orchestra/AUDIT.md

Orchestra audit — handoff first

2026-08-11 — tmux backend and Claude in-place context rollover

• orchestra-worker now selects ORCHESTRA_WORKER_BACKEND=herdr|tmux. The tmux backend is intentionally Claude-only: it creates one detached, isolated tmux session per task, resolves configured tmux pane indexes rather than assuming 0.0, starts Claude in the task worktree, handles the exact workspace-trust prompt, captures the pane, forwards explicit input, reports health/status, and retains/kills the session at the existing lifecycle boundaries. Codex and OpenCode still use herdr.
• Registry entries accept "backend":"tmux". Those entries are worker-owned even on the coordinator machine, so the Dockerized coordinator neither probes nor tries to operate a host tmux socket. Their router health remains gated by a fresh worker heartbeat and local backend check.
• Claude rotation no longer asks the agent to duplicate the workpc hook's handoff in .orchestra-handoff-report.md. A changed HANDOFF.md, observed after Claude is idle, drives the persisted in-place sequence /clear + ENTER, then @HANDOFF.md + ENTER; the exhausted transcript identity is discarded so the next observation resolves the new session. The canonical cross-worker release protocol remains separate and unchanged.
• The portable workpc Claude configuration (settings*.json, CLAUDE.md, status line, hooks, and helper scripts) was checksum-verified after copying to homesrv. The prior homesrv files are backed up under /home/kami/.claude/backups/workpc-import-20260811T120000; machine/session state was excluded and local-only hooks were preserved.
• Verified in the source tree with the real isolated-tmux lifecycle test, focused backend/worker tests, go build ./..., go vet ./..., go test ./..., go test -race ./..., and the web lint/test/production build. No worker binary, registry file, service, container, or live pane was deployed/restarted/touched; live Claude/tmux behavior remains a deployment QA item rather than a completed claim.

Audited 2026-07-30 against the working tree, spec, deployed coordinator, workpc worker, event log, and live herdr (read-only).

Verdict: the source-level P0/P1/P2 fixes are in place, the live coordinator can replay its repaired event log, and the current OpenCode worker is connected. The system is not safe to run unattended until the controlled QA matrix has passed for all three harnesses.

Evidence

• go build ./..., go vet ./..., go test ./..., and go test -race ./...: pass.
• Live B17: release seq=251, re-lease 252, completion 262; the simple probe needed six approvals, logged a 409 lease version conflict, and recorded consumed:0.
• Live follow-up: Docker owns the coordinator; the old systemd unit is inactive. The pre-v2 repeated-seq=1 event prefix was migrated with a backup-preserving, explicit tool before the current coordinator replayed it.
• Deployment follow-up: coordinator and installed workpc OpenCode worker are clean revision d6cab133b56666f81f569f4c1c3c9a6f104088d1. The worker service restarted at 2026-07-30 16:07 +04, has emitted no federation failures since, and its configured Unix-socket herdr answered ping with protocol 17.

Federation design status (updated 2026-07-30)

Design B ("workers pull tasks", /v1/federation/*) is the live design. It is no longer clientless: cmd/orchestra-worker/main.go (~1,131 lines, tests in cmd/orchestra-worker/main_test.go) is the deployed worker, and the workpc OpenCode worker runs it. Any earlier statement here or in CLAUDE.md that Design B "has zero clients — no worker binary exists" is obsolete.

The Design A guardrail from the 2026-07-27 decision has landed: Coordinator.adapterFor (internal/orchestrator/orchestrator.go) refuses to resolve an adapter for a session owned by a non-local herdr, so rotation and cleanup can no longer validate a git anchor against the wrong machine's checkout.

Design A is deleted as of 2026-07-31, superseding the 2026-07-27 "retain through Phase 5" decision: the operator confirmed the bridge is undeployed now that workers carry cross-machine work, so clients/ was removed rather than tracked. The Phase 6 cutover is therefore already done on this axis.

The legacy harness-hook completion path was removed in the same pass, once it was confirmed that nothing calls it. orchestra-worker owns completion — it watches for .orchestra/done, confirms via AgentStatus that the agent is not busy, then posts through /v1/federation/* with the lease epoch and expected version. Deleted: the /v1/harness/complete route (a 410 stub), its unmounted harnessCompletion handler, that handler's test (green against unreachable code — the pattern this audit exists to catch), and the three deploy/hooks/ scripts, which still used the older .orchestra-report.md marker and would have failed against the 410. /v1/harness/turn is unaffected and still live.

Note for the QA matrix: the OpenCode run completed through the worker path, so no hook script was exercised. Nothing about hook-based completion was ever verified live, which is why deleting it costs nothing.

Remaining release blockers

• Only OpenCode capacity is ready. Workpc's workpc-opencode worker has a configured project file and a reachable local herdr Unix socket. Homesrv has no reachable herdr, and no Claude/Codex worker/herdr pair has been verified, so the full three-harness matrix cannot begin yet.
• B17 needs a fresh controlled run. The historical probe's six approvals, one 409 lease version conflict, and consumed:0 receipt came from the old worker. They cannot be treated as evidence for the current worker until a live OpenCode run is repeated; Claude and Codex require their own runs.

QA handoff — next agent

1. Preflight before creating work. Read GET /v1/federation/workers and coordinator diagnostics through an authenticated operator session. Confirm each target worker reports revision d6cab13, supported test-e2e, and fresh herdr_status: reachable; raw-ping its configured local Unix socket with params:{} and confirm protocol 17. Confirm no pre-existing agents or leased task on the target harness.
2. OpenCode controlled continuity run. Submit one new disposable test-e2e task that makes a deterministic marker, releases at a clear turn boundary, validates pickup from the resulting anchor, then completes. Record event sequence, handoff ref, anchor SHA, transaction id, lease epoch, native session evidence, quality-gate result, remote SHA, and a receipt with known non-zero (or explicitly explained known-zero) usage. Do not use destructive herdr calls against unrelated panes.
3. Exercise rotation and recovery. In separate disposable tasks, trigger soft, hard, milestone, thrash, coordinator restart, worker restart/lost response, stale completion, and corrupted-worker-state paths. Verify each result is a fenced lifecycle event or durable needs_attention, never a silent retry or orphaned pane. Preserve the predecessor until matching pickup validation.
4. Repeat on Claude and Codex only after provisioning their own reachable worker/herdr pairs. Do not treat OpenCode evidence as cross-harness proof. After all runs, compare worker/coordinator revisions and checksums, attach the artifacts/event ranges to this audit, and only then clear the live release gate.

P0 — correctness

ID	Current failure	Required fix
H1	Closed 2026-07-30. The checkout-owning worker and coordinator turn path now use RotationStateMachine. Workers persist harness-native identity (Claude/Codex transcript, OpenCode SQLite session id), apply soft/milestone/thrash/hard-boundary decisions, and record unknown activity/occupancy/boundary as degraded health rather than zero usage.	Verified by go test -race ./...; the existing turn-policy coverage now exercises the shared state machine.
H2	Closed 2026-07-30. PrepareRelease verifies immutable TASK.md, checkpoints all repository work except protocol markers, always pushes the per-task project's scratch anchor, verifies it with ls-remote, and only then seals the CAS handoff.	TestScratchCommitCapturesAllGitStatesExceptProtocolMarkers covers staged, deleted, renamed, untracked, and protocol-marker cases; release uses the configured project remote.
H3	Closed 2026-07-30. Worker state persists idempotent release transactions through prepared → anchor_pushed → event_committed → pickup_validated → predecessor_retired. Release/pickup endpoints bind transaction, anchor, and lease version; a predecessor remains mapped and is retired only after matching pickup validation.	TestReleaseTransactionSurvivesReLeaseUntilMatchingPickup covers transaction propagation and pickup epoch binding; full race suite passes.
H4	Closed 2026-07-30. Every new lease carries an opaque durable lease_epoch; renew/release/pickup/complete validate the exact harness owner and epoch at the store boundary and federation API. Offline heartbeats retain leases until expiry, new workers require a fresh reachable local-herdr probe, and local/worker ownership loss stops or durably quarantines the old pane before its mapping is dropped.	TestLeaseEpochFencesStaleOwnerLifecycleWrites, TestAvailableRequiresFreshReachableLocalHerdrHealth, plus the full race suite cover stale re-lease/completion and health admission.
H5	Closed 2026-07-30. Store.Append validates legal state/owner/epoch transitions, fsyncs the event before applying its projection, and replays projections solely from events.jsonl (snapshots are disposable caches). CAS, worker/federation/coordinator state use temp-file + fsync + rename; corrupt worker state aborts startup. The legacy /v1/harness/complete route and its handler were deleted outright on 2026-07-31 (previously a 410 stub plus an unmounted, separately-fenced handler).	TestOpenRebuildsOnlyFromLogAndIgnoresCorruptSnapshot, TestWorkerRefusesCorruptDurableState, and go test -race ./... pass.

P1 — autonomy and recovery

• Recovery: Closed 2026-07-30. Launch/recovery faults now emit TaskNeedsAttention, retaining the durable harness owner and lease epoch. Renew, release, expiry, and a late reconciled completion accept that same fenced lease; worker state advances its expected aggregate version without dropping the live session. TaskBlocked remains terminal for an explicit operator block. TestNeedsAttentionRetainsFencedLeaseForLateCompletion covers the durable recovery path.
• Retries: Closed 2026-07-30. Hand-off-less TaskReleased is the single durable reclaim transition. It projects exponential attempt, next_retry_at, and failure_class; router assignment reads those fields, so coordinator restarts cannot reset a backoff or retry limit. TestReclaimPersistsAttemptAndBackoffAcrossReopen covers replay.
• Launch: Closed 2026-07-30. Workers emit a fenced TaskLaunchAcknowledged only after a local start/prompt is persisted. Typed NACKs immediately reclaim transient unusable capacity, terminally block invalid handoffs, and retain uncertain live panes for reconciliation.
• Completion: Closed 2026-07-30. .orchestra/done is explicit intent only; the worker also requires native non-busy identity, runs its quality gate, verifies immutable TASK.md, commits, pushes, and checks the remote SHA before it emits completion.
• Quota: Closed 2026-07-30. Completion receipts contain native per-lease deltas plus a known/unknown marker. Five-hour and weekly projections are published from the same receipts; any bounded harness without fresh known usage fails routing closed.
• Approvals: Closed 2026-07-30. Projects have a validated audited safe_operations policy limited to worktree-local read/edit/test/Git. Workers inject it into the task prompt; network, secrets, destructive actions, and paths outside the worktree remain operator-gated.
• Observability: Closed 2026-07-30. Task projections now retain lifecycle phase, last error, retry time/failure class, lease epoch, pane state, and anchor. Release/anchor certification faults enter durable needs_attention instead of disappearing through retry continue paths.

P2 — performance

• Closed 2026-07-30. Each scheduling pass takes one atomic task/lease snapshot, batches cached (TTL) reachability probes concurrently, and evaluates candidate availability once. It no longer probes candidates or scans active tasks once per queued task.
• Closed 2026-07-30. Active leases and per-harness, time-ordered quota receipts are projection indexes. Availability uses indexed rolling-window sums rather than decoding the event log; the task snapshot is a one-time disposable compatibility cache rather than a full rewrite on every append.
• Closed 2026-07-30. BenchmarkAssignPending{1K,10K} and BenchmarkAppend{1K,10K} report and enforce p95 budgets, with durable fsync cost included in their respective paths.

Delivery order

1. Durable event transitions + lease fencing.
2. Idempotent checkpoint/release/pickup transaction.
3. Worker-local rotation, completion, quota, and typed recovery.
4. Approval policy and performance indexes.
5. Only then: ingestion/UI expansion.

Release gate

• Pass: build, vet, test, and race checks pass; unit/integration coverage includes the defined fault and cross-machine cases.
• Pending QA: run the controlled soft, hard, milestone, thrash, completion, and late-recovery paths on OpenCode, Claude, and Codex without manual intervention for safe repository work. Follow the QA handoff above and attach the resulting event ranges/artifacts before clearing this gate.

Capability restrictions at the agent boundary (2026-08-26)

The rule now enforced: an agent may perform work and request lifecycle changes; it may never perform one.

• New authz.Agent surface, GatedWrite. AuthorizeEvent refuses every event type Orchestra owns (WorkPhaseChanged, ReviewRecorded, TaskSubmitted, TaskCompleted, TaskLeased, ApprovalGranted, …), and the HTTP gate refuses their endpoints. Credential is ORCHESTRA_AGENT_TOKEN, the only Orchestra credential that may enter an agent pane.
• Gated surfaces could not reach the two endpoints written for them. The middleware admitted only paths ending in /approval, so decision-request and deferred were 403 before their handlers ran, and the handlers' own AuthorizeEvent("ApprovalRequested") was dead code. The allowlist is now authz.GatedWritePath, and the gate keys off CapabilityFor(s) == GatedWrite rather than naming MCP and Maven.
• /v1/harness/turn was unreachable. An unlabelled request defaults to the Web surface, sessions is always non-nil, so every harness call returned 401 in any deployment with web credentials. It is now exempt from the surface gate and authenticates its own bearer token in the handler, like federation does.
• RequestHumanDecision now requires ownership and fences on the lease. It blocked any task in any state, and its TaskBlocked event carried no harness_id/lease_epoch. That is backwards twice over: an agent credential was a way to block a queued task nobody was working on, and a question from the session that did own the task was rejected by Store.Append's fence. Both fixed; six tests that had been exercising the unleased state now lease first.

Not built, deliberately: a Capability vocabulary, CapabilitySet, per-role SessionAuthority, or role-to-capability project policy. One surface at one capability level expresses "may ask, may not act", and the store already fences every lifecycle event on (harness_id, lease_epoch). Add roles when two agent roles actually need different API rights — today the difference between an implementer and a reviewer is what agentctx renders, not what the API allows.

Still open, and it is the real enforcement:

• Execution capabilities are unenforced. Network, secrets, paths outside the worktree and destructive commands have no policy check; agents inherit the harness pane's environment, and nothing in this repo sets it. git push and a direct Gitea call succeed or fail purely on whatever credentials that environment happens to hold. Credential isolation in the pane is an operator task today, not a code path.
• A reviewing session still cannot seal its own review, and should not: the worker seals on its behalf. That answers question 1 of the handoff.

Turn-boundary reconcile-failure escalation (2026-08-26)

The gap the 2026-08-26 handoff deliberately left open. A failed reconcile at a verified turn boundary was recorded and the turn continued, forever. One failure is transient, so continuing is right. A streak means Orchestra can no longer promise that the newest human input outranks the session's intent, and continuing silently is exactly the failure shape this repo keeps producing.

• Coordinator.ReconcileFailureHandoff (default 3, defaultReconcileFailureHandoff) is the number of consecutive failures that escalate. Env: ORCHESTRA_RECONCILE_FAILURE_HANDOFF.
• Coordinator.noteReconcileResult holds the streak per task, keyed on the lease epoch. A successor never inherits its predecessor's count, so no release path needs a cleanup hook. A success deletes the entry. The count is written into MonitorHealth.Sessions[id].LastError as reconcile human input (N consecutive): ....
• On escalation TurnDecision asks for a handoff with reason reconcile_failure and answers prepare_handoff. RemoteTurn answers the same for a worker-owned session, on the same threshold.
• The escalation only fires where rotation had no reason of its own. It sits on the continue branch, so an existing rotate, refuse, or prepare_handoff keeps its own reason rather than having a second one manufactured for it.
• reconcile_failure is a real handoff reason: added to continuity.reasons (or the artifact it produces would fail validation), to herdr.handoffReason, and to the new orchestrator.bypassReason — which replaces the manual || milestone || thrash comparison that was duplicated in rotate and TurnDecision. Release therefore runs through the existing bypass path, with no new state, blocker or recovery protocol.
• CLIAdapter.RequestHandoffReason explains the reason to the agent and says explicitly that it is not a judgement about its work.
• The worker ignored the coordinator's verdict entirely. federatedTurn read answer.Decisions and dropped answer.Verdict on the floor, so a federated session could never be asked to hand off for any coordinator-side reason. It now requests the handoff and records it on the session, which is what the release loop watches for.

Then the existing machinery does the useful part: the successor's Store.PreLease reconcile fails closed while the source is down, so the task waits in the queue instead of resuming from an older authority.

Proofs: internal/orchestrator/reconcile_escalation_test.go (streak, reset, rotation-wins, release-through-bypass, no-source, delivery-failure-is-not-a- reconcile-failure, federated parity), internal/integration/reconcile_escalation_test.go (the full loop: two turns continue, third hands off, successor refused while the source is down, correction reconciled on recovery), and cmd/orchestra-worker/main_test.go:TestFederatedTurnActsOnPrepareHandoffVerdict.

Deviation from the requested shape: the threshold is one coordinator field, not per-project human_reconcile.turn_failure_handoff_after. TurnDecision has no project in scope, and Soft/Hard/Thrash are already coordinator-level for the same reason. Making it per-project means plumbing the registry into the coordinator, which is worth doing when a second project actually needs a different number.

Burn-in instrumentation and readiness probe (2026-08-26)

Feature work stops here. BURNIN.md is the runbook: evidence per run, the five flows, the failure classification, and the pane credential cleanup.

One addition, because the burn-in's main inspection was impossible without it: herdr.WriteLaunchContext dumps the exact agentctx.Build result to <worktree>/.orchestra/launch.md at every launch, local (Coordinator.Start) and federated (orchestra-worker). Reading it back from pane scrollback is not equivalent, because the harness reflows and truncates. A write failure is recorded, never fatal. Proof: internal/integration/reconcile_launch_test.go:TestLaunchWritesTheContextItSent compares the file against the instruction the adapter actually received.

Probed live state, and the burn-in is blocked on deployment, not on code:

• The API is up on homesrv (/readyz ready, gitea and jsonl configured).
• The workpc worker is up (pid 741, restarted 2026-08-26 11:39, no errors), serving workpc-claude on a tmux backend and workpc-opencode on a herdr unix socket.
• The deployed worker is built from 97a9c65 (2026-07-30). Every v3 unit from the last two sessions is an uncommitted working-tree change, so neither the container nor the worker has phases, review, submission, the agent surface, or the reconcile escalation. Commit and redeploy both before any run.
• Codex has no entry in /etc/orchestra/harnesses.json, and no worker runs on homesrv, so three of the four target harnesses cannot be exercised at all today.
• Correction to an earlier assumption in this file: the live config.jsonc sets no backend and no address on any of its six herdrs, so all six resolve to <machine>:9245 via registry.defaultHerdrPort. Both ports are closed, and that is not evidence about the workpc harnesses, which use a tmux socket and a unix socket. Federated reachability defers to worker heartbeat. Do not diagnose harness availability from a TCP probe of 9245.

Burn-in deployment, 2026-08-26 18:35

Burn-in build identity: 6f9300b549362c4c5788f8845b56aaff9672d993. The v3 stack is committed (7f12c7f), then startup revision logging (86b67d9), then this record. Both halves are built from 6f9300b so the identity is HEAD, and a later deploy/build.sh cannot silently produce a different revision than the one deployed.

• Coordinator deployed. Rebuilt on homesrv with --build-arg BUILD_REVISION/BUILD_TIME/BUILD_DIRTY, container recreated, /readyz ready. It now logs orchestra revision 6f9300b... dirty false at startup.
• Worker staged, not installed. ~/orchestra-deploy/orchestra-worker, sha256 2b1c430.... install and systemctl restart need root, which this sandbox does not have, so the running worker is still the 2026-07-30 build. Until it is installed the pair is mismatched and no task should be created.
• Observability fixed before proceeding, per the requirement that deployed identity be evidence. Revision was previously visible only behind the operator login, and the worker never logged its own build at all. Both now print it at startup, so docker logs orchestra-api and journalctl -u orchestra-worker are sufficient.
• deploy/build.sh stamps both binaries from one commit and refuses a dirty tree, so a burn-in run cannot pair a new coordinator with an old worker.
• The deployed coordinator confirms the transport split directly: herdr workpc-opencode is worker-owned on workpc; coordinator probe skipped, while the three homesrv-* herdrs report dial tcp 192.168.1.104:9245: connect: connection refused.

Not done, and both need root: the /etc/orchestra/worker.env scrub (mode 0600, root-owned) and its in-pane verification. No agent should run before that.

Pane environment and the opencode backend, probed 2026-08-26 18:45

Three findings, all blocking flow 1, none of them code defects in this session's work.

• herdr is not running on workpc. herdr status server reports not running; the socket refuses connections and its log stops at 2026-07-30. workpc-opencode cannot start a pane. Note that the worker logs serving harness workpc-opencode (opencode) on herdr backend at startup without touching the socket, so that line is not evidence of reachability. Same shape as the older note about the coordinator never logging a herdr success: absence of an error is not evidence here either.
• The two workpc harnesses inherit different environments. An opencode pane is created by the herdr daemon and inherits herdr's environment, so scrubbing /etc/orchestra/worker.env does not affect it. A claude pane comes from TmuxBackend.StartAgent, which runs tmux new-session via exec.CommandContext with no Env set, so the tmux server inherits the worker's full environment and every pane under it does too.
• The scrub alone cannot close the tmux path. The worker needs ORCHESTRA_WORKER_TOKEN* and ORCHESTRA_FEDERATION_ADMIT_TOKEN to function, and the pane inherits exactly those. Closing it needs a filtered cmd.Env in the backend, or a tmux server started separately with a clean environment. Deliberately not built now: flow 1 is opencode only, and the burn-in order puts claude at step 6.

Sudo is not available in this sandbox, so the worker install, the restart, and the worker.env scrub remain operator steps.