chat.sendMessage displayText hides the actual prompt in ADE chat transcript

[arul28]

Summary

When sending a chat message through the raw chat.sendMessage action with both text and displayText, the ADE transcript stores/renders only displayText as the user message. This can make a long agent handoff look like an empty/short placeholder in the chat, even though the caller supplied the real prompt in text.

Repro

Send a message like:

{
  "sessionId": "a2dc8109-576c-46d3-b863-214335ee0faa",
  "text": "<long Pearl UI audit prompt>",
  "displayText": "Pearl UI audit handoff"
}

via:

/Applications/ADE.app/Contents/Resources/ade-cli/bin/ade actions run chat.sendMessage --input-json "$INPUT_JSON" --json

Then inspect the transcript at .ade/transcripts/chat/<session>.jsonl.

Actual

The transcript user_message event contained only:

{"type":"user_message","text":"Pearl UI audit handoff", ...}

The visible chat did not show the full prompt, so the session appeared to have no meaningful user instructions.

Expected

One of these should happen:

• the visible transcript should preserve/render the full text, possibly with displayText as a collapsed label; or
• both fields should be retained in transcript data; or
• the API should document/validate that displayText replaces visible text and is not appropriate for hidden long prompts.

Impact

This is easy to trip when using raw ADE actions for agent handoffs. It makes audit/worker chats look empty or under-specified and makes later debugging harder because the visible transcript no longer contains the actual prompt.

Workaround

Resend without displayText. The full prompt then appears in the transcript and visible chat.