home-network-k3s-impl/CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md — how work lands in this repo

Read this before doing anything durable. It is the delivery contract for AI coding sessions and agents. DECISIONS-LOG.md's last entry is the current PM handoff and takes precedence on what to work on; this file governs how it lands.

1. Never push to main. Ever.

Every durable change reaches main exactly one way:

branch  ->  push the branch  ->  open a PR  ->  CI gate green  ->  human approval  ->  merge

There is no other path. Specifically:

• Do not git push origin main.
• Do not git push origin HEAD:main. Same thing wearing a hat.
• Do not merge your own PR. A human approves and clicks merge.
• Do not kubectl apply / edit / patch a durable change. Flux reconciles main; anything applied by hand is drift that the next reconcile reverts or, worse, adopts.

Many runbooks under runbooks/ still say git push origin main IS the deploy. That wording is stale — it predates the PR flow. It describes what Flux does (main is what the cluster follows), not what you are permitted to do. Honour this file, not that line. Fixing those runbooks is tracked work.

2. Enforcement is currently WEAKER than this rule. Follow the rule anyway.

Verified against the live Gitea on 2026-09-29:

Expected	Actual
main protected, direct push rejected	No branch protection. protected: false, user_can_push: true
PR blocked until the gate passes	enable_status_check: false, status_check_contexts: []
Gate runs on every PR	Fixed 2026-09-29. Runner incluster-dind is online; gate / gate (pull_request) runs and passes in ~1m30s–2m
Approval required before merge	required_approvals: 0

So nothing mechanically stops you from pushing to main right now. That is a gap being closed, not permission. DECISIONS-LOG.md (2026-08-31) claimed the gate was a "required status check" with a runner online; neither was true, which is how this went unnoticed for a month. The runner half is now genuinely fixed and observed green. The protection half is not — see infra/gitea/.

Consequence for you: CI now runs, but it does not yet block anything. Always run the toolbox gate yourself and quote its numbers. Never describe a PR as "green" on the strength of a check you have not seen report — and note that a skipped Gitea job reports as success, so a green tick is not by itself evidence that anything ran.

2b. Never infer platform state from this repository

This repo is not evidence about the live platform. Neither is DECISIONS-LOG.md. Both describe what someone believed at the time of writing, and both have been confidently wrong for a month at a stretch.

On 2026-09-29 the log stated the merge gate was a required status check with a runner online. The API said branch_protections: [] and zero runners. Everything downstream of that belief — "the gate enforces this", "your push would be rejected", "CI covers it" — was wrong, and nothing in the tree could have revealed it, because the tree was the source of the error.

So, before asserting that any gate, protection, runner, secret, or workload is in a given state: query the thing itself.

Claim about...	Check
branch protection / required checks	GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/branches/main
a runner exists	GET /api/v1/admin/actions/runners
CI actually ran	the commit's /statuses — and read the description; a skipped Gitea job reports success with "Has been skipped"
a workload / Secret / env	kubectl --context k3s-prod ... (read-only is fine for agents)
Flux applied your commit	compare .status.lastAppliedRevision against the GitRepository's artifact revision

Quote the measured field, not the prose. If you cannot measure it, say so explicitly — "unverified" is a legitimate report, and a far better one than a confident guess that matches the docs.

A green tick is not proof anything ran. Read what actually executed.

3. Gate before you push

./infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c './ci/gate.sh'

Exit codes are a contract — do not flatten them:

rc	Meaning
0	PASS
1	BLOCKED — something failed
3	UNDETERMINED — a stage did not run. Never report this as green.

spec-immutability reaches rc 3 whenever the sibling spec repo is not checked out beside this one; that single skip is expected and tolerated. Any other skip is a real gap in your run.

Never gate on the host. promtool and kustomize are not on the host $PATH, so checks SKIP and you get a false rc 3. Only the pinned toolbox result counts.

Running the gate from a git worktree

Two unrelated failures, both with known workarounds — put both in any agent brief:

1. dev.sh refuses to start: infra/ansible/.cache/prod.kubeconfig is untracked and exists only in the main checkout. Do not copy it (it is a credential). Use DEV_KUBECONFIG=/dev/null — the gate contacts no cluster, so L2/L3 scaffold-skip normally.
2. Every git call inside the container fails: a worktree's .git is a pointer to a gitdir outside the mounted root. dev.sh takes no extra-mount flag, so inject one via the ENGINE hook — a shim that intercepts run and re-execs podman run -v /path/to/main/.git:/path/to/main/.git:ro "$@". A traceback in tracked_files() is this bug, not a broken tree.

4. Branch naming

Use feat/, fix/, docs/, chore/. Note that .gitea/workflows/gate.yml's push trigger lists feature/** — not feat/** — so branch pushes get no fast-feedback run. The pull_request trigger fires regardless of branch name, so the PR gate is unaffected.

5. Cluster access

kubectl does not work on the operator workstation; the toolchain lives only in the pinned container. Always name the context explicitly:

./infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c 'kubectl --context k3s-prod get nodes'

dev.sh merges both clusters and picks a current-context per invocation; that default has already changed once. Never rely on it. Do not run two dev.sh invocations concurrently.

Mutating kubectl and flux reconcile are operator actions, not agent actions.

6. Secrets

• Never sops -d a file into a terminal, a log, or a transcript.
• Never print a Secret's .data/.stringData when checking whether it exists — list key names or object names only. A password has been leaked into a transcript this way before.
• Encrypted files are *.sops.yaml or live under secrets/. The root .sops.yaml is the single creation-rules file; do not add a second one in a subtree.
• A short-lived credential (e.g. a plex.tv claim token, ~minutes) cannot survive the PR flow. Do not design around committing one — read the expiry from the issuing page and treat a burnt token as free to retry.

7. Before you finish

Append a handoff entry to DECISIONS-LOG.md describing what you changed, what you verified, and what you did not verify. State gaps plainly — an honest "UNVERIFIED" is worth more than an optimistic "green", and this repo has already been burned by the difference.