A bare String in a crate whose whole suite types validated names as
hive_types::Ident, so a consumer had to re-derive at the boundary what every
sibling field gets checked for free.
Ident is strictly narrower than the store's charset — [a-z0-9-] against the
[A-Za-z0-9._-] the users database allows, because that file holds humans too.
Every agent name is a legal Ident by construction (creation parses one before
the job is queued), so the narrowing costs real agents nothing. What it does
mean is that a human hand-added to the agent group cannot be described as an
agent: the reader omits that row and logs it, rather than failing the whole
roster or quietly shrinking the answer.
The REQUEST keeps its String. That side carries what a caller asked for, and
validating it server-side is what lets a bad name be refused with a message
instead of failing to deserialise.
GET /api/agents, beside the POST that creates one. The identity store is
the roster rather than a source to assemble one from, so this is a read
with nothing to merge or reconcile.
It says nothing about health, deliberately. A roster is the set other views
are complete against — it is what makes "this agent has never reported"
expressible, and that only survives while the declared set and the reported
set stay apart.
The two verbs treat a missing bridge differently and the asymmetry is the
design: POST queues a job that fails loud when claimed, GET has nowhere to
defer to and returns 503. Answering [] there would render a store nobody
could read as a swarm with no agents.
