User identification

Coulisse keeps separate memory per user. To do that, it needs to know who is making each request.

How users are identified

Requests identify the user via one of these fields, in order:

1. safety_identifier (preferred — matches OpenAI's recent schema)
2. user (deprecated, but still accepted)

{
  "model": "assistant",
  "safety_identifier": "alice@example.com",
  "messages": [...]
}

The identifier can be anything — an email, an internal user ID, a UUID, an opaque token. Coulisse derives a stable internal UUID from it:

• If you pass a valid UUID, that's what's used.
• Otherwise, a deterministic v5 UUID is derived from the string, so the same identifier always maps to the same user.

Requiring identification

By default, Coulisse requires every request to carry an identifier. Unidentified requests are rejected with an error. This is the safe default: memory only works if you know who you're talking to.

default_user_id: a single-user fallback

For local development or single-user deployments, you can declare a default_user_id in coulisse.yaml. When a request arrives without safety_identifier or user, Coulisse acts as if that default had been passed.

default_user_id: main        # everyone's anonymous requests bucket here

providers:
  anthropic:
    api_key: sk-ant-...

agents:
  - name: assistant
    provider: anthropic
    model: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929

With a default_user_id set:

• Requests that omit both safety_identifier and user fall back to the default. They get memory like any other user — just scoped to that shared bucket.
• Requests that do include an identifier still get their own scope.
• All anonymous requests share one memory bucket and one rate-limit counter, because they all map to the same id.

When to set it

Good reasons:

• Local / single-user setups where you don't want to bother sending an identifier.
• Small deployments behind an auth layer that handles identity upstream but doesn't want to plumb it through.

Don't set default_user_id in multi-tenant deployments — every user would share one bucket, which defeats isolation. Leave it unset so missing identifiers are rejected.