cli: survive a dead session, and a flaky terminal

2026-08-12T21:49:19Z

Three bugs found on a fresh Debian box, all of which made sl0ppi look broken when the terminal underneath it was the problem. 1. JSON crash on startup. `action list-panes --json` against a session that has died exits 0 with EMPTY stdout, and JSON.parse("") threw "JSON Parse error: Unexpected EOF" at the user. Empty output is now "nothing", and genuinely malformed output is reported with the command name and the offending text. 2. `up` silently resurrected. A dead-but-resurrectable session is not an empty slot: `attach --create-background NAME` restores it from the serialised copy and IGNORES --layout. The result was a root full of projects coming back as plain shells with no agents and no purposes -- and the resurrected background session then exited again within seconds. sl0ppi now refuses to guess and explains the two real options (`up --fresh` to rebuild, `sl0ppij attach` to restore it properly in a terminal). Verified on a clean slate that a fresh `up` produces exactly the right panes: purpose='agent:main' held=true cmd='pi'. 3. The terminal's CLI actions are racy. Measured against a LIVE session on a 2-vCPU box: list-tabs and list-panes each fail ~60% of the time while the session is detached, ~25% with a client attached, either with empty output or "There is no active session!" (the action client consults get_active_session() before it looks at -s). That is a defect in sl0ppij -- filed as a known issue -- but these are idempotent reads, so sl0ppi retries them with backoff and distinguishes "the session is gone" from "the terminal would not answer". `sl0ppi ls` went from failing most runs to 8/8. Also: - session creation returns before the server is registered, so `up` now waits for readiness instead of racing its own next command - UserError: actionable answers ("no project foo", "that session is a saved dead copy") print and exit 1 instead of falling through to sl0ppij, which buried the explanation and started a session nobody asked for - `sl0ppi print ` implemented; it was referenced by the init template and the design doc but did not exist

sl0ppi.git/cli/test/sessions.test.ts, branch main

cli: survive a dead session, and a flaky terminal