Enablement Report: Sage Visual Storytelling & Delegation

Date: December 29, 2025 Status: Implementation Complete / Verification Pending (Deployment) Author: Antigravity (Agent)

1. Executive Summary

We have successfully implemented the ability for Elena (System Guide) to delegate visual storytelling tasks to Sage (Creative Agent). This feature leverages a durable Temporal workflow to generate a narrative (Claude), an architecture diagram (Gemini), and a visualization (Gemini/Imagen), saving all artifacts to Azure Files and enriching Zep memory.

2. Architecture

Workflow (StoryWorkflow)

The process is orchestrated by backend/workflows/story_workflow.py, ensuring durability and retries.

  1. Generate Story: Claude 3.5 Sonnet generates the narrative.
  2. Generate Visuals:
    • Diagram: Gemini Pro 1.5 generates a JSON graph specification.
    • Image: Gemini/Imagen generates a PNG visualization.
  3. Save Artifacts: Saves .md, .json, and .png files to /app/docs (mounted Azure File Share).
  4. Enrich Memory: Ingests the story content and metadata into Zep for future recall.

Delegation Flow

  1. User asks Elena: “Create a visual story…”
  2. Elena interprets request and calls delegate_to_sage tool.
  3. Tool triggers StoryWorkflow via Temporal Client.
  4. Tool constructs response with Story ID, snippet, and inline image.

3. Findings & Challenges

3.1 Zep User Management & Workflow Crashes

Issue: The workflow consistently failed at the final step (“Enrich Memory”) with a Zep API error: 400 - user does not exist. This unhandled exception caused the Temporal Activity to fail, and in some cases, appeared to crash the worker process before the image file could be reliably synced/flushed to the docs volume. Finding: The deployed version of Zep (Community/OSS) likely does not support dynamic user creation via the /api/v1/users endpoint, or requires strict prerequisite setup not present in our staging environment. Fix: We modified ZepMemoryClient.get_or_create_session to automatically detect the “user does not exist” error. The client now logs a warning and retries the session creation with user_id=None (anonymous/system context). This ensures the workflow completes successfully even if the specific user profile (elena-delegate) is missing.

3.2 Visual Artifact Persistence

Issue: Although logs confirmed image generation (941KB), the file was missing from docs/images/. Finding: The sequence of events (Image Generated -> Worker Crash due to Zep Error) suggests that the file write operation was either interrupted or the worker container terminated before the filesystem sync could complete. By fixing the root cause of the crash (the Zep error), we ensure the worker remains healthy to complete the file operations.

3.3 UX Feedback Loop

Issue: Initially, the user had to click a link to view the story/image. Fix: We updated the delegate_to_sage tool in backend/agents/elena/agent.py to check for successful workflow completion and append an inline Markdown image (![Visual](/api/v1/images/{id}.png)) to the chat response. This provides immediate visual confirmation to the user.

4. Verification Plan (Pending Deployment)

We are currently awaiting the deployment of Worker Revision > 0000046 and API Revision. Once live, we will verify:

  1. End-to-End Success: Workflow completes without Zep errors.
  2. Image Persistence: /api/v1/images/{story_id}.png returns a valid image.
  3. Chat UI: The image appears inline in the chat.
  4. Story Page: The “Visual” tab displays the generated image.

5. Future Recommendations

  • Monitoring: Add specific alerts for “Task not found” or worker crashes to identify infrastructure instability sooner.
  • Zep Enterprise: Evaluate upgrading to Zep Enterprise if multi-user ephemeral context is a strict requirement.