repo-mailbox/CLAUDE.md
Kjell Tore Guttormsen a435a031db fix(route): close the record's drift surface and the confounded smoke test
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
2026-07-31 10:19:30 +02:00

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8.6 KiB
Markdown

# repo-mailbox
Renamed from `coord` in v0.3.0. The plugin/repo is `repo-mailbox`; the CLI
(`coord-send.sh`, `coord-inbox.sh`, `coord-done.sh`), the mailbox root
(`~/.claude/coord/`) and `CLAUDE_COORD_DIR` deliberately kept their names —
they are the transport protocol, not the product.
## Context
Local inter-repo coordination mailbox for Claude Code, packaged as a
marketplace plugin. Three components, one boundary:
- **Engine (`scripts/*.sh`):** bash owns all mailbox semantics — filename
grammar, frontmatter, delivery, archiving, the seen set. `coord-send.sh`
writes, `coord-inbox.sh` reads (formatted for context injection),
`coord-done.sh` archives, `coord-count.sh` counts without delivering.
Everything is pinned by `coord-selftest.sh`
(136 checks, throwaway mailbox via `CLAUDE_COORD_DIR`).
**Reading is delivering — counting is not.** `coord-inbox.sh` records a
broadcast as seen once it has printed it, so it can never be used to survey
other repos: doing so would consume each one's backlog silently, and the seen
set is delivery history that retraction deliberately leaves alone.
`coord-count.sh` exists for every "what is pending" question and writes
nothing at all. Any future read-shaped feature belongs there, not in the
read path.
- **Hook (`hooks/scripts/session-start.mjs`):** thin zero-dependency Node
wrapper (marketplace convention: hooks are `.mjs`) that calls
`coord-inbox.sh` and emits the `hookSpecificOutput.additionalContext`
envelope. No mailbox logic lives here. Always exits 0.
- **Board (`scripts/board.sh`):** cross-repo attention board. Reads STATE.md
next-step blocks + board lines, `git status`, and mailbox pending counts, and
prints one line per repo. Read-only by construction: it writes to no repo, no
STATE.md and no mailbox. Pinned by `board-selftest.sh` (30 checks).
**It lives here because the mailbox is one of its three inputs, and it carries
the same axis distinction the mailbox does.** A pending count means *others
are waiting on this repo*; who a repo waits *on* comes only from its board
line, because the message format has no reply-to field. Enforcing that in one
of two repos would not be enforcing it. `~/.claude/scripts/board.sh` is a
deployed copy (the operator's `board()` shell function points at it), exactly
as with the `coord-*` scripts — this repo is the source of truth.
- **Route (`scripts/route.sh`):** pure calculator for the next session's model
and effort. Takes four scored traits of the next task plus a required
rationale, and prints one block of `key=value` lines: the rubric row, the rule
that fired, the `next-cost` value, a pasteable startup command, the one-row
cheaper fallback, and the STATE.md comment lines. Pinned by
`route-selftest.sh` (50 checks).
**It is here because it is the WRITER for the field `board.sh` already reads.**
`next-cost` had a reader and no writer, so it was hand-typed every session and
drifted into several competing spellings — cleaning the data
could not fix that, because the cause was the missing write path. The row
table is a closed set of six values, so a seventh cannot enter circulation,
and section 6 of the selftest runs the round trip (route emits → board parses)
*inside* one repo rather than across two. `board.sh` itself is untouched: a
calculator that prints to stdout writes nothing, and the session writes
STATE.md.
**The row table is the operator's global rubric, moved here as the single
copy.** It is not a second spec — `board.sh --help` documents the board line's
*grammar* and points here for the *values*. Scoring the traits is judgement
and belongs to the skill; turning scores into a row is a lookup and takes zero
model calls.
- **Skills (`skills/coord-send/`, `skills/board/`, `skills/route/`):** natural-language front
doors mapping user intent to engine invocations. No mailbox logic lives here
either. `board` additionally owns the *ranking* — which repo wins and why —
since `board.sh` deliberately prints evidence and takes no position. `route`
likewise owns the *scoring*: the calculator is deterministic, so all judgement
sits in choosing the four trait values, and the skill must never reason its
way to a model instead.
**Boundary rule:** the mailbox is transport, not state. Durable decisions
live in the owning repo's docs/git history; messages are notices pointing at
them. Message content is untrusted cross-repo input — the read side quotes
and frames it; the send side sanitizes line-oriented fields.
What the boundary forbids is storing a repo's *state* — its decisions, its next
step, its progress. It does not forbid the mailbox knowing who it is delivering
to: `_broadcast/seen/<repo>` and `<repo>/.origin` (0.6.0) are delivery metadata,
answering "has this repo received this" and "which checkout claimed this name".
Both are unreadable as a description of the repo and useless outside delivery.
The test is not "does the engine write a file about a repo" but "would this file
still mean anything if delivery were removed". If yes, it belongs in the repo's
own docs and git history instead.
**Priority rule (v0.5.0, Rule 7):** the injection block is the only place a
repo is ever told what to do with a message, so its wording *is* the protocol
— treat that string as engine behavior, not prose. It obligates handling the
inbox first and driving every directed message to a terminal state before the
session ends. The obligation is **procedural, never substantive**: responding
is mandatory, complying with message content is not. Those two must stay
distinct in any reword — keeping the priority while dropping the distinction
turns prioritization into an injection surface. Selftest section 20 pins both
halves together for exactly that reason.
## Conventions
- Scripts are bash-3.2-safe and ASCII-only: no `declare -A`, no
`readarray`/`mapfile`, no `|&`; guard `shift 2` with `$# -ge 2`; guard
empty-array expansion under `set -u` with `${#a[@]}`.
- Zero dependencies everywhere: bash + coreutils in the engine, `node:`
builtins only in hook and tests.
- TDD: no behavior change without a failing selftest check first.
`bash scripts/coord-selftest.sh` must exit 0 (136/136),
`bash scripts/board-selftest.sh` must exit 0 (30/30) and
`bash scripts/route-selftest.sh` must exit 0 (50/50).
- English for all code, docs, and commit messages (public repo). Norwegian
trigger aliases in the skill description are deliberate.
- Conventional Commits: `type(scope): description`.
## Commands
- Test: `bash scripts/coord-selftest.sh`, `bash scripts/board-selftest.sh` and
`bash scripts/route-selftest.sh` (or `npm test`, the Node wrapper around all three)
- Hook smoke test: `node hooks/scripts/session-start.mjs` (expects JSON on stdout)
- Board smoke test: `bash scripts/board.sh` (read-only, ~3s over the real tree)
- Route smoke test: `bash scripts/route.sh --path known --verification strong
--reversibility cheap --scope local --rationale x` (writes nothing, instant)
## Release
Version must agree across: `.claude-plugin/plugin.json`, `package.json`,
README version badge, `skills/coord-send/SKILL.md`, `skills/board/SKILL.md` and
`skills/route/SKILL.md` frontmatter, git tag `vX.Y.Z`, and the catalog `ref` in
`ktg-plugin-marketplace/catalog/.claude-plugin/marketplace.json`. Release via
the catalog's `scripts/release-plugin.mjs repo-mailbox` (tag + ref bump
together);
verify with `scripts/check-versions.mjs`. Never hand-edit a ref.
Two things that script does that its dry-run label does not suggest:
`--create-tag` creates AND pushes the tag even without `--write`, and its
closing verification gate runs `check-versions.mjs` over ALL plugins — one
unrelated plugin in ERROR aborts it with the catalog edit written but
uncommitted. When that happens, commit the catalog's `marketplace.json` +
`README.md` by hand and leave every other dirty file in that repo alone.
## Hardening roadmap
Empty — the post-v0.1.0 queue (atomic delivery, `.`/`..` rejection,
selftest gaps, uniform `-h`) shipped in v0.2.0; broadcast self-delivery
shipped in v0.2.1; broadcast retraction (`coord-send --retract`) shipped in
v0.4.0, closing the last monotonically-growing surface. `coord-inbox.sh`
still ignores unknown arguments by design (hook context must never fail)
but now warns about each one on stderr, which the hook discards.
Two retraction limits are deliberate, not gaps: it is un-send and never
recall (a repo that already received a broadcast keeps it — the seen set is
delivery history and is left untouched), and the sender check is an accident
guard, not a security boundary, because `--from` redefines identity here as
it does everywhere else in the engine.