The 2026-09-29 session found the merge gate did not exist -- no branch protection, no
runner -- while the tree asserted both. This corrects the documents that carried, and in
several cases CAUSED, that belief.
CLAUDE.md gains section 2b: never infer platform state from this repository. It carries
the specific API and kubectl checks for protection, runners, CI status, workloads and
Flux revisions, and the rule that a green tick is not proof anything ran (a skipped Gitea
job reports success). This is the rule whose absence produced every other finding.
.gitea/workflows/README.md and merge-gate.yaml both said "there is no remote git host,
this file is dormant". Gitea had been live for weeks. Both were written as plans and never
revisited once the plan completed. The Transition section is now marked COMPLETE and says
what is genuinely still outstanding (CLUSTER_AVAILABLE unset, so L2/L3 never runs in CI).
DECISIONS-LOG 2026-08-31 is annotated IN PLACE. Anyone reading chronologically previously
hit "required status check; runner incluster-dind online" with nothing marking it false
until a month later. The correction now sits on the bullet itself.
ci/README.md, clusters/README.md and both conformance READMEs carry a status banner: they
speak as though no cluster exists, which makes a live L2/L3 coverage gap read as an
expected phase. That framing is why the gap went unexamined.
apps/wave-1/gitea-actions-runner-secret.sops.yaml: fixed a wrong path, replaced advice to
`sops -d` into a terminal (which CLAUDE.md forbids) with the rotation script, and recorded
that a fresh token alone does not re-register a runner holding a stale /data/.runner.
apps/wave-0/plex-claim-secret.sops.yaml: the header claimed the file ships the placeholder.
It has not since the claim -- it holds the spent token, which is inert and deliberately
left in place.
catalog/plex.yaml and the plex secret both asserted a "~4-minute TTL" as fact. It was
uncited, upstream documents no expiry, and it was the basis for a since-disproven claim
that the pipeline was too slow to fit inside it. Measured: ~2m45s.
Both .sops.yaml files were verified to still decrypt after the comment edits
(`sops -d > /dev/null`), and render==golden confirms the catalog comment does not
propagate into the rendered manifest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
The committed apps/ goldens were a MIX of two render flag sets: 8 services
were rendered with `--no-image-automation` (no image CRs) while gitea and
nextcloud carried stale ImageRepository/ImagePolicy CRs from a render WITHOUT
the flag. Neither single command reproduced all goldens, and the gate did not
catch it.
Part A — canonical render:
python3 catalog/render.py --all catalog -o apps --wave-layout --no-image-automation
`--no-image-automation` is canonical: image automation is authored-but-DISABLED
(DECISIONS-LOG; image-reflector/-automation controllers not installed), and
every app was onboarded via this flag. Re-render drops the ImageRepository +
ImagePolicy objects from gitea + nextcloud only (52 line deletions, purely the
trailing image-automation blocks). No functional content changed — the
nextcloud postStart hardening and gitea OIDC hook are untouched.
Part B — enforcement:
ci/render-golden.sh renders every onboarded catalog service with the canonical
command into a temp dir and FAILS on ANY diff vs committed apps/ (missing
golden or content drift), across all 10 services (not just the 3 L1 spot-checks).
Not-onboarded catalog entries (keycloak, vm-demo) are excluded per DESIGN-waves.
Wired as a required no-cluster stage in ci/gate.sh, ci/Makefile, and both the
live (.gitea/workflows/gate.yml) and dormant (merge-gate.yaml) pipelines.
Proof: tampering a golden makes the stage exit 1 (blocks merge); reverting
restores exit 0. `make -C ci gate` green in the devcontainer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Phase 0 foundation shell (read-only spec at ../home-network-k3s). Top-level
tree + rules; workstream agents fill their subtrees on feature branches.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <[email protected]>