MCP squad_decide author validator too narrow — cannot express on-behalf-of authorship #1256

Summary

squad_decide MCP tool rejects author values that contain spaces, parentheses, or other characters needed to attach role context. The validator only accepts [A-Za-z0-9_-]+. This makes it impossible to express authorship like "Squad (Coordinator) on behalf of Tamir Dresher (CTO)" — which is the most accurate description for structural decisions made by the coordinator on behalf of a human directing the work.

Reproduction

Tested on @bradygaster/squad-cli@0.10.0-build.7 (local build from PR #1245 branch).

mcp_call({
  tool: "squad_state-squad_decide",
  args: {
    author: "Squad (Coordinator) on behalf of Tamir Dresher (CTO)",
    summary: "...",
    body: "..."
  }
});

Returns:

MCP server 'squad_state': Invalid author name: must contain only letters,
numbers, hyphens, and underscores

Why this is too narrow

The author field on a decision is human-readable provenance. Real authorship in a multi-agent system is often complex:

• "squad-coordinator" — accepted today, but loses the "on behalf of" context
• "Scribe on behalf of Flight" — rejected, contains spaces
• "FIDO (review) + EECOM (fix)" — rejected, contains parens and slash equivalents
• "User: Tamir Dresher → Coordinator" — rejected, contains colon, space, arrow

Workaround today is to embed the full attribution in the body and put a slug in author. But that defeats the purpose of having an author field — automated tooling that displays decisions by author cannot show the real authorship.

Suggested fix

Relax to something like:

• Allow letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, spaces, parentheses, ampersands, slashes, periods, colons, plus signs
• Cap length at 200 characters
• Reject only characters that would break filename derivation (the slug is derived from this in the inbox filename)

Or split into two fields: author_slug (the strict validator, used for the filename) and author_display (free text, used for the human-readable header).

Related

• PR Promote Fact Checker to active roster; declare dual operating mode #1254 (team-structure change that hit this — used "squad-coordinator" as a workaround, lost the "on behalf of" context)
• feat(mcp): bridge memory.* tools through squad_state MCP server (currently unreachable from agents) #1244 / PR feat(mcp): bridge governed memory tools (memory.*) through squad_state MCP server #1245 (the MCP bridge work)