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. It can also — off by default — reply when it is @-mentioned on a pull request; see Mentions on a pull request. 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`

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:

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.
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?.

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`

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.

Mentions on a pull request

Off by default (PM_PR_MENTIONS: "false"), and nothing below has been exercised against the live Gitea — see decisions/2026-11-07-pm-agent-pr-mentions.md.

With it on, the dispatcher runs a second, independent pass each poll. A mention of the bot account on a pull request makes the PM read that pull request — its description, its changed files, its diff, the thread it was mentioned in and the rest of the conversation — and reply where it was mentioned. Three places count: the pull request's conversation, a review's own body (Gitea renders it in the conversation, so the reply goes there), and an inline review comment against a file and a line.

  @pm-agent in a PR comment ─▶ discover (notifications, else open PRs)
  or in a review body           │
  or on a line inline           ├─▶ read /issues/{n}/comments, /pulls/{n}/reviews,
                                │        .../reviews/{id}/comments
                                ├─▶ decide, per comment: self-authored? already
                                │        answered? does it name the bot?
                                ├─▶ assemble the PR + diff + thread, every field fenced
                                │        and labelled UNTRUSTED
                                ├─▶ ask the model: `comment` or `decline`, and nothing else
                                └─▶ post the reply in that thread, carrying its own marker

It can only reply. implement and revise are not in the vocabulary this path offers the model, and the decision schema has no branch and no brief field, so the PM cannot ask for work in a shape this program would accept. Nothing on the path calls build_job(). The change-authoring half of issue #116 — revise a branch an agent owns, versus open a fresh branch and PR against main for somebody else's — is a separate issue and a separate PR.

An explicit mention is the only trigger. A comment is answered if and only if it is not the bot's own, it spells out @-the-bot-account, and no earlier reply of the bot's says it was already answered. Nothing else is actionable: a comment with no mention produces no reply and no model call, however recently the bot was mentioned or replied nearby. So a mention is a discrete, self-limiting request — one @ gets one reply in the place it was written, and the rest of the pull request is read as context rather than as a queue of questions.

That is the operator's decision on issue #116, taken once it was established that pull-request conversation comments are a flat list rather than a hierarchy: "since there is no threads and the PR comments are flat, then the pm-agent should be looking for explicit mentions rather than a single mention and continued scrapping of comments within the PR in perpetuity". It replaced an earlier rule where the first mention in a thread armed replies to every later non-bot comment in it. It is applied uniformly, including to inline review comments — those are genuinely threaded in Gitea, but keeping continuation for them alone would be a second rule nobody asked for. The fixtures that used to assert continuation are inverted, not deleted, so the old behaviour cannot creep back unnoticed.

Two practical consequences. A mention is repeatable: ask again by tagging again, and each tag gets its own reply. And a mention is not a conversation — the PM is told to answer as if it is the last word it will see, and to ask you to tag it again if it needs something back.

What remains, unavoidably, is that anyone who writes the handle gets a reply — the operator's answer (3) is "anyone can talk and have the agent work" — and Gitea cannot tell a quoted mention (> @pm-agent what do you think?) from a fresh one, so re-quoting an old mention in a new comment costs one more reply.

Thread identity is now only about where the reply goes. Inline review comments are grouped by (path, position), which is Gitea's own grouping and is what makes the reply land in the thread that was spoken to rather than beside it; conversation comments and review bodies are answered in the conversation. None of that is part of the trigger any more.

Loop prevention. There is no author gate — anyone who can comment can start a run, which is the operator's decision (issue #116, answer 3: "anyone can talk and have the agent work. Authorization of changes is through the CI pipeline"). That makes the self-authored filter load-bearing, so it is the first check made on every comment and it is structural: a bot-authored comment can only ever clear work, never create it, even if it contains the bot's own handle. The reply the PM posts also never contains @-the-bot. Both are asserted by the selftest.

Idempotency. The record that a mention has been answered is a marker inside the reply:

<!-- pm-agent:replied-to=comment-9001,review-comment-77 -->

One atomic write with the reply, so the two cannot get out of step. The failure mode chosen, deliberately, is at-least-once model call, at-most-once reply: a crash before posting costs one repeated decision, a crash after posting is a no-op because the marker is already in the thread, and a mention is never silently dropped. The marker is only believed in the bot's own comments — pasting it into yours does not silence a mention.

The cheap mention query, and the token scope it needs

The operator asked for "a way to check for '@'s for the bot account instead of scouring the entire pull request list and associated threads". That is Gitea's notification list: a mention subscribes the mentioned account to the thread, so one bounded call names the pull requests worth reading.

It is a hint, never the decision — the trigger is re-derived by reading that pull request's comments. That split is why the endpoint over-delivering is harmless: the subscription keeps raising notifications for later comments on a pull request the bot was once mentioned on, and since those comments carry no mention, they resolve to nothing.

It will be refused on today's token. /api/v1/notifications sits behind Gitea's notification scope category, and the bot's token is minted read:user, write:repository, write:issue, read:package (above). The dispatcher handles that explicitly: it logs the refusal, names read:notification as the remedy, and falls back to listing open pull requests, which needs only read:repository. Which query answered is in the log every cycle. To get the cheap one, re-mint the token with read:notification added — same account, same five other scopes, both Secrets updated (runbooks/pm-agent.md).

Look before you turn it on

PM_PLAN: "true" makes this path discover, assemble and print the exact payload it would send and the exact thread it would post into, without asking the model and without posting anything:

./infra/devcontainer/dev.sh run bash -c \
  'kubectl --context k3s-prod -n pm-agent logs deploy/pm-agent | sed -n "/^=\{20,\}/,\$p"'

Setting PM_PLAN also enables the path, so it is one knob. PM_DRY_RUN implies it.

To settle the API shapes by hand before enabling anything (read-only, and the bot's token is enough for all but the first):

T=<the pm-agent token>; G=https://gitea.home.keithjackson.dev/api/v1
R=repos/Home-Network/home-network-k3s-impl
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $T" "$G/notifications?all=true&subject-type=pull" | head -c 2000
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $T" "$G/$R/pulls/116/reviews"
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $T" "$G/$R/pulls/116/reviews/1/comments"
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $T" "$G/$R/pulls/116/files"

The committed fixtures are infra/agent/testdata/pr-mention-fixtures.json; they are written to Gitea's published 1.24 shapes rather than captured from the server, and the file says so at the top. Replacing them with a real capture is the cheapest way to close that gap.

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".

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, 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.

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'`
`PM_PR_MENTIONS`	`false`	whether a mention of the bot on a pull request triages it. See "Mentions on a pull request" above; read `PM_PLAN` output once before turning it on
`PM_PLAN`	`false`	the pull-request path's dry run: print the payload and the intended thread, ask no model, post nothing. Also enables the path. `PM_DRY_RUN` implies it

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.

README.md Unescape Escape

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