Robert Helewka 49da024877 docs: add Incidents & Lessons Learned section for Pallas<->Mnemosyne saga
Capture the five debugging chapters from the bearer-forwarding rollout
so the knowledge doesn't live only in chat history:

  1. Per-request bearer across anyio.TaskGroup boundary (ContextVar
     snapshot semantics, httpx auth-header caching on persistent
     connections, forward_inbound_auth pydantic-drop workaround).
  2. install() idempotency guard shadowing three newly-added
     monkey-patches — each patch now owns its own sentinel.
  3. FastMCP on_call_tool context shape: context.message.name, not
     context.message.params.name.  Extractor returning None silently
     killed the _PUBLIC_TOOLS bypass and downstream dispatch "await
     None(...)" produced the terse 'object NoneType can't be used in
     await expression' string that blocked Harper<->Mnemosyne.
  4. Rich-TUI corruption by DEBUG openai/sse_starlette/mcp via root
     logger inheriting logger.level=debug + our stderr StreamHandler.
     Fixed by PALLAS_LOG_STDERR gate and PALLAS_ROOT_LOG_LEVEL split.
  5. Current state table of PALLAS_LOG_* knobs + jq tail recipe.

Also add pallas.log and pallas._fastagent_patch to the Module Reference
table.
2026-05-07 06:32:24 -04:00

Pallas — FastAgent MCP Bridge

Pallas is the generic runtime that turns fast-agent agent definitions into StreamableHTTP MCP servers.

It is completely deployment-agnostic: all environment-specific values (agent names, ports, hosts, model) live in the calling project's agents.yaml and fastagent.config.yaml.


Installation

pip install git+ssh://git@git.helu.ca:22022/r/pallas.git

Or as a project dependency in pyproject.toml:

dependencies = [
    "pallas-mcp @ git+ssh://git@git.helu.ca:22022/r/pallas.git",
]

Usage

Pallas reads configuration from the working directory at runtime.

my-project/
├── agents/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── jarvis.py          # FastAgent definitions
├── agents.yaml            # Deployment topology
├── fastagent.config.yaml  # FastAgent + model config
└── fastagent.secrets.yaml # API keys (gitignored)

Run from your project root:

pallas                     # start all agents + registry
pallas --agent jarvis      # start a single agent

Or via python -m:

python -m pallas.server

agents.yaml format

name: my-project           # used in log prefixes and registry names
version: "1.0.0"
host: my-host.example.com  # hostname for registry URLs
namespace: com.example.my-project
registry_port: 8200

agents:
  jarvis:
    module: agents.jarvis  # importable Python module path
    port: 8201
    title: Jarvis
    description: "My assistant agent"
    depends_on: [research]  # optional: start these first

  research:
    module: agents.research
    port: 8250
    title: Research Agent
    description: "Web search and knowledge graph"

fastagent.config.yaml extensions

Pallas reads two extra keys beyond the standard fast-agent config:

default_model: openai.my-custom-model-name

# Explicit capability declarations — avoids brittle name-regex heuristics
model_capabilities:
  vision: false
  context_window: 200000
  max_output_tokens: 32000

Capabilities are published in the registry and used to register unknown models with fast-agent's ModelDatabase.


Environment variable

Variable Default Purpose
PALLAS_AGENTS_CONFIG agents.yaml Override path to deployment config

What Pallas provides

Module Purpose
pallas.server CLI entry point and agent orchestration
pallas.registry GET /.well-known/mcp/server.json registry server
pallas.multimodal_server MultimodalAgentMCPServerAgentMCPServer subclass with image support
pallas.health LLM preflight validation + get_health MCP tool
Description
FastAgent MCP Bridge — generic runtime for serving FastAgent agents over StreamableHTTP
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