--plan shipped with dir= and command= as separate fields. That is right for a
driver, which moves the pane itself and then types the command, and unusable
for a person: the first operator to read a block could not act on it at all.
Joining an absolute path from one field with a command from another is not a
saved line of output. It is the step where a session gets started in the wrong
repository - the same failure the absolute dir= exists to prevent, moved from
the machine to the human.
paste= is the two already joined, cd <dir> && <command>, one thing to select.
Both forms stay: the two consumers want the same fact shaped differently, and
neither shape serves both.
Emitted only alongside command=, never once per block. A `paste=cd X && ` with
nothing after it would run the cd and then a bare newline, which fails
SILENTLY - the operator ends up in the right directory with no session started
and no error to notice.
board-selftest: 86 -> 89 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011eKRzhD1RqY2MxvDEkrJAM
The table says what the state of every repo is; the briefing says who is
waiting. Neither says which repos to open a tab for today, in what order,
and with which command - so a day plan was assembled by hand every morning
from a table that deliberately takes no position.
--plan is built on exactly the argument --brief was: a lookup over data the
scan already holds, zero model calls, and route.sh already derives the
per-repo command. The order IS the position it takes, and the only one -
there is no cutoff, so nothing is hidden.
The rule most likely to be "fixed" into a defect: repos owing mail rank
first regardless of status. Excluding blocked or done is a claim about a
repo's OWN next step, which by definition cannot be moved, while owing an
answer is the other axis entirely - and answering is often what unblocks
it. Measured on the real tree, two of 26 planned repos were done with an
unhandled inbox, so the fixture tree pins done-with-debt and
blocked-with-debt rather than the general rule alone. Repos with no board
line rank last and are LABELLED, because the table already prints a note
about them and dropping them silently would repeat that defect.
key=value rather than prose, because the plan has two consumers: the
operator, and a separate repo driving a terminal from it. Prose would make
the rendered format an API no test here could hold stable for a consumer
living in another repo. dir= is absolute because a new pane inherits its
anchor's directory; command_missing= carries both no-command causes,
because a driver reading ^command= would type a blank line into a live pane.
route_cmd_for() becomes the single reader of the route-line grammar, shared
with --brief, distinguishing the two failure causes by exit code rather
than by an empty string. --brief output is unchanged.
Driving a terminal from the plan stays OUT of this repo, on the measurement
in docs/ghostty-orchestration-measurement.md rather than on taste.
board-selftest: 51 -> 86 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011eKRzhD1RqY2MxvDEkrJAM
The operator has more repos than they can hold in their head, and the
question that actually costs them is "who is waiting on me, and what does
answering cost". board.sh already scans for it; nothing rendered it in a
form an unattended job could leave behind.
--brief is a second RENDERING of that scan, never a second scan. It prints
NESTE uncut, because the 38-character cut is the table column's property
and not the record's - the value used to be truncated at record-build time,
which left the cut string as the only copy. Each startup command is derived
by CALLING route.sh with that repo's own four traits; next-cost alone
cannot produce it, since the advisor flag is a property of the ROW and two
rows can share a model/effort pair while differing on it. A repo with no
route line is told so rather than handed a guess.
It cross-checks itself against coord-count.sh, and that is the substance of
the change rather than a nicety. The repo scan and the mailbox are two
different populations: a mailbox can carry a name no scan will ever produce
- a declared non-git surface (CLAUDE_COORD_REPO, e.g. ~/repos) or a
checkout outside the roots. Measured on the real mailbox: 11 repos / 21
messages in the briefing against coord-count's 12 / 22, the missing one
being the declared surface `repos`. A briefing that only walked the scan
would answer "who is waiting on you" with a number it quietly knew was
short.
Zero model calls, which was the deciding property. Measured against 2.1.220
under subscription auth: --max-budget-usd DOES bite (terminal_reason
budget_exhausted, exit 1), but it aborts AFTER turn one - floor ~0.25
USD-equivalent per turn on claude-opus-5[1m]. It is a runaway brake, not a
pre-flight gate, so a nightly claude -p job would draw on the same quota
pool as interactive work every night. Determinism removes the question.
board.sh stays read-only: the file write lives in brief-nightly.sh, which
renders to a temp file and renames it into place, and treats an EMPTY
render as a FAILED one - board prints nothing when its scan roots do not
exist, which is what a mistyped path or a moved home looks like, and a
plain `> file` redirect would destroy yesterday's briefing on a bad launchd
environment.
The launchd template carries placeholders, not absolute paths: this repo is
mirrored publicly and a plist is the one file here that would need a home
directory in it. It points at a checkout rather than the plugin cache,
which is version-pinned and would break silently on the next bump.
board-selftest 36 -> 49. One check pins a defect caught only by eye against
the real tree: fold copies its input's missing trailing newline, which ran
the command onto the tail of the NESTE prose and produced a briefing whose
commands could not be copied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017orCFDkmp88fLnqDR3chdJ
A notice needs no answer, but it is still re-injected at every session
start until someone closes it by hand. Across enough repositories that
hand-closing IS the manual work the mailbox was meant to remove, and the
pending count -- the operator's only signal -- drowns in messages that
were never going to be acted on: 9 of 22 pending messages across 12
mailboxes were pure notices when this was written.
coord-sweep.sh closes exactly one mechanically decidable class:
reply-expected: no, older than a grace window (default 14 days). A
message that owes a reply is never touched, at any age, with any flag --
answering it would mean deciding something on the receiving repo's
behalf, which is the one thing this system exists to prevent.
Four properties are load-bearing, not incidental:
- Dry-run is the default, inverted from the rest of the engine. The
others print or deliver; this one destroys pending state, so the safe
direction has to be what you get by forgetting a flag.
- Closing goes through coord-done.sh --repo, never mv, so the archive
layout and the _broadcast refusal stay in one place.
- Age is read from the filename prefix, never the file. An unreadable
age is never treated as old: fail-safe, not fail-open.
- Every closure is logged with sender and subject. Directed messages
have no seen-tracking, so the sweep cannot tell "seen and ignored"
from "never delivered" -- a notice can be closed unread, and the log
is the only thing standing between that and silent data loss.
The reply-expected read is bounded to the frontmatter block, matching
coord-count.sh: a body line claiming it at column 0 is untrusted
cross-repo input and must not close its own message.
No scheduler, no launchd unit, no skill front door -- the script does
nothing until invoked.
Selftest 159 -> 182. The log check caught a real defect during
development: the first implementation read from/subject AFTER
coord-done.sh had moved the file, logging empty values and quietly
defeating the only safeguard the design has.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uwcak9j4m9JijDKeFmptww
route.sh now emits `--advisor opus` into the startup command it prints.
The flag existed and worked, but nothing generated it, so it went unused:
the only mechanism that ever set an advisor here was `/advisor`, which
writes the global advisorModel setting -- every session, every repo -- and
was abandoned for burning quota. Nothing replaced it.
Two independent triggers, almost disjoint by construction:
rows 1-2 always. Sonnet main model, so opus is a capability LIFT rather
than a peer. Load-bearing: every fallback is one row cheaper and
the cheap rows are Sonnet, so this makes the quota fallback safe.
rows 3-4 only at reversibility=costly|one-way. Opus main model, so the
advisor buys peer review where a mistake is not cheap to undo.
rows 5-6 never. The CLI rejects every advisor for a Fable main model.
costly forces row 3 and one-way forces row 4, so a Sonnet row always has
reversibility=cheap and neither rule reaches the other's rows.
verification=none is deliberately not a third trigger: beyond the stakes
rule it adds only cheap-to-reverse mistakes, docs sessions among them.
Applied per ROW, so fallback-command carries its own correct answer.
route-selftest.sh 56 -> 73. Section 14 gates the three CLI facts the rule
rests on against the installed claude without spending a token: advisor
validation runs before the empty-prompt check, so `-p ""` reaches the
validator and stops. --help cannot gate this -- it short-circuits before
option validation, so an unknown flag would pass the gate untested.
Three pre-existing checks updated rather than worked around: two asserted
whole command strings that now carry the advisor, and section 11's effort
extraction swallowed the tail of the command line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01X8N8hQEJSWWtieWUx37txT
Version sync across plugin.json, package.json, README badge, CHANGELOG and
all three skill frontmatters, plus the 156 -> 159 selftest-count references
that follow from the previous commit's three new checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YJMJanRHkUhEf9EYxMpbM5
Bumps the six version-bearing files and gives ac62a38 its changelog entry.
Until the tag exists the plugin cache keeps serving the 0.11.0 skill, which
instructs every new session that effort is not observable and to ask the
operator for it. The fix is committed and pushed but not in circulation, so
the release is the part that changes behavior.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxRVZm1busUeuXd5iPkK36
The last-session record exists to make the routing policy falsifiable, and
it only is if --last-effort is measured. route.sh documented the opposite as
settled fact: that the effort a session ran with is not observable from
inside that session. That was true when written and is not now. Claude Code
exports CLAUDE_EFFORT into every tool-use context as the session's current
effort level, so a Bash call reads it directly.
The premise had a cost. With effort unobservable, the record could only be
completed by asking the operator at session end, which made it block on their
presence -- all four fields or none. That is also the weaker measurement, and
in the same way the previous board line is: the operator reads the effort off
the startup command they typed, so both sources report what was PRESCRIBED
rather than what was RUN. They come apart exactly when the record would be
most interesting, which is what a session that silently ran xhigh under a
board line saying high already showed.
Reading it makes all four fields knowable from inside the ending session, so
the record no longer waits on anyone. The skill does the reading; route.sh
deliberately does NOT default from the variable, because a calculator that
consults its environment is no longer deterministic from its arguments and
the route->board round trip in selftest section 6 rests on that.
Section 13 also pins the trap this opens: skill frontmatter overrides the
session effort while that skill is active, so an effort: field in route's own
SKILL.md would make the reading report the skill instead of the session --
a measurement quietly measuring itself, with nothing in the output to show
it happened.
Also corrects the neighbouring claim that the model is readable from the
environment. There is no CLAUDE_MODEL; the session takes it from what it
knows itself to be running as.
route-selftest 50 -> 56.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Gfa1nvwGXdST2MHvbs6htD
Bumps plugin.json, package.json, the README badge and the three skill
frontmatters, because release-plugin.mjs blocks on a plugin.json that does not
already stand at the target version.
Also closes a gap this release would otherwise have inherited: v0.10.0 shipped
without a CHANGELOG section, and the next-cost fix sat under [Unreleased] even
though it is inside v0.9.0..v0.10.0. Labelling that block 0.11.0 would have
made a second wrong claim, so 0.10.0 now has its own section, written from the
commits in the tag rather than from memory.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016iJoZVmU2guTEZcMghk88z
Version bump across plugin.json, package.json, the README badge and all three
SKILL.md frontmatters.
Also removes the last false statement in the public docs: the board skill still
sold a `~/.claude/scripts/` fallback as portability, but that copy was deleted
when the skill was made the only entry point. Tagging it would have published a
path that does not resolve, next to a sentence claiming it does. One entry point
is the point -- two entries pointed at two copies and made it impossible to know
which one ran.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
Six follow-ups on 0d11838, three of which mattered.
The model-alias gate passed for the wrong reason: after the quoted-alias grep
it fell back to an unanchored grep for the bare word, which matches "opus"
anywhere in `claude --help` and would have reported success even if --model
stopped accepting the alias. A gate that cannot fail is worse than no gate.
Only the quoted form is matched now, and the failing aliases are named.
--last-model and --last-effort were unvalidated free text while the other two
record fields were gated. The next session READS the record back to decide
--opus-xhigh-failed, so a drifted spelling there rebuilds the exact
reader-versus-writer drift this script exists to remove, one field over. Both
are closed sets now: the row table's three model names and the verified effort
levels. That also makes the record's sanitizing dead code, so it is gone.
The skill told future sessions to write the record "every session" while
STATE documented that the effort level is not observable from inside a running
session. A session following both would have fabricated the value, and a
fabricated effort reads back later as a measurement. The skill now says: ask
the operator, and omit the record rather than guess -- explicitly including
that reading it off the previous board line measures what was PRESCRIBED, not
what was RUN.
Also: README said "seven bash scripts" (nine files, six user-facing) and its
skills badge still said 2; selftest counts updated to 50.
Verified, not assumed: the installed plugin cache at 0.9.0 contains only
board and coord-send, so route is not discoverable until a release bumps it --
the smoke test STATE had queued before release would have failed with 127 for
a reason unrelated to the skill. STATE reordered to release-then-test. The
manifest is auto_discover, so no skills array needs an entry.
check-versions.mjs is green (11 OK, 0 ERROR) with the new skill at 0.9.0.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 50, node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
The board line's next-cost field had a reader (board.sh) and no writer, so
its value was retyped by hand every session and drifted into several
competing spellings. Cleaning the data could not fix that: the cause was the
missing write path.
route.sh is that writer. Four scored traits of the next task -- path,
verification, reversibility, scope -- plus a required rationale, run through
the operator's model rubric moved here as the single copy. The row table is a
closed set of six values, so a seventh spelling cannot enter circulation, and
route-selftest.sh section 6 runs the round trip (route emits -> board parses)
inside one repo rather than across two.
Two spellings of one decision come out of one table: the rubric name for the
board line, the CLI alias for the command the operator pastes. Effort levels
are the set pinned in this marketplace; model aliases are gated against the
installed claude rather than hardcoded.
Three things worth naming:
- Escalation is asymmetric. Any single trait escalates; the cheapest row needs
all four at the cheap end. Underkill costs one session, overkill costs quota
every session -- but a wrong architecture call costs more than either.
- The Fable rows fire only from an explicit judgement flag, never inferred
from the last-session record. "The session did not finish" also covers
context exhaustion and operator interrupts, which say nothing about the
model, and Fable runs without an advisor.
- The trait block is a single-line HTML comment because board.sh's NESTE
extractor skips only lines that START with '<!--'. Measured first: a YAML
block or a multi-line comment silently replaces the repo's next step on the
board with "next_task:". Pinned by section 7.
board.sh is untouched as a program; its header now points at route.sh for the
value set so this does not reopen the two-specs defect 305f168 closed.
Selftests: coord 136, board 30, route 47 (new), node 7.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017peNgsxVt1BR4BTuMwiPoX
