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Broad-Side: lens queue via headless agent (@openrouter/agent) — sync-priced, tool-using variant #143

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@TheAmericanMaker

Roadmap item (see ROADMAP.md). Explores the middle tier between Broad-Side's batch API (50% pricing, no tools, single-turn) and the full interactive CodeCartographer pipeline (agent loop + tools, driven by a host).

OpenRouter's official scaffold for this is the create-headless-agent skill (OpenRouterTeam/skills): a queue worker that runs @openrouter/agent's callModel loop per prompt with local tools (grep/file/shell), retry-with-backoff, session persistence, output-schema validation, and stop conditions including maxCost(amount).

Open questions the design must answer before this is worth building:

  • Cost: sync API = ~2x batch pricing per lens. Does tool-using capability (grep first, read only what matches) recover the difference by shrinking input tokens vs Broad-Side's stuff-everything-into-context approach? Only a real comparison run answers this.
  • Overlap: the tool-using variant re-implements much of what the interactive pipeline already does. Its niche would be unattended multi-turn verification (e.g., 'confirm the finding by reading the cited line'), which batch cannot do.
  • Hybrid (the likelier winner): keep batch API for the six lens sweeps, then spend one sync-priced verification pass on the top N synthesis findings — read the cited file:line, confirm or discard each lead, promote survivors to verified status. This attacks the biggest weakness (unverified leads) at a fraction of full-pipeline cost.

Related: #133 (truncation repair), #135 (triage lens), #141 (multi-model). Retry-safety note: batch requests are pure, so resubmission is always safe; a tool-using variant must adopt the headless-agent rule (retry only before tool calls, since replaying a mutating tool double-executes it).

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