHub/lingtai-kernel \
    -p ~/.lingtai-tui/runtime/venv

Runtime editable checkout can be stale after a merge

A successful PR merge does not prove running agents execute the merged code. The runtime venv may have lingtai installed editable from a checkout (e.g. ~/Documents/GitHub/lingtai-kernel) that is behind origin/main even after the merge, and agents can be launched from older detached worktrees or legacy addon checkouts.

Symptom: a feature present on GitHub is missing at runtime; imports such as lingtai.mcp_servers fail; an MCP/addon path still points at an old standalone repo or a detached worktree.

Fix: use reference/setup/SKILL.md → "Verify the runtime checkout a running agent actually uses" to probe the exact interpreter and relevant module paths, then fast-forward or editable-reinstall the intended source only with separate authorization. The update/build owner hands off the resulting target evidence. Kernel system-manual → reference/refresh-precheck/SKILL.md owns any refresh transaction; load reference/runtime-self-check/SKILL.md only for the matching provenance assertion or a suspected mismatch.

PYTHONPATH pollution shadows the runtime import

A leftover PYTHONPATH in the launch environment can silently replace the runtime venv's lingtai with another project's source. This is a real incident: 2026-08-09, a dev agent refreshed onto a fresh frozen main, then post-refresh probing showed import lingtai resolving to a different project's scratch checkout (exact-8c44d232/src) because the live parent process carried PYTHONPATH=/Users/.../dev-2/.../scratch/.../src from the session that launched it. The intended venv was untouched — the import path just pointed elsewhere.

Root cause: debug sessions commonly export PYTHONPATH=... to test one scratch/worktree/temp repo. LingTai's refresh watcher copies the parent environment verbatim (os.environ), so pollution survives refresh — a plain system(action="refresh") re-inherits it. The wrong import can persist across refreshes until the process is relaunched from a clean environment.

Symptoms: post-refresh probes disagree with the configured venv (lingtai.__file__ points at another project's src/), direct_url/git HEAD resolve to the wrong checkout, or behavior matches old code that is no longer in init.json/the venv.

Prevention (launch-session discipline): never launch the TUI or an agent from a shell session that exports PYTHONPATH. If you must test scratch source, use env -u PYTHONPATH or an isolated venv/preset rather than exporting it into the shared launch session.

Detection: inspect the live process environment, not just config:

PID=<agent-parent-pid>
ps eww -p "$PID" | tr ' ' '\n' | grep '^PYTHONPATH=' || echo 'PYTHONPATH absent'

Then confirm the import resolves from the intended venv with the same probe under a clean environment:

VENV_PY=<configured-venv>/bin/python
env -u PYTHONPATH "$VENV_PY" -c 'import lingtai; print(lingtai.__file__)'

Recovery when pollution is already live: a plain refresh re-inherits the pollution, so use an identity-verified clean relaunch of the agent process (with PYTHONPATH unset in the new parent and children) instead of relying on refresh. See reference/runtime-self-check/SKILL.md §1 for the full probe and relaunch recipe.

Migration cross-package contract (retired)

TUI and portal historically shared meta.json and were required to bump CurrentVersion in lockstep across tui/internal/migrate/ and portal/internal/migrate/. That contract is retired: both registries are retained as historical/test APIs (m001–m039), and no production binary consults meta.json or refuses a project on version grounds. Do not reintroduce paired project migrations, mirrored CurrentVersion bumps, or the data version N is newer than this binary supports recovery checklist — none of it runs today.

The only live migration surface is the TUI's per-machine registry (tui/internal/globalmigrate/ under ~/.lingtai-tui/meta.json), run by the TUI alone at startup; Portal has no equivalent and needs no mirror.

Three-locale rule

A new i18n key means updating all three of en.json, zh.json, wen.json in both tui/i18n/ and (where applicable) portal/i18n/. Missing translations show as the raw key on screen — they don't fall back. If a key is genuinely English-only (procedural notes, error stacks), document why; otherwise translate.

Binary naming

The TUI binary is lingtai-tui, never lingtai. lingtai is the Python agent CLI (installed by the kernel into the runtime venv at ~/.lingtai-tui/runtime/venv/bin/lingtai). Build the TUI to tui/bin/lingtai-tui; never to tui/bin/lingtai.

Preset directory structure

• presets/templates/ — TUI-owned. Rewritten on every Bootstrap from embedded data. Never hand-edit.
• presets/saved/ — user-owned. Bootstrap never touches it.

The directory IS the answer to "is this a template?" — there's no in-band marker. Each loaded Preset carries a Source field (SourceTemplate / SourceSaved); prefer IsTemplate(p) over the legacy IsBuiltin(p.Name). When writing manifest.preset.* paths from Go code, always use preset.RefFor(p) to pick the right subdirectory based on Source.

Authorization gate

manifest.preset.allowed is the explicit list of preset paths the agent may swap to at runtime. The kernel refuses any swap not in allowed. default and active MUST both appear in allowed; init_schema.validate_init enforces this.

Module naming

The Go module names are github.com/anthropics/lingtai-tui and github.com/anthropics/lingtai-portal. Historical naming — they are NOT moving to a Lingtai-AI/ import path even though the GitHub org renamed.

Notifications — single-slot wire invariant

At most ONE system(action="notification") pair lives in the wire history at any time. When the kernel detects a fingerprint change it strips the prior pair and reinjects a fresh one. Agents observe the current notification state, not a history of arrivals.

Rebuild-gate test can false-pass on incidental bucket changes

A service/adapter that rebuilds only when a coarse "bucket" of inputs changes (provider / model / base_url / provider-defaults) is hard to test honestly. A regression test asserting "refresh rebuilds the service" can pass for the wrong reason: if the fixture also perturbs an unrelated field feeding the same bucket (max_rpm, some provider-default), the rebuild fires off that incidental change rather than the condition under test — green test, still-broken code path.

This surfaced while verifying the Codex prompt-cache refresh fix (PRs #406/#411).

Discipline: when testing a bucket-gated rebuild, vary only the field under test and pin everything else in the bucket. Assert on the effect the rebuild should produce (the live object was reconstructed; the expected metadata/fingerprint changed), not merely that "a rebuild happened". See reference/runtime-self-check/SKILL.md §6 for the live-object verification side of the same problem.

uv vs pip

The TUI's runtime venv is uv-managed. There is no pip symlink — only pip3. Always use uv pip for package operations in this venv.