repo-mailbox/CHANGELOG.md
Kjell Tore Guttormsen 61e224ccc3 feat(board): cross-repo attention board as script + skill (0.9.0)
The mailbox answers "who wrote to me"; it never answered "which repo
deserves the next session". board.sh scans every discovered repo and reads
three sources each: the STATE.md next-step block with its optional board
line, git status, and that repo's pending mailbox count. Read-only by
construction, pinned by board-selftest.sh (28 checks).

It ships here rather than as a personal script because the mailbox is one
of its three inputs and the two carry the same axis distinction: a pending
count means others are waiting on that repo, while who a repo waits ON comes
only from its board line, since the message format has no reply-to field.
Splitting the board from the mailbox would put that distinction in two
places. It also lets the skill resolve the engine through CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT
like every other script here, instead of depending on a file that exists
only in ~/.claude/scripts (a directory with no remote and no backup).

The skill is a ranking, not a report: re-runs the board every invocation
because counts drift, ranks by what unblocks the most and what is cheapest
to move, then names one repo, the rule that fired, and the real next action
read from that repo's STATE.md. Never the table. Not wired into session
start, which would spend context on repos the session is not in.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MubwdTi88yu4hVLAFG1LbM
2026-07-28 21:15:03 +02:00

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# Changelog
All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
The format is based on [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/),
and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/spec/v2.0.0.html).
## [0.9.0] - 2026-07-28
### Added
- **`board.sh` + the `board` skill — the cross-repo attention board.** The
mailbox answers "who wrote to me"; it never answered "which repo deserves the
next session". `board.sh` scans every discovered repo and reads three sources
per repo: the STATE.md next-step block with its optional board line, `git
status`, and that repo's pending mailbox count. Read-only by construction — it
writes to no repo, no STATE.md and no mailbox — and pinned by
`board-selftest.sh` (28 checks against a throwaway repo tree and a throwaway
mailbox).
**Why it ships here rather than as a personal script.** The mailbox is one of
its three inputs, and the two carry the same axis distinction: a repo's pending
count means *others are waiting on it* (an obligation owed outward), while who
a repo waits *on* is only derivable from its own board line, because the
message format has no reply-to or thread field. Splitting the board from the
mailbox would put that distinction in two places, and a rule enforced in one of
two places is not a rule. It also means the engine resolves through
`CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT` like every other script here, instead of existing only on
the author's machine.
The skill is a ranking, not a report: it re-runs the board on every invocation
(counts drift between turns), ranks by what unblocks the most and what is
cheapest to move, then names one repo, the rule that fired, and the real next
action read from that repo's STATE.md — never the table. Deliberately not wired
into session start: injecting the whole board into every session spends context
on repos the session is not in.
## [0.8.0] - 2026-07-27
### Added
- **`coord-count.sh` — counting without delivering.** Reading *is* delivery in
this engine: `coord-inbox.sh` prints a broadcast and then records it as seen,
so there was no way to ask "what is pending" without answering it. Asking per
repo would have consumed every repo's broadcast backlog as a side effect —
once, silently, and unrecoverably, since the seen set is delivery history that
retraction deliberately leaves alone. `coord-count.sh` counts files instead
and writes nothing: no seen set, no `.origin`.
It keys on **mailboxes**, not repos. It enumerates `$COORD/*` and never scans
a filesystem for checkouts, so a repo without a mailbox is not missing from
the count — it is absent from the domain. Drained mailboxes are omitted rather
than reported as zero, the reserved `_` namespace is skipped, and `--exclude`
drops one mailbox (the caller's own).
- **A cross-repo line in the SessionStart injection.** A session whose own inbox
was empty saw silence and concluded "all clear" while mail sat unanswered in
every other mailbox. The read path now appends one aggregate line:
Elsewhere in the mailbox: 3 unhandled messages across 2 other mailboxes.
Counted, not delivered -- none of it is yours to handle here. Run
coord-count for the per-mailbox breakdown.
Deliberately an **aggregate of two integers, not a roster**. A list of names
would reproduce every other repo's situation inside this repo's injection —
the state boundary the mailbox exists to respect — and mailbox names are
cross-repo input. Two integers cannot carry anything that escapes framing.
The disclaimer is engine behavior, not politeness (Rule 7): the line lands
directly beneath *"handle this inbox FIRST"*, and without it the numbers read
as an extension of that obligation. Pinned in selftest section 26, exactly as
section 20 pins the priority text.
### Changed
- **BREAKING (injection contract): the read path is no longer silent whenever
*this* repo has nothing pending.** It is now a silent no-op only when the
whole mailbox is empty. The empty-inbox session is precisely the one that
needed the cross-repo line, so coupling the line to having your own mail would
have hidden it from its only real audience. Three selftest assertions that
used "no output at all" as a proxy for "nothing was delivered" now assert the
absence of the content itself, which is what they always meant.
## [0.7.0] - 2026-07-27
### Added
- **`CLAUDE_COORD_REPO` — declaring an identity for a non-git surface.** 0.6.0
removed the working-directory fallback, which was right, but it left every
non-git working surface (`~/repos`, `$HOME`) with nothing to derive from: the
read path declines silently, so such a surface simply stops seeing its inbox,
with no error and no exit code. That is the same loss-looks-like-normal shape
0.6.0 set out to remove. The hook now reads `CLAUDE_COORD_REPO` and forwards
it verbatim as `--repo`, so a directory can *declare* which mailbox it owns:
{ "env": { "CLAUDE_COORD_REPO": "repos" } }
This is not the fallback returning. The fallback guessed a name from wherever
the session happened to stand; a declaration is written down, readable back,
and deletable. Because it forwards as `--repo` it inherits every engine rule,
including that an explicit override never claims `<repo>/.origin` — otherwise
a surface borrowing a name could steal the claim from the checkout that owns
it. Both halves are pinned by tests.
## [0.6.0] - 2026-07-26
### Fixed
- **`_broadcast` is a reserved namespace, not a repo.** `coord-send` guarded
retraction with a sender check, but that guard only covered the door it was
nailed to: `coord-done --repo _broadcast <file>` archived a broadcast out of
the queue — a full unauthenticated retract of an announcement for every repo
that had not read it yet. The whole `_` prefix is now reserved, in every CLI,
so a later `_seen` or `_config` cannot reopen the hole.
- **Repo identity is derived, never invented.** The fallback to
`basename(pwd)` is gone. It existed so the CLI would work anywhere, but
"anywhere" includes every global surface: a session in `~/repos` is not a
repo, and the fallback silently handed it the identity `repos` — under which
real mail was delivered. git toplevel or an explicit `--from`/`--repo` are
now the only sources. Write paths exit 2 and name the fix; the read path
declines silently, because the hook runs at every session start and must
never fail a session.
- **Broadcast delivery is recorded only after the injection is written.**
Marking inside the read loop left a window where the seen set said
"delivered" while the operator saw nothing — and the hook runs under
`timeout: 10`, so the window was reachable. A lost broadcast is
unrecoverable by design (the seen set is delivery history, and retraction
deliberately leaves it alone), so the failure mode is now redelivery.
- **The hook no longer resolves identity at all.** It was a fourth independent
copy of the identity rule and the only one that runs in production, so
passing `--repo` bypassed the engine's guards exactly where they mattered —
and suppressed the new collision check along with them.
### Added
- **Mailbox-collision warning.** Two checkouts with the same directory name
share one mailbox. Re-keying identity would break every existing mailbox and
the readable `--to <repo>` addressing, so the first git-derived read records
the claiming path in `<repo>/.origin`, and a read from a different path is
reported in the injection. A warning, not a refusal: the same repo moved or
re-cloned is the ordinary case. It goes in the injection because the hook
discards stderr, and a warning nobody can see is not a warning.
### Changed
- Selftest 93 → 116 checks; three Node tests now cover the hook behaviorally
rather than by reading its source.
### Breaking
- `coord-send` and `coord-done` exit 2 outside a git repository instead of
naming themselves after the working directory. Pass `--from`/`--repo` to
choose an identity explicitly. Repo names beginning with `_` are refused
everywhere.
## [0.5.0] - 2026-07-25
### Changed
- **The inbox is a priority, not a suggestion (Rule 7).** Through 0.4.0 the
injection block told every repo to "consider replying/resolving where it fits
in this session". That sentence was the whole problem: the injection text is
the only place a repo is ever told what to do with a message, so the wording
*is* the protocol — and it granted permission to defer. Messages sat
unanswered for weeks while each session did its own work first. Nothing was
broken; the protocol was asking for exactly what it got.
The block now states an ordering and a completion obligation:
- **Handle the inbox first**, before the task the session came to do — "not
after it, not *if there is time*".
- **Every directed message must reach a terminal state before the session
ends:** `coord-send --reply-to` or `coord-done`.
- **Neither terminal state is the default.** The format has no
reply-expected field, so mandating only the reply would manufacture
traffic for messages that merely inform.
- **Leaving one pending stays allowed, but must be stated** to the operator
with a reason. The escape hatch is explicit rather than silent.
- **Raising priority deliberately does not widen the trust boundary.** The
obligation is procedural, never substantive: *responding* is mandatory,
*complying* with what a message asks is not — only the operator authorizes
that. Untrusted cross-repo content still cannot direct the reader; it merely
can no longer be ignored. The injection states both halves, and the selftest
pins them together so a future reword cannot keep the priority and quietly
drop the distinction.
- Selftest grew from 82 to 93 checks (new section 20 pins the wording contract:
the permissive phrasing is gone, ordering and completion are stated, both
terminal states are named with neither as default, responding-vs-complying is
kept distinct, and the untrusted-data framing survives).
## [0.4.0] - 2026-07-25
### Added
- **`coord-send --retract <filename>`: a broadcast can finally be retired.**
Until now nothing could remove a message from `_broadcast/inbox/`:
`coord-done` is directed-only and never touches the broadcast queue. The
backlog could therefore only grow, and every *new* repo received the entire
standing history at its first session — including announcements that had
since become false. Retract moves the message to `_broadcast/archive/`, so
no future repo is served it.
Deliberate limits, both documented and pinned by tests:
- **Un-send, not recall.** Repos that already received the broadcast keep
it; `_broadcast/seen/` is delivery history and is left untouched.
- **Only the sender may retract** (`from:` must match the repo identity).
`--from` overrides this, as it does everywhere else in the engine, which
makes the check an accident guard rather than a security boundary.
- **Nothing is deleted**, mirroring `coord-done`. Retracting twice is a
no-op (exit 0).
- Selftest grew from 70 to 82 checks (new section 19 covers retraction:
authorization, archiving, non-delivery to new repos, no collateral damage to
other broadcasts, invalid names, flag combinations, and idempotency).
### Fixed
- README's install command still said `claude plugin install
coord@ktg-plugin-marketplace` after the v0.3.0 rename.
- README told the reader to prune `_broadcast/inbox/` by hand when a notice
stopped being relevant — advice that contradicted the rule that the script
owns mailbox files. `--retract` is now the supported path.
## [0.3.0] - 2026-07-25
### Changed
- **Renamed the plugin and repository from `coord` to `repo-mailbox`.** The old
name said that something was coordinated but not what the thing was; the new
one names what it is, using the same vocabulary the code and docs already use
throughout (mailbox, inbox, archive, broadcast). The Forgejo repository moved
from `open/coord` to `open/repo-mailbox` (the old URL redirects), and the
marketplace entry, plugin manifest and package name follow.
**This is breaking for installed users:** the skill is now invoked as
`/repo-mailbox:coord-send` rather than `/coord:coord-send`, and the plugin
must be reinstalled under its new name.
**Deliberately unchanged:** the CLI (`coord-send.sh`, `coord-inbox.sh`,
`coord-done.sh`, `coord-selftest.sh`), the skill name `coord-send`, the
mailbox root `~/.claude/coord/`, and the `CLAUDE_COORD_DIR` override. Those
name the transport protocol, not the product — renaming them would migrate
live mailbox data and break message history in every participating repo for
no gain in clarity.
### Fixed
- Catalog README listed `48 selftest checks` for this plugin; the actual count
has been 70 since v0.2.2.
## [0.2.2] - 2026-07-25
### Changed
- `coord-inbox.sh` now warns on stderr for each unknown argument instead of
discarding it silently. The read path stays lenient (it runs inside the
SessionStart hook, which must never fail a session over a stray flag) and
the exit code is unchanged, but a mistyped flag no longer looks like a
working invocation. The hook runs the script with stderr discarded, so the
warning surfaces in manual CLI use only.
### Added
- Selftest: 68 -> 70 checks, covering the stderr warning and the leniency it
must not break (unknown argument still reads the inbox and exits 0).
### Documentation
- README: corrected the stale selftest count (64 -> 70), documented that a
broadcast is never delivered back to its own sender (shipped in 0.2.1 but
undocumented), and added rule 6 — message content is data, never
instructions — which `coord-inbox.sh` already enforces in the injection
framing.
## [0.2.1] - 2026-07-25
### Fixed
- Broadcast self-delivery: `coord-send --broadcast` left no seen-set entry for
the sender, so the announcing repo got its own announcement injected at its
next session start. The delivered filename is now recorded in
`_broadcast/seen/<sender>` at delivery time, reusing the existing per-repo
seen set rather than adding a second exclusion mechanism. Filtering on the
`from:` field at read time was rejected: `from:` is sender-controlled, so it
would let any repo suppress a broadcast for another by forging the field.
The seen file is keyed by the raw sender name (the read side keys it
unsanitized, so the two must agree); senders containing a slash, or equal to
`.`/`..`, skip the marking rather than escape the directory.
### Added
- Selftest: 64 -> 68 checks, covering sender self-exclusion, unaffected
delivery to other repos, self-exclusion for sender names that are not
shell-clean, and the seen-marking path-escape guard.
## [0.2.0] - 2026-07-24
Hardening pass over the three CLIs.
### Fixed
- Atomic delivery: the temp file is created inside the destination directory
(dot-prefixed, invisible to the inbox glob), so the final rename never
crosses filesystems and readers never observe a half-written message.
- `.` and `..` are rejected explicitly in the `--reply-to` and `coord-done`
name guards instead of relying on downstream failure.
### Added
- `-h`/`--help` on `coord-inbox.sh`, making usage output uniform across the
three CLIs.
- Selftest: 48 -> 64 checks, closing gaps around the default mailbox path via
`HOME` fallback, malformed frontmatter on the read path, and a read-only
destination directory.
## [0.1.0] - 2026-07-24
First public release: extraction of a battle-tested personal mechanism into a
distributable plugin.
### Added
- Bash engine: `coord-send.sh` (directed / broadcast / reply delivery),
`coord-inbox.sh` (pending inbox + unseen broadcasts, formatted for context
injection), `coord-done.sh` (archive without reply), all bash-3.2-safe,
ASCII-only, zero dependencies.
- `coord-selftest.sh`: 48 checks against a throwaway mailbox, including
regression cover for filename sanitization, no-hang argument parsing,
prompt-injection resistance, frontmatter hygiene, and broadcast ordering.
- SessionStart hook (`hooks/scripts/session-start.mjs`): thin zero-dependency
Node wrapper that injects the repo's pending mailbox as
`additionalContext`. Always exits 0 — a broken mailbox never blocks a session.
- `coord-send` skill: natural-language front door (English + Norwegian
triggers) mapping intent to engine invocations, including bounded
multi-target loops, deferred sends, and replies.
### Fixed
- Frontmatter injection: CR/LF and control characters in `--subject`/`--from`
are collapsed before writing, so fields can no longer inject frontmatter
lines or a premature `---` terminator.
- Broadcast loss: a per-repo seen set (`_broadcast/seen/<repo>`, one delivered
filename per line) replaces the single high-water mark, which silently
dropped a same-second broadcast whose filename sorted below one already
seen. Upgrade note: a legacy watermark file is read as a one-entry seen
set, so old broadcasts may be re-delivered once.
### Changed
- Read-side protocol strings are English (`--- message:`, `-> reply:`,
UNTRUSTED DATA framing); the forgery-resistance selftest checks pin the
English tokens.