Which Provider-required state must survive a Tool turn without becoming Agent cognition?
Separate model-visible semantic history from opaque Provider continuation bytes whose authority comes from an exact prior Provider Tool result and lineage.
01 / Current position
A hypothesis is not the current judgment.
The dossier preserves the live research position. Dated articles preserve the complete evidence and argument that changed it.
A small Adapter-bound continuation object can preserve Provider protocol continuity across crash/reopen while remaining hidden from Agent messages and without replaying the physical Tool effect.
Answered within Harness X2. A live Gemini falsifier returned 200 with the exact continuation and 400 INVALID_ARGUMENT when only the signature was stripped. A 940-byte continuation then survived crash/reopen, remained hidden from Agent messages, completed LIVE_CONTINUATION_OK, and caused zero Runtime redispatch. ProviderToolContinuation was the only new primitive earned across five pressured frontiers.
02 / Decision boundary
What keeps this Question alive?
A semantic transcript can look complete while a native Provider still rejects the next request if protocol continuation is missing; copying opaque bytes into messages would blur cognition, privacy, and Provider authority.
Keep the primitive Provider-neutral and small. Reopen abstraction only when another native Provider exposes a materially different continuation fact that cannot fit the same Adapter/turn/model-call authority and privacy boundary.
Official Provider stateful APIs or direct adapters preserve the same crash/reopen Tool continuation with less shared Harness machinery, or another Provider requires continuation semantics that invalidate the current authority shape.
03 / Supporting publications
Complete arguments connected to this Question.
1 dated publication currently document this research line.
04 / Source discipline
The dossier is an index, not the evidence authority.
Owns the current judgment, next test, and deletion condition.
Own complete dated arguments, limitations, comparisons, and source links.
Own exact code, tests, releases, receipts, and machine evidence.