Status: rejected — a single turn can contain substantial real work, including many steps and large tool output. Preserving interrupted turns is preferable to silently dropping that tail on load.
The current persistence contract preserves a final turn that was durably written but never closed. On load, `interruptedTurnClosers()` scans the tail, synthesizes error `tool/result` events for unanswered tool calls, appends a `step/end` when a step is open, appends `turn/end { kind: 'interrupted' }`, and asks the backend to durably commit that repair. The coordinator, JSONL backend, SQLite backend, session event vocabulary, invariants, docs, and tests all model this synthetic close path.
This is a lot of machinery to preserve partial work from the last crashed turn. It also invents events that never happened. A synthetic tool result is useful because it makes provider history valid, but it also means the resumed log contains model-visible text that no tool produced. The current design optimizes for maximum tail preservation before there is a released product or a real resume UX that proves partial-turn recovery matters.
## Proposal
On load, keep only the last completed turn. A backend still tolerates and truncates a torn final record, but if the parsed durable prefix ends after an open `turn/start`, the canonical repair is to drop every event after the previous `turn/end`. No synthetic `tool/result`, no synthetic `step/end`, no `turn/end { interrupted }`, and no `interrupted` turn-end reason.
This makes the persisted turn boundary simple: a completed `turn/end` is the checkpoint. Anything after the last checkpoint is crash tail. The next prompt resumes from the last known-valid provider transcript, not from a partially reconstructed final turn.
## Acceptance criteria
-`TurnEndReasonMap` drops the `interrupted` variant.
-`interruptedTurnClosers()` and its tests disappear.
- The persistence coordinator's repair hook truncates backend-specific torn/open tail state without appending closers.
- [Session persistence docs](../../../../packages/session-persistence/session-persistence/README.md) say load returns the last completed turn, plus no partial final turn.
- The session format version and recorded fixtures are refreshed; non-current stored logs are rejected per the pre-release format policy, with no migration path.
A crash can lose real work from the final turn: assistant text, tool calls, and tool output appended after the previous `turn/end`. That is the deliberate simplification. The product is unreleased, the final-turn recovery semantics are not user-proven, and a clean completed-turn checkpoint is much easier to explain, test, and implement. A future "recover partial crashed work" feature should be designed as an explicit user-facing recovery view, not as synthetic events silently inserted into the canonical transcript.
This is a direct simplification of [session persistence](../../implemented/architecture/2026-06-14-session-persistence.md) and [turn enclosure](../../implemented/architecture/2026-06-15-turn-enclosure-invariant.md). It also removes much of the motivation for durable step boundary events, making [drop durable step boundary events](2026-06-20-drop-durable-step-boundaries.md) smaller.
