feat(plugin): add ToolResult type for structured tool responses #7590

Summary

Plugin tools lacked support for structured responses and real-time streaming metadata, preventing advanced features like background tasks with progress updates.

Problem

When building a plugin to support background tasks, we encountered limitations:

1. No Structured Response Support

Plugin tools could only return plain strings. Any metadata (tool counts, status, progress) was lost because fromPlugin always returned metadata: {}.

Impact: Background tasks couldn't display tool counts, subagent types, or progress updates.

2. No Streaming During Execution

Long-running operations (file searches, API calls, subagent tasks) had no way to emit progress updates. The UI showed a static "Running..." state until completion.

Impact: Poor UX for multi-step operations with no feedback.

Solution

PR #6544 adds:

1. ToolResult interface - Structured response type with title, metadata, output
2. ctx.metadata() method - Real-time streaming updates during tool execution
3. Registry handling - Proper propagation of structured results
4. Backward compatibility - Plain string returns still work

Example: Background Task with Progress

Before (limited metadata):

async execute(args, ctx) {
  return "3 files found"  // Just a string
}

After (rich metadata + streaming):

async execute(args, ctx) {
  ctx.metadata({ title: "Searching...", metadata: { current: 1, total: 5 } })
  // ... search ...
  ctx.metadata({ title: "Analyzing...", metadata: { current: 2, total: 5 } })

  return {
    title: "Complete",
    metadata: { toolsUsed: 3, duration: "2.3s" },
    output: "3 files found",
  }
}

Related

• Plugin SDK: packages/plugin/src/tool.ts
• Registry: packages/opencode/src/tool/registry.ts
• Core types: packages/opencode/src/tool/tool.ts

Future Work

• Attachments: The attachments field was added for alignment with core Tool.Result types, but attachment propagation was not tested. Future work could enable plugins to return images, PDFs, or other file types.