EACI Development Journal · Experimental

Why Do Optional Agent Control Surfaces Stay Lab-Grade?

Experimental control surfaces can fail without breaking chat. They stay optional until permissions, browser support, and regression behavior are dependable.

Experimental ~6 min issue-tagged
Issue this fixes

Agent control APIs vary by host and may expose capabilities that ordinary browsers do not have. Loading them as a core dependency would make Main reliability depend on an experimental environment.

The error logger already recognizes the optional agent script separately. The application can probe for its globals, expose the lab control only when supported, and keep normal companion chat independent.

What was actually going wrong

A promising integration was at risk of being treated as a universal browser feature.

What I tried

What finally worked

The control surface loads behind an explicit experimental gate and feature detection, with failure isolated from core scripts.

Why it worked

Unproven capability code cannot take down the stable conversation path.

What I learned

Experimental autonomy needs a smaller blast radius than ordinary UI.

Where EACI uses this today

Main companion chat does not require optional agent controls to load or function.

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