coord-sweep.sh shipped in 0.10.0 and had never run once against the real
mailbox. Measured 2026-09-03 with a denominator (docs/2026-09-03-coordination-
debt-measurement.md): 55 mailbox directories, 52 with an inbox/, 27 pending
directed messages - 23 of them pure notices, re-injected at every session start
in repos nobody had opened. The script was correct and unreachable.
WP5 (order 20260902T113745Z-1254925290) asked for a mechanism and named two
candidates. The measurement chose neither, and the first session returned the
order saying so: bulk-ack for pure notices was already built - it is this
script - so the second candidate would have been two copies of one policy, and
the broadcast class converges on its own (reading sets seen), with 34 of 263
unread pairs belonging to two mailboxes no session can hold, so a TTL would
have closed those rather than reduced them. The operator then chose the window
and authorized the schedule.
launchd/com.ktg.repo-mailbox-sweep.plist runs --write --days 14 daily at 05:30.
That is the entire behavioural change. The window is written out in the plist
rather than inherited from the script's default: it is a policy constant chosen
on a measured distribution (30d -> 0 messages, 14d -> 7, 7d -> 13), so a later
change to DAYS=14 must not silently change what an unattended job closes across
51 other repos. It runs BEFORE the 06:00 briefing agent, which scans the same
mailbox this mutates, so the morning briefing reports the debt that remains
rather than counting notices being closed underneath it.
coord-selftest.sh section 38 pins the launchd templates (242 -> 257 checks). A
wrong program path is the one defect here that nothing catches at runtime: the
agent loads cleanly and then silently never runs, with no output to be wrong
and no exit status to read. launchctl list proves an agent is LOADED, never
that it is RIGHT. The section covers every plist in launchd/, not only the new
one - the plist grammar gets one reader rather than one per agent - while
board-selftest.sh section 9 keeps owning brief-nightly.sh's behaviour. Each
plist must name a script that exists here, carry a Label matching its filename,
keep its __CHECKOUT__/__HOME__ placeholders (public mirror), and never point
into the version-pinned plugin cache.
The cache assertion runs on the extracted path, never the whole file - caught
by the check itself on its first run: the brief plist's header explains in
prose why it does not point at the cache, and a file-wide grep read that
explanation as the defect it warns about, the same shape as prose saying
status=done triggering the board's done-guard. Four controls present; mutation-
verified against the real file, where a one-letter typo (coord-sweeep.sh) turns
exactly that check red. XML well-formedness is deliberately not checked:
plutil is not coreutils, and malformed XML already fails loudly at launchctl
load - the opposite of the silent failure this section exists for.
Also fixes the README selftest-checks badge, stale at 529 since 0.25.0; the
real total is 868 (257 + 368 + 73 + 116 + 54).
Suites: coord 257, board 368, route 73, orders 116, guard 54. npm test 11/11.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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
