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jakman85andClaude Opus 5 8b5e950baa

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test(pm-agent): a committed negative-path probe for the worker's input guards

pm-worker's command is pinned by admission with no args, so everything a caller could
influence arrives in the environment — and the guards at the top of that script are what
stand between an injected variable and a clone from the wrong host or a push to the
wrong ref. Nothing exercised them, which makes them a claim rather than a control.

probe-validation.sh asserts 17 refusals, each on BOTH a non-zero exit and the specific
message, so a guard that stopped firing cannot pass by failing somewhere else. It covers
a redirected git host, a real and reachable WRONG one (the egress policy permits tcp/443,
so that case is not hypothetical), the right host with a smuggled path, 'main' and five
other bad branch shapes, a malformed owner/repo, a bad mode, a bad issue number, and each
missing credential. build-image.sh runs it inside the built image too.

Writing it found three things:
 - the PM_BRANCH != main guard is unreachable while the pattern check above it holds, so
   the comment claiming it as the defence was wrong about which line does the work. Kept
   as an assertion independent of the regex; the comment now says so.
 - the EXIT trap ended in a failing test, which under set -e can replace the script's
   real exit code with that failure.
 - a provenance LOG LINE read a file through a redirect that set -o pipefail would have
   turned into a dead worker if the file were absent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>

2026-10-05 22:34:46 -05:00

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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`

It does nothing at all until an operator does two things

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

The image does not exist. platform/pm-agent/deployment.yaml and PM_WORKER_IMAGE in configmap.yaml carry an all-zero digest placeholder. Build it with infra/agent/build-image.sh (which verifies it and refuses to push), push it as the operator, then update both places with the digest podman push --digestfile returned, in one pull request. Until then: ImagePullBackOff.
The credentials are placeholders. pm-agent-credentials.sops.yaml is encrypted to the repository's age recipient but holds REPLACE-ME-… strings. The hand-off — which Gitea account to create, which scopes, and why it must not be an administrator — is in pm-agent-credentials.sops.yaml.example. Until then 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.

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.

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 any host but this Gitea: `pm-worker` validates `PM_GITEA_URL` against an allowlist baked into the image
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

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 write:repository, write:issue 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".

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:

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.
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, and no envFrom.

Six 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: 28 assertions, 28 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.

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

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.

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