An agent delta should ship only after its envelope proves which emitter and session it belongs to, passes that protocol’s lifecycle and authorization checks, and is ordered or replayed by the protocol’s defined mechanism. Arrival alone is not validation. The details vary by protocol, and a streamed delta may be transient rather than part of the durable record.
What should “ships” mean?
Here, “ships” means the application accepts or exposes a delta under its own contract—not that any particular vendor’s deployment pipeline has a universal release gate. Before committing or displaying an event, validate its schema and version, authenticate its emitter, bind it to the correct session scope, enforce lifecycle and authorization rules, apply deduplication and ordering checks, and determine whether it is durable or transient. Which fields and checks are required depends on the selected protocol.
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How can you tell a delta belongs to the right session?
AEP: combine the emitter with the session
Agent Event Protocol (AEP) 0.1 defines a JSON event with required context fields including aep, id, type, time, source, and agent. Session-scoped events also carry session and seq. The protocol says consumers deduplicate on (source, id); the id is per-emitter, so it should not be treated as globally unique by itself.
AEP session keys are unique within an emitting agent, not across all agents. Aggregators should therefore key session state by (source, session), rather than by the session string alone. AEP also permits optional context such as run, step, cause, trace, severity, capture, and payload fields; optional fields should be omitted when absent, not filled with null. See the AEP-0001 specification.
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MACP: authenticate the sender and check session state
MACP requires a canonical message envelope that carries protocol version, session scope, sender identity, message identity, and payload. For session-scoped acceptance, sender identity must be authenticated or derived, rather than trusted merely because a message contains a sender string. MACP’s session creation binds relevant configuration and policy metadata, and its lifecycle includes open, suspended, resolved, expired, and cancelled states. A session-scoped message referencing a session that is not open must be rejected. These are MACP-specific rules, not universal envelope requirements. See MACP RFC-MACP-0001.
AIDP: validate actor and authority
The July 2026 AIDP Internet-Draft defines an Intent Envelope as a cryptographically attributable execution request, not simply a natural-language prompt. Its envelope includes an ID and timestamp, actor and authority references, bounded intent, constraints, a delegation chain, and observability hooks. Before execution, the boundary validates actor identity, capability, delegation integrity, revocation status, constraints, and that the envelope ID has not been reused. The draft says: “Failure of any validation step MUST abort execution.” AIDP is an Internet-Draft; that requirement should not be mistaken for evidence of a finalized standard or broad implementation. See the AIDP Internet-Draft.
Should events be ordered by timestamp or sequence number?
Use the ordering authority defined by the protocol; a wall-clock timestamp may help with display or joining data, but it does not automatically establish event order.
- AEP:
seqestablishes order for session-scoped events. AEP uses(epoch, seq)for restart-aware ordering and replay;timeis display and join metadata. - PI Desktop RACP: durable events use
sequence. The Host allocates numbers from 1 within an epoch; it starts a new epoch when continuity cannot be proven. Clients use durable sequence values to detect gaps. - AIDP: the cited draft requires a unique, non-reusable envelope ID as part of replay protection. That is an identity and validation rule, not a substitute for another protocol’s sequence semantics.
Do not combine these into a made-up universal envelope: each protocol assigns authority to its own fields. See the AEP-0001 specification, PI Desktop RACP documentation, and AIDP Internet-Draft.
Can you replay a delta after reconnect?
First determine whether it is durable
PI Desktop Remote Agent Control Protocol (RACP) explicitly distinguishes durable events from ephemeral activity. Durable events carry sequence. Ephemeral kinds—including turn.activity, item.delta, tool.progress, and terminal.output—carry afterSequence, are not retained or replayed, and do not count against the replay window. RACP states: “Ephemeral events are never retained, never replayed, and never counted against the replay window.”
In RACP’s mapping, message_update becomes the non-durable item.delta, while message_end becomes durable item.completed containing the full UI message. After reconnect, a client should recover from durable events or a snapshot; it cannot assume every streamed fragment can be replayed. Gap detection relies on durable sequence values, not on expecting transient deltas to fill the gap. See the PI Desktop RACP documentation.
For other protocols, follow their own replay contract
AEP defines (epoch, seq) for ordering, replay, and resume. MACP’s session lifecycle determines whether session-scoped messages can still be accepted. Neither fact makes RACP’s ephemeral-delta policy universal: establish whether the chosen protocol and application retain the specific event before designing reconnect behavior.
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- Validate the protocol envelope. Check the protocol marker and schema requirements for that protocol; do not require fields borrowed from a different specification.
- Authenticate the emitter and bind scope. Apply the protocol’s identity rules. For AEP aggregation, use
(source, session); for MACP session-scoped acceptance, authenticate or derive sender identity; for AIDP, validate actor and authority references. - Check lifecycle and authorization. Reject messages for a closed or otherwise unacceptable session where the protocol requires it. Validate capabilities, delegation, revocation, and constraints at an execution boundary when required.
- Deduplicate and enforce continuity. Apply the protocol’s message identity and ordering rules. In AEP, deduplicate on
(source, id)and use sequence rather than timestamp for order; in RACP, use durable sequence and epoch continuity to detect gaps. - Establish durability before promising recovery. Distinguish a transient stream update from a completed durable event. Expose or commit the delta only in the way the application contract allows, and use durable events or a snapshot for recovery when transient updates are not replayable.
These checks are a decision framework, not a claim that the protocols are interchangeable or that one checklist fits every deployment. The relevant specification determines the exact acceptance conditions.
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