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WIP: generic scenario steering — plumbing-only client scenarios shouldn't need per-SDK fixture handlers

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#431 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
testing

Research direction

Start by reading the context-passing channel described in #51, then inspect the working per-SDK handlers from #335 and the drift noted in #345. Define the generic scenario-step data and interpreter boundary, while preserving bespoke handlers for scenarios requiring real client behavior. Done means plumbing-only scenarios can run across SDK fixtures without per-scenario handler changes.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Parking a design note; details to be fleshed out (there may be an earlier exploration of this on a branch elsewhere — to be dug up and linked).

Pain (fresh example from #335)

All five Tier 1 SDK conformance clients failed the new json-schema-2020-12-preservation scenario with "Unknown scenario" — yet when we prototyped the missing handler in each fixture (10-35 lines each), every SDK passed 9/9. The scenario needs no SDK behavior change at all; the per-scenario fixture handler is pure dispatch plumbing, duplicated across N repos, and it rots (see #345 for in-repo drift of the same kind).

Idea

Scenarios of this shape declare their client-side steps as data over the context-passing channel from #51 (implemented), e.g. steps like "tools/list", "call tool X with the schema you got for tool Y". Each SDK fixture implements one small generic interpreter, once; after that, new plumbing-only scenarios need zero fixture changes anywhere. Scenarios needing real client behavior (elicitation decisions, sampling, auth flows) keep bespoke handlers.

Related: #51 (context channel), #345 (handler drift), #335 (motivating case, with working handler patches for all five SDKs).

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
127
Forks
101
Avg merge
4d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
6

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