finalOutput now recovers the front-loaded answer when the terminal turn is a
sources/citations-only addendum ("Sources: [x](url), ..."), not just when it is
empty or a back-reference. It recovers the prior substantive answer and appends
the (real) citations below it. Guards: citation-DOMINANCE (a prose answer that
merely opens with "Source: ... http://..." is left as the answer), ^-anchored
heading, citations recovery decoupled from the terminal-length ratio (concise
answers recover too), preamble filter applied only in the borderline band
(long answers opening with "Sure,"/"Let me" are not vetoed), and a dedup that
ignores <url> angle-bracket wrappers. Healthy terminal answers unchanged; zero
extra model calls.
Fixes mort #1418. Gadfly-reviewed (6 reviewers) + adversarially pre-verified;
all findings graded, real ones addressed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The agent loop took the final answer only from the terminal (no-tool-call)
turn. Models that "front-load" their answer into an earlier turn that also
calls a tool — then close with a trivial pointer like "(Already answered
above.)" — had their real answer discarded and the pointer delivered. This
recurs across several open-weight models (glm-5.2, etc.); well-behaved models
(Claude/GPT) defer their answer to the terminal turn and are unaffected.
finalOutput() now falls back to the last substantive assistant content in the
transcript when the terminal text is weak (empty, or a short back-reference).
The predicate is narrow and back-reference-gated so short-but-correct answers
("42", "It's down, restarting now.") are never overridden; recovery only picks
a prior turn that reads like a real answer, not a preamble. Zero extra model
calls. Terminal-answer behavior for normal runs is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
steve