also, random note, i had written the codec so it was reusing memory from received event data, overwriting the first half of hex fields, specifically id, pubkey and signature, i am altering this to allocate new memory instead because i have encountered an error where for some reason the read buffer is being decoded again and of course has mangled fields.

hooray for the wonders of AI coding agents, these tedious tasks i can delegate and not get tied up with getting these tedious, simple tasks causing bugs in my code.