Interactive ouroboros pm logs corrupt pasted input and make mosh sessions look frozen

[srausser]

Summary

Interactive ouroboros pm sessions write structured logs into the terminal while the user is entering responses. Over SSH/mosh, this makes large pasted answers look truncated or corrupted and makes the session appear frozen.

Repro

1. Configure ouroboros and run ouroboros pm in an interactive terminal (especially over mosh/SSH).
2. Paste a multi-paragraph opening response.
3. Wait for the interview to advance.

Actual

Structured log lines are emitted into the same terminal session during the interactive prompt / transition between prompts, for example:

2026-... pm.opening_response_received ...
2026-... interview.started ...
2026-... pm.interview_started ...

This has two bad effects:

• the pasted response appears visually cut off or overwritten
• the terminal can look frozen while the next question is being generated because there is no clean user-facing progress indicator

Expected

Interactive PM mode should suppress console log output by default and only show clean prompt UI. Debug logging should be opt-in via a flag like --debug.

It should also show an explicit progress message between prompts (for example, "Starting interview..." or "Generating next question...") so long-running model calls do not look like terminal hangs.

Local workaround

I patched my local install to disable console logging during ouroboros pm unless --debug is set, and added explicit progress messages before the opening interview call and before follow-up question generation.

[ouroboros-agent]

Triage result: this is a valid bug report with clear reproduction steps and expected behavior.

Scope assessment:

• Likely implementation surface is limited to the ouroboros pm CLI flow, PM interview progress messaging, and console logging control.
• This appears to be a single-PR change, not a multi-PR design effort.
• It does not appear to touch protected boundaries (SOUL.md / AGENTS.md / release config / security-sensitive code paths).

Routing: safe to proceed to implementation.

ouroboros-agent[bot]