jakman85andClaude Opus 5
8059297036
Operator correction: "sop, wg, and any other tool requirement is supposed to be
baked into the devcontainer."
My previous commit discovered that `wg` existed only on the host, `sops` only in
the container, and `qrencode` on neither -- and fixed it the wrong way, by
splitting every step of the key procedure across the boundary and telling the
operator to `dnf install qrencode` on their workstation. That breaks CLAUDE.md §5
and the devcontainer README's "Don't install the toolchain on the host", produces
a procedure that cannot be reproduced in CI, and is miserable to follow.
wireguard-tools + qrencode are now distro packages in the Containerfile. Both are
in Fedora 44's repos (wireguard-tools 1.0.20260223 -- the same upstream version as
the image this component runs -- and qrencode 4.1.1), unpinned like every other
dnf package there: the pinned thing is the Fedora base, and neither is a gate tool
whose version changes what green means.
Three things got SIMPLER rather than merely relocated, which is the tell that the
rule was right:
* Step 2 is one pipeline in one shell -- `sops set ... "$(wg genkey)"` writes the
key straight into the already-encrypted document. No staged copy in .cache, no
`*.key`-suffix warning, no sha256 comparison to prove the right bytes landed.
* new-peer.sh derives the server public key from wg-server-key.sops.yaml itself
(`sops -d --extract | wg pubkey`), so there is no local key copy to keep in
step with the encrypted one, and no magic host path it must live at.
* `.cache/` is gitignored at the repo root (mirroring infra/ansible/.gitignore),
giving the container a persistent non-committable scratch dir. new-peer.sh
writes profiles to .cache/wg-peers/ -- necessary because the repo bind-mount is
the container's only persistent read-write mount, so a profile in /tmp there is
gone before it can reach a desktop. Its blanket "refuse to write inside the
checkout" guard is now a `git check-ignore` test of the real property.
Verified by execution, not reasoning: the image rebuilds; wg/qrencode/sops all
resolve in it; `sops -d | wg pubkey` runs in one shell; new-peer.sh refuses the
REPLACE-ME placeholder with an actionable message; and a full run with a throwaway
server key renders a correct profile at 0600 under a 0700 gitignored dir, prints
the QR, and refuses a non-ignored destination inside the repo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
decisions/ — the handoff log, one file per entry
This directory is the decision log. ../DECISIONS-LOG.md is the frozen archive of
everything written before 2026-09-29 and is never edited again (see "The archive is
frozen" below).
Why this exists
DECISIONS-LOG.md was append-only in a single file, and every agent appended to its
tail. Two branches that both append hit the same last hunk, so git cannot
auto-merge them: the second one to be reviewed conflicts, and so does the third, and
the fourth. Measured on 2026-09-29: four of the five open PRs were unmergeable, and
DECISIONS-LOG.md was the only conflicting file in all four:
#22 fix/crafty-oauth2-proxy-signin CONFLICT (content): DECISIONS-LOG.md
#20 feat/conformance-job-template CONFLICT (content): DECISIONS-LOG.md
#19 feat/conformance-trigger-kubeconfig CONFLICT (content): DECISIONS-LOG.md
#18 feat/conformance-runner-image CONFLICT (content): DECISIONS-LOG.md
#17 feat/ci-is-the-approver clean (it touched no log entry)
Nothing was wrong with any of those changes. The log's storage format serialised work that was otherwise parallel, and it got worse with every concurrent branch: N branches produce N-1 rebases, each of which invalidates any gate run that preceded it.
The fix is the obvious one for concurrent appenders: stop sharing a file. Each
handoff is its own file. Two agents writing handoffs touch disjoint paths, so there is
nothing for git to merge and nothing to conflict. This scales to any number of parallel
branches with zero coordination — which is the point, since the agents are deliberately
isolated from each other in separate worktrees (required by CLAUDE.md §0) and cannot
coordinate.
There is deliberately no index file and no counter. An index would be a shared
mutable file — exactly the thing that just failed — and a sequence number would have
two agents racing for 0043. The directory listing is the index.
Writing an entry
One file per handoff, named:
decisions/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md
<slug> is lowercase [a-z0-9-]. Use your branch name's last segment — it is
already unique per unit of work, which is precisely the property the filename needs.
A branch fix/crafty-oauth2-proxy-signin handed off on 2026-09-29 writes:
decisions/2026-09-29-crafty-oauth2-proxy-signin.md
The file is YAML frontmatter followed by three required sections:
---
date: 2026-09-29
branch: fix/crafty-oauth2-proxy-signin
title: The Keycloak gate works — Crafty's own login was the wall
---
## What changed
Prose. What you actually did, and why.
## What I verified
The measurements, with their numbers. Quote the field you read, not the prose you
believed. Name the gate result and its exit code.
## What I did NOT verify
Everything else. An honest "UNVERIFIED" is worth more than an optimistic "green" —
this repo has been burned by the difference more than once.
All three headings are required and enforced (ci/decisions-log.sh). They are
CLAUDE.md §7's contract; making them a checked structure is what stops an entry
degrading into "done ✅".
Reading the log
The whole log, oldest first:
ls decisions/[0-9]*.md | sort
The current PM handoff — the newest entry. Ties within a day are broken by what landed
on main last, which is the honest answer, so ask git rather than the filename:
git log --diff-filter=A --format='%H' --name-only -- 'decisions/[0-9]*.md' \
| grep '^decisions/' | head -1
For a quick skim of who said what:
grep -H '^title:' decisions/[0-9]*.md | sort
The archive is frozen
DECISIONS-LOG.md is read-only history. Its SHA-256 is pinned in
decisions/ARCHIVE.sha256 and ci/decisions-log.sh fails the merge gate if the file
changes. That is not ceremony: without it, the next agent to read runbooks/ or an old
CLAUDE.md habit appends to the tail again and re-creates the conflict for everybody
else, silently, one PR at a time.
If the archive genuinely must change (a leaked credential to redact, say), that is a
deliberate, reviewed act: change it, run sha256sum DECISIONS-LOG.md > decisions/ARCHIVE.sha256,
and say in your handoff entry why. Re-pinning is visible in the diff. Appending is not.