Commit Graph
81 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
dongarandClaude Opus 5.5 2c9a082e5b Define the work model: duties, work items, scopes
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"Project" was carrying several things at once: the repo, the effort
through arch plan and milestones, and the transcript's scope. The
Sysadmin Agent needs the same distinctions in a different shape, with
standing duties that produce many efforts over one scope. New section
0.2 names them:

- Duty: a standing responsibility that produces work items, and owns
  deduplication of its findings
- Work item: the unit of state, identified by a locally minted id
  (A9's task_id), optionally linked to an external record
- Scope: what a work item operates on, shared across work items
- Park-and-switch: one active work item, switching only at safe
  points, nothing lost while parked; the schema does not assume one

0.1 records this as a bounded exception to extract-after-it-works:
identity is designed ahead, behaviour is not. A2, A4, A9, A10, B1/B2
and C4 now speak in these terms; the transcript is scoped per work
item, and a milestone no longer mints a task_id. Part H parks
concurrency with its costs, and leaves open when a work item must
have an external record.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 20:26:24 +00:00
dongar 889615e3e2 Merge pull request 'Record the MCP server deployment decisions in the spec' (#36) from mcp-deployment into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#36
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-23 02:03:59 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5.5 3dbfbc8cf0 Name the site domains the identifiers are stems of
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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 02:00:43 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5.5 cdc3881deb Fold the MCP deployment amendment into the spec
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Part F is restructured around rules that now apply to every agent:

- F1: every agent gets its own VM, for inter-agent isolation and
  per-agent credential attribution
- F2: a declared, per-instance default-deny egress allowlist that
  covers MCP servers' reach, with the tailnet's 100.64.0.0/10 called
  out
- F3: MCP servers per agent VM and per (service, site, privilege),
  plus the rejected routed-meta-tools alternative
- F4: the existing image pipeline, with third-party MCP images
  digest-pinned and excluded from Watchtower

Consequences land where they belong: site identifiers in Part 0, a
machine account per MCP server instance in A7, B3 and C5 recast as
instances of F1/F2, plan approval required for every write in C2, MCP
as the primary infrastructure path in C3, the network-gear browser
item narrowed to fallback access, and stateful-server relocation
parked in Part H.

The standalone amendment is removed now that its content lives here,
as with the Tiered Inference amendment; it remains in the previous
commit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 01:56:30 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5.5 31bef59151 Add the MCP deployment amendment
Records a design session on MCP server deployment as a standalone
amendment, ahead of folding it into the spec:

- Every agent gets its own VM, justified by inter-agent isolation and
  per-agent credential attribution; Docker-in-Docker stays as an extra
  Dev Agent reason rather than the rule's foundation
- Egress is a declared, per-agent-instance default-deny allowlist,
  covering what MCP servers reach on the agent's behalf, with the
  tailnet's 100.64.0.0/10 called out as outside RFC1918
- MCP servers run per agent VM, one instance per (service, site,
  privilege), with site in the server identity rather than a tool
  argument
- Third-party MCP images are digest-pinned and excluded from Watchtower
- Routed meta-tools rejected; stateful-server relocation parked

Two consequences settled with the operator while drafting: each MCP
server instance gets its own Vaultwarden machine account (A7), and any
write, reversible or not, requires an approved plan (C2).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 01:55:31 +00:00
dongar b0d7adb70d Merge pull request 'Discover a model's vendor from LiteLLM instead of its name' (#35) from alias-discovery into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#35
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-23 01:49:36 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 e38adf40ca Discover a model's vendor from LiteLLM instead of its name
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Route selection sniffed model names: anything starting "claude-" or
"anthropic/" took the vendor-native passthrough, everything else took the
normalized route. That works only while an alias names its vendor. A
semantic role alias like "remote-architecture" is meant to point at
Anthropic today and somewhere else tomorrow, and the name says nothing
either way -- so it would have taken the normalized route regardless of
what was behind it, silently losing the fidelity A13 wants for delegations.

LiteLLM already knows the answer. /model/info reports each alias's backing
model, provider, and declared tool support, so the agent asks at startup and
routes on the provider it discovers. That keeps vendor knowledge where A5
already put it -- in the proxy -- rather than duplicating it as name patterns
here.

There is deliberately no name-based fallback: PASSTHROUGH_PREFIXES and
has_native_adapter are gone, and select_client now requires a catalog. A
second heuristic could only ever disagree with the proxy. An unknown model
raises instead of guessing a route.

Misconfiguration is therefore loud and early. build_agent validates every
role against the catalog before it clones anything, naming all the bad ones
at once. Discovery is per key -- /model/info returns only what the presented
token may use -- so the same check catches a role pointed at a real model
this key cannot reach. An unreachable proxy is reported separately, since an
outage and a typo call for different responses from the operator.

Two things now get recorded rather than inferred: the resolved model is
pinned alongside the role mapping at task start, for the reason A11 already
pins roles, and DelegationStarted carries backing_model so A16 eval history
is not averaged across whatever an alias happened to point at.

A model LiteLLM declares tool-less warns at startup rather than refusing;
A15 expects weak local models to be accommodated, and they are observed
driving tool loops anyway.

Verified live: all four aliases the production key can see route correctly
through discovery, and each chosen route works.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-23 01:47:58 +00:00
dongar 231b406393 Merge pull request 'Choose the LLM route by model, and add a capability matrix' (#34) from model-routing into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#34
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-23 01:47:34 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 8cfa116aa1 Preserve delegation work through any upstream outage, not just budget
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An exhausted budget was a special case of something more general: the
work is not at fault. A network blip, a timeout, a 5xx from the proxy,
or a rate limit that did not clear all leave a delegation branch that
may be perfectly good, and discarding it would throw away work for a
reason that has nothing to do with the work.

UpstreamUnavailable now names that family, with BudgetExhausted a
member of it — distinguishable where the difference matters, since a
budget will not clear within the hour while a network blip will. A
delegation stopped by any of them is "interrupted": branch kept,
intent left pending, and A3's resume rule picks it up.

The benefit of the doubt stops at the server's own door. A 4xx that is
not a rate limit means the request itself was wrong, and preserving
branches on the strength of one would hide a real bug — so those still
fail and clean up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 23:57:05 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 8cfb45aed3 Enforce the token cap, and treat a spent budget as an interruption
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Exceeding a LiteLLM spend limit takes external models away for the
rest of the day, which makes three existing gaps consequential rather
than untidy.

- A13 calls the delegation caps hard on "turns, tokens, and wall
  clock", and the module docstring repeated it, but the token cap was
  decoration: nothing counted, and result.tokens was always zero. It
  is now metered from the usage the provider reports, so a confused
  delegate cannot spend a day's allowance. A5 keeps the *money* cap on
  the LiteLLM key, which is a different thing; this is a scope cap
- The normalized route sent no ceiling at all, so truncation detection
  there had nothing to detect against. Both routes now send one
- A budget refusal is recognised distinctly. It is not a rate limit:
  retrying cannot help, so the planner no longer burns a second call
  to fail identically

And a delegation cut off by an exhausted budget is now "interrupted"
rather than "failed", which preserves its branch and leaves its intent
pending. The work on that branch may be perfectly good; discarding it
because the budget ran out would throw away work for a reason that has
nothing to do with the work. A3's resume rule already knows how to
pick such a delegation back up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 23:54:57 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 249bcb10fc Detect truncated responses, and raise the output ceiling
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Measuring Opus found a bug that had been silent all along: nothing
checked stop_reason or finish_reason, so a response cut off mid-answer
was parsed as a complete one.

The symptom was a submit_plan tool call whose required `content` field
was simply absent — structurally valid, substantively empty, and
indistinguishable from a model that chose to send nothing. The cause
was our max_tokens of 4096: Opus writing an architecture plan
routinely spends 3,000-4,000 output tokens, and was observed at 4,064
against that ceiling. Roughly one run in three crossed it.

Worse than the empty plan is what the same failure does elsewhere: a
truncated write_file writes half a file and reports success.

- Both routes now raise TruncatedResponse when the model was cut off.
  It subclasses LLMError, so the planner's retry and the executor's
  and delegation's gating already handle it without learning a new
  type: a cut-off turn is a failed turn
- The default ceiling is 16384 and configurable via
  NISSE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS. Output is billed by what is produced, not
  by the ceiling, so a low limit buys nothing and costs silent
  truncation

Verified: three consecutive Opus planning turns now return plans of
5,700-6,200 characters where one in three previously returned nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 23:45:28 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 ed2f5dfc7f Choose the LLM route by model, and add a capability matrix
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The arrival of non-Anthropic models made a latent bug observable: the
delegate's client was hardcoded to the Anthropic passthrough, so
pointing NISSE_ROLE_DELEGATE at gpt-6-astra or a local model would
have sent Anthropic-shaped /v1/messages bodies to something that does
not speak them. A5 promises the frontier tier is swappable "as a
configuration change, not a refactor", and it was not.

select_client now picks the route from the model: the vendor-native
adapter where one exists, LiteLLM's normalization otherwise — which is
exactly what A13 prescribes for a vendor whose renderer adapter has
not been written, pending validation against the A16 eval set.

Also adds the capability matrix Part H asks for. It says the
thresholds that depend on local capability — A12's failure count,
A14's consult budget, A15's manifest size — must be tuned "on the real
hardware", and that needs measurement rather than reputation. The
harness probes each model for the things that actually break: whether
it calls a tool at all, whether the plan it submits has substance
(llama3.2 emitted "{"), whether it can consume its own tool result,
and whether prompt-level JSON holds. Opt in with
NISSE_CAPABILITY_MODELS; it spends real tokens across several models.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 23:20:38 +00:00
dongar 1da94d2581 Merge pull request 'Add the composition root and a runnable entry point' (#31) from agent-entrypoint into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#31
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 22:33:45 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 dfa574aeec Refuse to start with the state store or .env inside the clone
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Answering "is the workspace where the agent runs, or what it works
on?" — it is what it works on, and conflating the two is dangerous
rather than merely untidy.

The agent commits its workspace with git add -A and pushes it, so
anything inside the clone reaches the project repository. A .env
placed there would publish the LiteLLM, Matrix and Gitea tokens as a
side effect of the agent working correctly: silently, once, and
probably unnoticed. Startup now refuses both that and a state store
inside the clone, and .env.example documents the intended layout.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 22:31:39 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 2fb25b8195 Add the composition root and a runnable entry point
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Nothing had ever assembled the agent. main.py was still the hello-world
placeholder from the scaffold, and no code outside the test suite
constructed an Orchestrator — which is how two fully built, fully
tested components came to be reachable from nothing: the delegation
harness, and the Gitea comment poller. Unit tests that construct a
component directly cannot catch that; only assembly can.

- config.py validates every variable before anything is built and
  names all of them at once, rather than failing at first use twenty
  minutes into a milestone on the call that mattered. Whitespace-only
  counts as missing, since a token of spaces passes a truthiness check
  and fails at the first request instead
- agent.py builds the whole graph and owns startup and shutdown order:
  reconcile before accepting commands, and on stop, stop watching,
  then stop talking, then close the store last
- The Gitea account is read via whoami rather than configured: it names
  the identity every permission is evaluated against, and proves the
  token works before anything depends on it
- Poller lifecycle is now a state-machine concern: watch the plan issue
  while a gate stands, the PR while it is open, and stop on leaving.
  The orchestrator owns when to watch; an injected factory owns how to
  build one
- The executor reports each turn, because it runs synchronously inside
  the transport callback: without it the agent is silent for a whole
  milestone and a working run looks exactly like a hung one
- main.py loads .env, builds, and shuts down cleanly on SIGINT/SIGTERM

The entry-point tests changed shape: nisse-dev no longer greets, it
refuses to start unconfigured and says everything that is missing. Both
tests now run with a deliberately empty environment and a .env path
that does not exist, because the working directory's .env holds live
credentials and a test must never be one cwd away from starting a real
agent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 22:26:26 +00:00
dongar 6331fcafd9 Merge pull request 'Wire delegation to A12's trigger, and implement A3's resume rule' (#25) from delegation-resume into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#25
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 21:46:26 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 ce436262f4 Wire delegation to A12's trigger, and implement A3's resume rule
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Two gaps found by auditing spec against code, the second created by
7b landing the harness without its boot-time half.

**The harness was not connected to anything.** Only a live test
constructed a Delegation; A12's failure-count trigger still gated to
the human, which A13 describes as the fallback rather than the path.
Consecutive command failures now hand the sub-task to the delegate,
with the failures in the brief so it need not rediscover what the
local model learned the hard way. A usable handback lets the local
loop carry on; anything else escalates, because a cap breach leaves a
half-edited tree.

**A3 step 5 was unimplemented.** A crash mid-delegation failed safe —
boot gated on "restarted mid-EXECUTING" — but always gated, even on
the clean cut the spec says should resume, and left the branch orphaned
because _abandon only runs while the process lives.

- A delegation now records an intent before the branch exists, and
  settles it whichever way the delegation ends; an aborted delegation
  is a finished one, and leaving it pending would make the next boot
  believe work was still in flight
- delegation_verdict implements the clean-cut test as an observable
  check, never model self-assessment: settled if a completion follows
  the start, absent if the branch was never created, gate on a
  tool_call with no recorded result, resume otherwise
- recover() sweeps at boot, announcing a resume with a notice rather
  than a question, since a clean cut needs no decision from the
  operator, and leaving an unclean one pending so the generic sweep
  gates on it
- resume() continues the same delegation rather than starting a
  second: no new branch, no second delegation_started, because A10
  defines a session as the delegation, not the process lifetime

Honest limit, stated in the code: "the branch sits at the expected
commit" is approximated by the branch existing and carrying the work,
since per-turn shas are not recorded in the log, so a branch rewritten
underneath us would go undetected.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 20:03:46 +00:00
dongar 608a3a5bfb Merge pull request 'Add ask_expert and eval capture (A14/A16) — step 7c' (#24) from ask-expert into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#24
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 19:53:30 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 2b7651fb37 Add ask_expert and eval capture (A14/A16) — step 7c
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Completes step 7.

- expert.py: one stateless call for a question needing no repo access.
  Structured output is contracted at the prompt level, since vendors
  differ on JSON enforcement, so the reply is parsed and validated
  locally with one retry — tolerating a fenced code block, because
  models wrap JSON habitually, but not missing fields
- The per-task budget is counted from the canonical log rather than
  memory, so it survives a restart and cannot hand a circling executor
  a fresh allowance. Exhaustion raises rather than answering: a caller
  out of consults should get on with the work or escalate
- Consults are recorded as delegation_started/completed with role
  consultant. A16 asks for a "consult/delegation eval set", and
  reusing the composite events gets consult evaluation for free rather
  than inventing a parallel record
- evals.py pairs starts with completions into eval records, with
  verdicts kept outside the canonical log: the log records what
  happened, a verdict is a later judgement about it, and judgements
  get revised. Schema v3 adds the outcomes table, so a v1 store now
  traverses two migrations — a better exercise of the hook than one
- ask_expert is offered to the executor as a tool only when a desk is
  configured, in addition to the observable escalation triggers and
  never instead of them (A12). Consulting is not mutating, so a
  completion claim backed only by consults is still challenged

Found live: passing an empty message list and putting the question in
the system prompt fails outright — the Messages API requires at least
one non-system message. The question now travels as a synthesised user
message that is never appended to the log, which keeps the consult
stateless while remaining a valid request.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 19:48:13 +00:00
dongar dd22eda528 Merge pull request 'Map A17 onto Outline's actual primitives, and record the MCP decision' (#23) from a17-outline-mapping into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#23
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 19:38:29 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 2352a84004 Map A17 onto Outline's actual primitives, and record the MCP decision
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Observed rather than assumed, after checking the running instance:
collections carry per-user permissions in three tiers and permissions
are collection-scoped, not per-document. So one collection per writing
principal, with read membership for everyone else.

- States precisely what that enforces: no other agent can write a
  given agent's world model. It does not enforce operator-versus-agent
  exclusion, since the operator holds manager on their own wiki; that
  half is procedural, via the break-glass routine that stops the
  agents first. Two different strengths, so the spec no longer implies
  one guarantee covers both
- Per-user grants, not groups: Outline groups are not federated with
  LLDAP, so using them would put membership somewhere nothing syncs.
  Three principals make the manual mapping trivial
- Outline API keys are per-user, so each agent's token must belong to
  that agent's own Outline user. A token minted from an admin account
  voids every boundary above while appearing to work — the same shape
  as the Gitea permission surprise
- Collections identified by ID from config, documents by ID recorded
  in the state store, which also makes writes idempotent across a
  retry
- The conditional-write requirement softens to a revision *read*:
  break-glass stops the agents, so compare-and-swap is unnecessary and
  only divergence detection is needed for A3

Also records Outline's MCP server as considered and deferred. A17's
enforcement depends on this library sitting between the model and the
store; MCP's purpose is direct model access, and a procedure the model
may decline to fetch does not constrain it. Still a candidate for the
discretionary search tool, with two things to verify first.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 19:36:39 +00:00
dongar f2ba932744 Merge pull request 'Add A17, the knowledge store contract (Outline)' (#22) from a17-knowledge-store into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#22
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 19:25:00 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 9362a134c9 Give A17 its canonical event, and point Part G at the contract
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Two loose ends in the A17 amendment, both found by asking whether the
build order needed changing:

- A17 requires retrieved content to be snapshotted into the canonical
  log, but A10's event table — the authoritative list — had no row for
  it, so an implementer reading A10 would never know to add one.
  knowledge_retrieved now carries the text as read, the document ID,
  its revision, and when it was read
- Part G step 10 already scheduled Outline, so the ordering does not
  change; it now names A17 rather than only Part D, and says which
  half arrives first — the world model, with operator procedures
  waiting on the C2 taxonomy they bind to

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 19:23:17 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 b8ba683595 Add A17, the knowledge store contract (Outline)
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Part D said what Outline is for but never how to build against it —
the only external integration with no A-series component, while
Transport, LLM, Browser, Secrets, SSO and Logging all have one. A17
supplies the contract.

Settled here:

- Sharing is read access, never write access. Every document has
  exactly one writer, so concurrent writers never exist and Part D's
  last-write-wins objection disposes of itself. Default shared
  membership is operator + nisse-ops; nisse-dev gets private space
  only, since B3 seals it from the LAN and a shared network map is a
  map of what it is sealed from
- Agent-owned knowledge is always a cache, never authority: rely on
  it to know what exists and where to look, verify a specific fact
  against the live system before acting on it
- Enforcement is structural, because a prompt is not enforcement. A
  model cannot be stopped from believing what it reads, so the
  enforceable goal is narrower — an unverified belief must not become
  an irreversible action — and four mechanisms carry it, leaning
  hardest on surfacing provenance at the human gate that C2 already
  requires
- Never an instruction channel and never an approval channel, stated
  both here and in A4 where approvals are specified
- Corrections flow through transport rather than direct edits, which
  is better provenance: a hand edit is invisible to the agent's
  record, an instruction is authenticated, logged, and reconcilable.
  Break-glass reuses Part F's idle flag
- Retrieved content is snapshotted into the canonical log, since A10
  forbids a mutable provider handle being the only reference — with
  the A3 consequence that boot must re-fetch snapshots for resumed
  tasks
- Outage posture is asymmetric: write failures never block, but a
  failed read of a procedure bound to a confirm-first action gates,
  because proceeding is acting unconstrained on exactly the operation
  someone wrote a procedure for

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 19:20:43 +00:00
dongar d8d37b5441 Merge pull request 'Add the delegation harness (A13) — step 7b' (#21) from delegation into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#21
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 00:47:08 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 af9bdaac8d Stop CI running two suites at once, and retry rate limits
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CI failed on the delegation branch with a 429 from the proxy: token
limit 200000, 17399 remaining. Not a defect — the live delegation
tests are token-hungry, and every push to a PR branch fired two
identical suites concurrently, since the push and pull_request events
both matched.

- Push now only triggers on main. A PR branch is already covered by
  the pull_request event, so this halves both the wall time and the
  tokens spent per branch
- A 429 is retried once before being surfaced. Losing a ten-turn
  delegation to a transient limit wastes far more than waiting out
  the window, and retrying forever would hide a real ceiling. The
  sleep is injectable, so the existing 429 test no longer waits 20
  seconds for real

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 00:18:32 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 53ed11f9c4 Add the delegation harness (A13) — step 7b
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A frontier model receives a scoped sub-task, works autonomously with
full tool access, and hands back; the local loop reads the handback
note and the file state, never the reasoning.

- Branch at delegation start, and abort discards it. That required
  committing each turn's work onto the branch: without commits,
  deleting a branch discards nothing, so "abort discards the work"
  was a comforting phrase rather than a fact. The caller's own
  in-flight changes are committed to their branch first, so an abort
  cannot destroy work nobody delegated
- Hard caps on turns and wall clock; a breach is a defined failure
  return, and its result is not usable, so the caller gates rather
  than resuming on a half-edited tree
- Every event is checkpointed as it arrives, so a crash mid-delegation
  leaves the branch at a known commit and a truthful transcript
- Handback is validated locally: blank fields or a non-boolean success
  flag are refused and the delegation continues rather than accepting
  a useless note

Two failure modes found by running it against a real model:

- A success claim with nothing changed was accepted. The handback plus
  file state is the entire interface back, so a note describing work
  that does not exist is worse than no note. Success now requires a
  successful mutating tool call; reporting failure still does not,
  since "this is impossible" is a legitimate finding
- The delegate invented the absolute path /workspace, wrote there, ran
  its tests there, and handed back truthfully — with the repo empty
  and git seeing nothing. Writes outside the workspace are now refused
  with a message naming the real root, and both prompts state where
  the workspace is instead of leaving the model to guess. This is not
  sandboxing: work outside the repo is invisible to git, so the
  milestone would publish an empty PR

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 00:14:24 +00:00
dongar 1c8e7e35fc Merge pull request 'Add the Anthropic passthrough renderer and client (A10/A13) — step 7a' (#20) from anthropic-renderer into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#20
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-08 00:01:30 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 f4a94281ef Add the Anthropic passthrough renderer and client (A10/A13) — 7a
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The second renderer adapter, and the concrete case for A13's decision
to normalise in the renderer rather than on the wire. The two vendors
disagree structurally, not cosmetically: the system prompt is a
top-level field rather than a message, a tool call is a tool_use
content block rather than an array, a tool result is a block inside a
user message rather than a "tool" role, and tool schemas use
input_schema rather than parameters. A middlebox flattening those
would be lossy exactly where a long-running delegation lives.

- render_anthropic.py builds vendor-native /v1/messages bodies from
  the canonical log, coalescing adjacent same-role blocks so a
  tool_result lands directly after its tool_use
- Tool manifests are declared once in OpenAI shape and converted per
  vendor, so adding a tool does not mean editing two places
- AnthropicPassthroughClient implements the same LLMClient protocol,
  so callers pick a route rather than a different kind of client, and
  maps provider tool ids to canonical ones at the boundary
- Dangling tool calls get a placeholder result here too; this API
  rejects them more strictly than the OpenAI shape
- Vendor-opaque reasoning blocks are dropped for now with the reason
  recorded: A10 wants them stored and never replayed across sessions,
  and the canonical schema has no event for that yet

Live tests prove the body is accepted as sent, that a tool_result
turn round-trips, and — as A5 asks — that prompt cache accounting
survives the passthrough rather than being flattened by the proxy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 23:13:22 +00:00
dev-agent 1f292793c1 Merge pull request 'Record default-branch protection as a B2 requirement' (#19) from b2-branch-protection into main
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2026-09-07 22:55:22 +00:00
dev-agent f03c201729 Merge pull request 'Add PR comment intake and the review loop (B2) — step 6b' (#17) from review-loop into main
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2026-09-07 22:55:11 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 886cb80583 Count only mutating tools as evidence of work
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The previous fix challenged a completion claim made before any tool
call, but treated every tool as work — so a model that ran one
list_dir and then declared the milestone done was believed, and CI
caught the same empty milestone again.

Reading a file or listing a directory is the model orienting itself.
Only write_file and run_command now count, so a completion claim must
be backed by something that changed or verified the tree.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 22:53:20 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 846e5494ca Record default-branch protection as a B2 requirement
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B2 specified the service account and its scoped token but never said
the project repo's default branch must be protected — which turns out
to be the load-bearing part of the PR gate.

In Gitea, write access includes merging pull requests, and repository
ownership does not restrict merging either. So an agent with the
access it needs to push branches can also merge its own PR, and the
review gate holds only because the agent's code does not call the
merge endpoint. That is the advisory guarantee A4 exists to rule out.

Verified rather than assumed: before protection was configured, the
agent's own token merged its own PR (HTTP 200). With protection it is
refused (405), as is a direct push to the default branch. The
amendment says to assert both, so relaxing the protection later fails
a test instead of silently removing the gate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 22:48:42 +00:00
dongar 8f365263c4 Merge pull request 'Externalise plans to Gitea and accept approvals there (A4, Part H)' (#18) from gitea-approvals into review-loop
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#18
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-07 22:47:40 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 acee8b96f0 Do not believe a completion claim before any work was done
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CI caught the executor recording an empty milestone as a success: the
model answered with prose on its first turn, and the loop reads "no
tool call" as "the plan is done". It had therefore finished a
milestone having touched nothing, and the milestone would have gone
on to publish with no changes.

A completion claim is now challenged once when no tool has been
called yet — the same shape as the planner's nudge — and a model that
persists escalates instead of reporting success. After the first tool
call the claim is taken at face value, as before.

The live milestone test failed roughly one run in five on this; four
consecutive runs pass now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 22:19:15 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 d508e9a9b7 Externalise plans to Gitea and accept approvals there (A4, Part H)
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- approvals.py: PlanBoard opens one issue per project and posts each
  plan revision as a comment carrying its rev tag. The state store
  keeps only a pointer, so gate state can be re-derived from Gitea
  after a state-volume loss — external truth wins
- Gitea comments are a second approval source: revision binding, the
  typed word approve, and first-approval-wins work exactly as over
  transport, with a per-channel allowlist because a Gitea login is
  not a Matrix MXID
- Outcomes are echoed to the other channel, so the two records cannot
  silently disagree about what was approved
- A Gitea outage degrades durability of the record, not the ability
  to approve: planning proceeds and Matrix remains a complete channel
- Live test now asserts the server refuses the agent's own merge and
  its push to the protected branch. That property was previously
  true only because our code did not attempt it; branch protection
  makes it structural, and this test fails if the protection is ever
  relaxed
- Fixed a race in the process-group test: killing a group is
  asynchronous and the grandchild is an orphan, so its exit is not
  synchronised with our return; the test now waits for death

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 22:15:08 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 affdb9e8aa Add PR comment intake and the review loop (B2) — step 6b
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- poller.py: CommentPoller polls PR comments rather than taking
  webhooks, keeping the VM outbound-only (B3). On an outage it backs
  off exponentially, caps, and retries indefinitely while logging:
  polling is pure intake, so an outage delays a reaction but never
  fails a task or forces a transition
- prime() marks the existing thread as seen without delivering it, so
  starting a watch does not re-address feedback already handled
- Review loop: a comment in PR_OPEN enters the canonical transcript,
  the executor responds, and the fix is pushed to the same branch with
  a reply on the PR. No intent is recorded for a follow-up push — the
  PR already exists, so a repeated push is harmless, unlike opening a
  second PR
- Comment authors are checked against a separate Gitea operator
  allowlist: a PR comment is an instruction channel into an agent that
  writes code, so it is operator-scoped, and a Gitea login is not a
  Matrix MXID (A4 per-channel allowlists)
- Orchestrator now holds a lock: transport and the poller deliver on
  separate threads, and state transitions must not interleave
- Backoff timings are injectable, so the outage path is tested in
  milliseconds instead of being untestable

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 21:59:50 +00:00
dongar 914bc26221 Merge pull request 'Publish finished milestones as PRs (B2/A3) — step 6a, part 2' (#16) from pr-open into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#16
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-07 20:45:57 +00:00
dongar 3b1b84162a Merge pull request 'Add a manual CI trigger (workflow_dispatch)' (#15) from ci-scheduled into main
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Reviewed-on: dongar/nisse#15
Reviewed-by: Don Garrett <dgarrett@acm.org>
2026-09-07 20:44:48 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 3117565928 Publish finished milestones as PRs (B2/A3) — step 6a, part 2
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Completes the B1 loop past EXECUTING, and answers the question raised
reviewing #6: PR acceptance is a milestone's final gate, so there is
no separate FINISHED state — completion returns to milestone planning
or to IDLE.

- publish.py: MilestonePublisher commits the work on a task-namespaced
  branch, pushes, and opens a PR carrying the approved plan. Intent is
  recorded before the first externally visible act, so a crash
  anywhere in the sequence leaves a durable record and boot
  reconciliation asks Gitea whether the PR exists rather than opening
  a second one
- Nothing to commit is reported, not raised: the executor may
  legitimately conclude there was nothing to change
- control.py: PR_OPEN state with EXECUTING -> PR_OPEN and
  PR_OPEN -> {MILESTONE_PLANNING, IDLE}; operator commands
  'next milestone' and 'project complete'
- A configured publisher always contributes its own reconciler at
  boot, so an interrupted publish is settled against external truth
  without the caller having to remember to register it
- A publish failure gates to the operator rather than retrying into a
  possible duplicate

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:43:20 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 4d0b24794b Drop the scheduled run, keep the manual trigger
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Operator does not want nightly or weekly runs. Pushes to main already
cover code changes, so the remaining addition is workflow_dispatch: a
manual re-run for after a credential rotation or a budget top-up,
which also retires the empty-commit trick used to pick up new secrets.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:40:12 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 3e664984ac Run CI nightly and on manual dispatch
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Pushes to main already trigger a full run, so code changes were
covered. What was not: the live tests depend on external state that
drifts with no commit at all — the LiteLLM budget filling up, a model
withdrawn from the proxy, a token revoked or expired. A nightly run
against the default branch surfaces that the morning it happens
instead of mid-task.

workflow_dispatch adds a manual trigger, which also removes the need
for the empty-commit trick used earlier to pick up new secrets.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:38:06 +00:00
dev-agent 4025ac7875 Merge pull request 'Add executor tool loop (A12/A15) — step 5b' (#12) from executor-loop into main
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2026-09-07 20:35:33 +00:00
dev-agent 1ebd2a9988 Merge pull request 'Add Gitea client and git operations (B2) — step 6a, part 1' (#14) from gitea-client into main
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2026-09-07 20:35:17 +00:00
dev-agent ad45e33517 Merge pull request 'Assert the live Matrix tests run as a testing identity' (#13) from matrix-identity-guard into main
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2026-09-07 20:35:09 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 8dd5e3eb15 Page to the end when searching for an existing PR
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find_pull_request read only the newest 50 per state, so once a repo
passed that many pull requests a "not found" would mean "not in the
newest page" — and the A3 reconciler would read that as "the PR was
never opened" and open a duplicate. Exactly the side effect the
intent log exists to prevent.

It now pages until a short page proves the end, and raises rather
than answering "absent" from an incomplete search; the reconciler
turns that into unverifiable and gates to the human.

Found while wiring CI: every CI run opens a PR in the sandbox, so the
threshold would have been crossed in weeks rather than never.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:31:31 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 2071e6ab6d Add Gitea client and git operations (B2) — step 6a, part 1
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The standalone half of the Gitea layer; orchestrator wiring follows
once the executor loop lands, to avoid colliding with it in
control.py.

- gitea.py: GiteaClient over httpx — open PRs, list and post issue
  comments, close PRs. find_pull_request is the A3 external-truth
  query that makes opening a PR idempotent across a crash, and it
  checks closed PRs too, since a crash after opening must not be
  answered with "nothing is open, so open another"
- pull_request_reconciler: an unreachable Gitea returns None rather
  than a guess, so the agent gates to the human instead of risking a
  duplicate side effect
- git.py: branch, commit, push for the workspace. The token is passed
  per-invocation rather than stored as a remote, so it never lands in
  .git/config, and anything raised is scrubbed of it
- commit_all returns None when there is nothing to commit: an empty
  milestone is a fact to report, not an error
- Live test does the real round trip against the sandbox repo and
  cleans up after itself

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:27:34 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 e04d786840 Assert the live Matrix tests run as a testing identity
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Two invariants only a live homeserver can check, now enforced rather
than verified by hand:

- The configured NISSE_MATRIX_USER_ID must be the token's real owner.
  MatrixTransport filters its own messages by comparing sender to that
  value, so a mismatch would make the bot read its own posts as
  operator input.
- The account must be a testing identity, so a stray live run can
  never act as the production agent.

Both hold today; this keeps them holding when the production
nisse-dev account is created.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 20:16:18 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 bacf65dbe2 Fix AWAIT_INPUT deadlock and make the live milestone test robust
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Found while chasing a flaky live test, but the flakiness was a real
bug: only the ask_human path recorded a pending item, so AWAIT_INPUT
reached any other way — planning failure, stopped milestone, boot
reconciliation — refused every operator reply with "no pending
question to answer" and the agent could never be recovered. The
operator had no way back short of wiping state.

Every path into AWAIT_INPUT now records what a reply should resume,
and answering dispatches on it: planning failures and questions
resume planning, a stopped milestone returns to its still-approved
gate, and the fallback says what commands work instead of
dead-ending. Two regression tests cover the recovery paths.

The live test also scripted a fixed approve/approve/start sequence,
which a real model breaks by legitimately calling ask_human at a
gate. It now plays the operator adaptively, responding to whatever
the agent actually did. Five consecutive live runs pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 16:46:07 +00:00
dongarandClaude Opus 5 999a38a705 Fix process-group kill test to work without an init process
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os.kill(pid, 0) succeeds on a zombie, and a killed orphan stays a
zombie until reaped — which never happens inside a CI container with
no init. The test read that as "still alive" and failed there while
passing locally. It now reads the process state from /proc, with a
control assertion so a broken liveness check cannot pass silently.
The group kill itself was correct.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-07 16:37:38 +00:00