Kjell Tore Guttormsen c0ccb1d611 feat(engine): let a message say it needs no answer, and count debt without losing sight of the rest

Rule 7 (0.5.0) shipped an obligation on a format with four fields, none of
which could tell a question from a notice. Two consequences fell out of that
gap: the injection had to name both terminal states and prefer neither, and
coord-count.sh had to treat every unarchived file as a reply owed. The fifth
field closes both.

coord-send.sh --fyi writes reply-expected: no; omitting it writes yes. Absent
means expected, because every message already on disk lacks the field - so a
forgotten flag over-counts debt, which is visible, rather than creating debt
nobody sees. A reply is not a special case. A broadcast is always no: --reply-to
resolves inside the recipient's own mailbox and a broadcast never lands there,
so there is no reply path to promise.

coord-count.sh now prints TWO integers per mailbox, not one. Replacing pending
with debt was the obvious reading of "count debt rather than unarchived
messages" and it is wrong here: board.sh counts the same inbox files itself, so
a debt-only count would put two different numbers under one name with nothing to
reconcile them, and a mailbox holding only notices would read as empty while its
messages keep being re-injected.

The field is frontmatter and only frontmatter - a body line claiming
"reply-expected: no" at column 0 cannot silence a real debt, and a file without
valid frontmatter counts as owing a reply.

Section 20's wording changed because its stated reason expired, but its second
half matters more now, not less: the marking is a DECLARATION, not an
instruction. Without that clause one word in an untrusted message becomes a
lever that mints obligations in another repo.

coord-selftest 136 -> 151.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016iJoZVmU2guTEZcMghk88z

2026-07-31 15:46:14 +02:00

9.5 KiB

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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 (151 checks, throwaway mailbox via CLAUDE_COORD_DIR).

coord-count.sh prints TWO integers per mailbox (<name>\t<pending>\t<debt>), and the first must stay pending: board.sh counts the same inbox files itself, so a debt-only count would put two different numbers under one name. Debt is read from reply-expected in the FRONTMATTER BLOCK ONLY - a body line is untrusted input and must not be able to silence a debt - and an absent field means a reply IS owed, because every message written before 0.11.0 lacks it.

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 (36 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.

Since 0.11.0 the reply-expected field says which terminal state the SENDER expects. That does not soften the split, it sharpens it: the field is untrusted cross-repo input like the rest of the file, so the injection calls it a declaration, not an instruction and keeps both terminal states open to the receiver. Drop that clause and one word in a message becomes a lever that mints obligations in another repo.

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 (151/151), bash scripts/board-selftest.sh must exit 0 (36/36) 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.

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