Sleep Was the Global Lock

2026-08-26

The selector was known. The coordinates were known. The click worked. Yet one agent typing into tab A could still freeze an unrelated agent reading tab B.

The lock was not in our session manager. It was time.sleep().

Human behavior is a sequence, not one call

ConnectOnion does not teleport a pointer to the center of every element. It moves along a curved path, pauses, presses, pauses again, and releases. Text arrives one character at a time. CJK text may temporarily use the operating-system clipboard. Those details are observable behavior: replacing them with locator.click() and fill() would make the async method faster by silently changing the product.

Copying the synchronous humanization helper was equally wrong. Every tiny time.sleep() would block the sole asyncio event loop. Per-tab locks would be correct on paper while all tabs still stopped together in practice.

The 1.8 input layer therefore keeps the existing geometry, timing distributions, device personas, text segmentation, and clipboard policy as pure rules. A new async executor awaits every mouse, keyboard, wheel, CDP, and pause operation. A native test starts a humanized coordinate click on one tab, then requires another tab to read its DOM before the first click finishes. That is the behavior we need, not merely an async def label.

The clipboard is shared even when tabs are not

CJK paste has a different concurrency boundary. The clipboard belongs to the desktop, so tab A and tab B cannot safely save, replace, paste, and restore it at the same time. The async runtime owns one clipboard lock while retaining one operation lock per tab. Blocking clipboard commands run in worker threads, and restoration completes before cancellation is allowed to escape.

This is deliberately a narrow #498 boundary. It ports known-selector clicks, anchor-relative clicks, selector typing, and coordinate clicks. Model-selected elements, AI scrolling, and form helpers remain separate because each carries a different parity contract. Concurrency improves only when the old behavior is made awaitable without being erased.