home-network-k3s-impl/platform/pm-agent

pm-agent — an AI Program Manager that turns Gitea issues into pull requests

A service that runs in the cluster, reads the issues of Home-Network/home-network-k3s-impl, decides what to do about each thread as the Program Manager persona this repository already works under, and runs one worker agent per assignment that authors the change, runs the merge gate and opens a pull request.

It reacts to issue creation and to comments on issues. Every assignment and every piece of correspondence travels through the issue thread and the pull request, so the whole record of what the agent did, and why, is in the same place a human is already looking.

It never pushes to main and never merges a pull request. The merge gate remains the approver, and a sensitive-path change still needs the human review ci/approval-policy.sh requires.

Design, alternatives considered, threat model	docs/plans/pm-agent-issue-to-pr.md
Operator runbook — stopping it, reading its logs, rotating its tokens	runbooks/pm-agent.md
The image, the two entrypoints, the PM persona	infra/agent/
The security boundary	platform/kyverno/admission/pm-agent-job-shape.yaml

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Why the agent authenticates to Gitea with a local account and a PAT

Not Keycloak, and that is a decision rather than an omission (operator, 2026-10-06): the agents only ever talk to Gitea, so a local Gitea account with a scoped personal access token is the whole requirement, and it is drastically simpler than federating a machine identity.

It is also what Gitea can actually do. Keycloak service accounts were considered and are not available for this: Gitea's API accepts basic auth, PATs, SSH signatures and its own OAuth2 bearer tokens, and as an OAuth2 provider Gitea implements only the Authorization Code Grant — there is no client-credentials grant, and nothing in Gitea validates a token issued by a third-party OIDC provider. So a Keycloak service-account token cannot authenticate to Gitea's API or to git-over-HTTP at all. Keycloak remains what it is for human access: the browser login source registered on Gitea (catalog/gitea.yaml).

What still matters, and is enforced by the hand-off rather than by Keycloak: the account must not be an administrator — infra/gitea/approval-policy.json authorises /approve-override on live repository permission alone, so an admin-permission bot could waive the sensitive-path human review on its own pull request.

It does nothing at all until an operator does two things

Both are deliberate, and both fail visibly rather than silently:

1. The image is published by CI, not by a person. platform/pm-agent/deployment.yaml and PM_WORKER_IMAGE in configmap.yaml first carried the run-340 publish (sha-523cd9118f95), whose baked template predated the imagePullSecrets entry admission requires, so the service ran with PM_DRY_RUN=true. PR #96 pinned the run-383 digest (df36d9b, sha-ddd04d460ef6), whose template carries the entry, and dry run was turned off on 2026-10-31 (decisions/2026-10-31-pm-agent-go-live.md); every later bump is Renovate's. .gitea/workflows/images.yaml builds agent-runner on rootless BuildKit (platform/buildkit/) — the same Containerfile, and the same verify stage, that infra/agent/build-image.sh builds locally — and on a push to main publishes it to gitea.home.keithjackson.dev/home-network/agent-runner under sha-<commit> and main. Renovate then follows the main tag through the # renovate-digest: marker above both lines and moves them together in one pull request. Nobody builds-and-pushes this image from a workstation. The one operator prerequisite on the publishing side is the REGISTRY_PUSH_TOKEN Actions secret (see the header of .gitea/workflows/images.yaml); without it the publish job fails loudly rather than skipping.

   Two things have to be true before any digest will pull, and neither is declared in this repository. Both were measured after PR #57 merged — this service is the first workload in the cluster ever to reference the in-cluster registry, so nothing had exercised the path. Details and the exact commands: decisions/2026-10-05-pm-agent-registry-pull-prereq.md.

   • The nodes resolve the registry hostname to the WAN, so the TLS they fail to verify is the router's — DIAGNOSED 2026-10-06, and fixed in this change. containerd pulls as a node process, so it resolves through the node's public upstreams (node_baseline_dns_servers = the LAN gateway) rather than through Pi-hole. The public answer for every name in this zone is a CNAME to wan.home.keithjackson.dev — the WAN IP — which this router does not hairpin; it answers :443 with its own placeholder certificate CN=%D carrying no extensions, therefore no SANs, which is precisely x509: certificate is not valid for any names. The Gateway, the wildcard certificate and the digest were never implicated. The fix is the pin this repository already uses for the Keycloak issuer, for the identical reason: gitea.{{ k3s_base_domain }} is now in node_baseline_hosts_pins — node configuration is Ansible's, declared in the inventory, never typed on a node. Apply it scoped to that one task: cd infra/ansible && ansible-playbook playbooks/node-baseline.yml -e k3s_hosts=k3s_prod --tags hosts.
   • The pull must be authenticated once the node reaches the right endpoint: an unauthenticated client gets nothing from this registry. Now wired — pm-agent-registry is a dockerconfigjson Secret referenced by both the Deployment and the committed worker Job template, and the admission policy pins it to exactly that name. What is left to you is the value: the Gitea token must carry read:package in addition to read:user, write:repository and write:issue, and the dockerconfigjson is built from it. Steps: pm-agent-registry.sops.yaml.example.

   The same two apply to conformance-runner: same registry path, same publish-then-Renovate model, never pulled either.

2. The credentials are placeholders — two Secrets, one token. Both are encrypted to the repository's age recipient and both hold REPLACE-ME-… strings:

   Secret	type	read by	hand-off
   pm-agent-credentials	Opaque	the application, as env	.example
   pm-agent-registry	dockerconfigjson	the kubelet, before any container starts	.example

   They hold the same Gitea token in two formats, because a Secret cannot be both — the same one-value-in-two-files pattern the Keycloak client secret already uses here. So mint it once, with all four scopes: read:package (the pull), read:user (the dispatcher's startup GET /user — Gitea 1.24.3 scopes the whole /user group), write:repository (clone, branch push, pull request) and write:issue (issue comments). The account also needs package permission, not just the scope: a pm-agent-pull org team with Packages = Read and no repositories (steps in the registry .example). The first .example explains which account to create and why it must not be an administrator.

   Until they are filled in: the pull fails 401, and if you fix only the pull, the dispatcher CrashLoops with GET /user returned no login — is GITEA_TOKEN valid?.

Its Flux Kustomization is wait: false precisely because of those two states: a workload that is expected to be unhealthy for a while must never be able to gate anything.

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How it works

                   ┌──────────────────────── pm-agent namespace ─────────────────────────┐
                   │                                                                     │
  Gitea issue  ───▶│  pm-dispatch (1 replica, Recreate)                                  │
  (poll, 60s)      │    1. list open issues                                              │
                   │    2. act iff the NEWEST thing in the thread is not mine            │
                   │    3. ask the model, under the PM persona, with NO tools             │
                   │       → {action, branch, brief, comment}                            │
                   │    4. validate it, then: create the Job, then post the comment      │
                   │                        │                                            │
                   │                        ▼                                            │
                   │  pm-worker (one Job per assignment, no SA token, read-only rootfs)   │
                   │    clone → branch → read the live thread → Claude Code session →     │
                   │    ./ci/gate.sh → commit → push → open the PR → comment on the issue│
                   └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
          egress: gitea:3000 · kube-apiserver (dispatcher only) · tcp/443 · DNS.  ingress: none.

There is no database and no PVC. The trigger is a question asked of the issue thread itself — act iff the newest thing in this thread was not written by me — and since the PM always answers in the thread, acting makes the thread quiet again until a human (or a worker) says something else. The Gitea thread is the state. It survives restarts with no recovery path to get wrong, it is readable by the operator in the place they already look, and it creates no R-STATE-03 obligation for irreplaceable state.

It polls; it does not receive webhooks. Gitea's webhook SSRF guard ([webhook] ALLOWED_HOST_LIST) does not by default permit calling a private in-cluster address, a missed delivery is simply lost, and a receiver would need inbound reach into a namespace whose entire purpose is running model-authored code. The cost is up to 60s of latency. The full argument is in the header of infra/agent/pm-dispatch.py.

The PM holds no tools. It runs claude --print --tools "" against a JSON schema: text in, one JSON object out, no Bash, no file access, no network of its own. The dispatcher then validates every field — the action against a fixed set, the branch against CLAUDE.md §4's pattern, revise against the branch that actually carries the issue's work — and builds the Job from a committed template. The model's output is data, never a command.

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What the worker can and cannot do

can	change any file in its own clone; run any command in the container; run the gate; read the issue thread and the pull requests
can	push one branch (the one the PM named, validated twice against ^(feat|fix|docs|chore)/…) and open/update its pull request
can	post comments on its own issue
cannot	push to main — refused by pm-worker before anything runs, and by branch protection regardless
cannot	merge anything — the gate is the approver, and the service makes no merge call
cannot	reach the Kubernetes API: no ServiceAccount token is mounted, the pm-agent-worker identity is bound to nothing, and the egress policy does not include the API server. kubectl is on its PATH (the gate's toolchain needs it) and is inert
cannot	reach anything except this Gitea and tcp/443 — no package registry, no GitHub
cannot	clone from or push to anywhere but gitea.gitea.svc.cluster.local:3000: pm-worker validates PM_GITEA_URL against a one-entry allowlist baked into the image. In-cluster consumers reach a service by its cluster-local name — a different path by design from how a client outside the cluster reaches it — so the external hostname is not an accepted value
cannot	authenticate a git push during the model session: GIT_ASKPASS is unset for its duration, so the restriction is structural rather than a request in a prompt
cannot	be created in any shape but the committed one — see the admission policy
cannot	have the kubelet read any Secret but pm-agent-registry on its behalf: imagePullSecrets is pinned to exactly that one name

What is not defended, stated plainly

• The worker's own credentials are inside the model's reach. The session runs as the same uid in the same container as the wrapper, so it can read the environment, including its GITEA_TOKEN and CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN. There is no isolation between them and none is claimed. What bounds it: the Gitea token is scoped read:user, write:repository, write:issue, read:package on one repository with no admin permission, and egress reaches only this Gitea and tcp/443.
• world:443 is wider than api.anthropic.com. Cilium can express the tighter rule (toFQDNs) but nothing in this repository uses FQDN policy and its prerequisite (Cilium's DNS proxy) has not been measured here. Narrowing it is a tracked follow-up with that measurement as its first step, not a one-line edit.
• A write collaborator in Gitea can merge a pull request. No token scope separates "push a branch and open a PR" from "merge it". The service issues no merge call — that is all of pm-worker's API calls, readable in one file — but it is a property of the code, not of the credential. What the non-admin permission does buy structurally is that the bot cannot post /approve-override, so a sensitive-path pull request from the agent correctly sits unmergeable until a human reviews it.
• The PM cannot see the repository. It triages from the thread alone, so its brief is a belief about where the work lives, not a verified fact — which is why the persona requires it to say so, and why the worker is told to investigate before changing anything.
• Nothing here has run. Everything in this directory is authored and gate-checked offline. No part of this service has been built, pushed, deployed or observed; see the handoff entry's "What I did NOT verify".

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The escalation this service is built around

Kubernetes places no use check on a Pod's serviceAccountName. So "may create Jobs in namespace X" is equivalent to "may run arbitrary code as the most privileged identity in namespace X" — no matter how narrow the creator's own Role looks. The dispatcher creates Jobs. That is the whole problem, and this repository has met it before (conformance/incluster/rbac.yaml).

Two things answer it, and neither is sufficient alone:

1. There is nothing to escalate to. pm-agent-worker is bound to no Role at all, and the Job template mounts no token. The prize is empty.
2. The shape is constrained at the API server. platform/kyverno/admission/pm-agent-job-shape.yaml is Enforce + failurePolicy: Fail and admits only: the digest-pinned agent-runner image, exactly one container, the pinned command with no args, that powerless SA, no mounted token, restartPolicy: Never, non-root with no privilege escalation and a read-only root filesystem, only the workspace/tmp emptyDir volumes, no init or ephemeral containers, only the committed env names, no envFrom, and exactly one imagePullSecret — the committed one.

Seven rules, because pinning command only moves the injection to whatever adjacent field nobody enumerated — on the sibling policy that was initContainers (measured: a Job with a compliant containers[0] and a privileged init container was admitted, pass 3 fail 0), then ephemeralContainers, then env, then envFrom. All of them are closed here from the start, and platform/kyverno/tests/pm-agent/ proves each refusal offline: 33 assertions, 33 passing under the pinned kyverno CLI. The worker's own input guards have their own offline probe — infra/agent/probe-validation.sh, 17 refusals — because a guard nothing exercises is a claim rather than a control.

The policy is applied by platform-config/kustomization.yaml, and it has to be: adding a ClusterPolicy only to platform/kyverno/admission/kustomization.yaml is a silent no-op. That is exactly how the conformance boundary shipped green and never reached the cluster on 2026-09-29.

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Operating it

Every knob is in configmap.yaml, with the reasoning next to it. The five that matter:

knob	default	what it is for
PM_REQUIRE_LABEL	"" (every open issue)	set it to agent and only issues a human has labelled are in scope. Recommended for the first weeks — it bounds the agent to work somebody deliberately handed it, with no code change
PM_DRY_RUN	false	still triages and still posts what it would have done; creates no worker. The honest way to watch it for a day
PM_MAX_ACTIVE_WORKERS	2	concurrent workers. RAM is the binding constraint (2Gi limit each) and the subscription seat's rate limits are shared with every other use of that seat
PM_MAX_NEW_WORKERS_PER_CYCLE	1	drains a backlog one issue at a time instead of in one stampede the first minute the credentials work
PM_PUSH_ON_RED_GATE	false	a change the gate refused is not pushed; the issue gets the gate log instead
PM_DECISION_MAX_TURNS	1 (unset)	turns the triage call may take (1–5). The PM holds no tools, so a second turn is only ever the CLI re-asking after an answer that failed the decision schema. Raise it if a triage error logs subtype='error_max_turns'

When a triage fails, the [error] issue #N: claude exited … line carries the CLI's result envelope (subtype, is_error, api_error_status, num_turns, result) and the tails of stdout and stderr, redacted. Before 2026-10-31 it logged stderr only, which is empty under --output-format json — see decisions/2026-10-31-pm-agent-triage-exit.md.

Changing a knob requires bumping the config-generation annotation in deployment.yaml in the same commit — the process reads its configuration once, at startup, so without the bump the ConfigMap changes and nothing does. (Same class of defect as the inert merged cilium-config: decisions/2026-10-05-cilium-roll-out-on-config-change.md.)

To stop it, in increasing severity: PM_DRY_RUN, scale to zero, suspend the Kustomization, or revoke the Gitea token. Step-by-step in runbooks/pm-agent.md.