Commit Graph
9 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 00160739de feat(skills): a files arm — progressive disclosure through Read, not a deferred tool
deploy / test (push) Successful in 5m18s
deploy / build (push) Successful in 5m36s
The `index` arm retrieves through `ReadMcpResourceTool`, which is DEFERRED:
absent from the agent's default tool list until `ToolSearch` loads it. Across
three matched production runs (same recipe, same task, same three offered
uris) it retrieved 1 skill in 9 chances:

    01a07812  delegation forced      no instruction    0/3
    01a0842e  no delegation          no instruction    1/3
    01a09877  no delegation          told to load it   0/3

The third run is the decisive one. The preamble said in plain words to run
ToolSearch first; all three prompts carried it; zero ToolSearch calls, and the
three reasoning narratives never mention skills at all. The section was not
declined, it was never engaged with. Instruction is not the lever.

`Read` is a core tool. Never deferred, and every one of those agents used it.
So this arm keeps progressive disclosure exactly as `index` has it — a name, a
`when_to_use`, and a pointer the agent has to follow — and changes only what
the pointer is: a path under /mission/skills instead of an MCP uri. The bodies
are written into the container at launch (every visible skill, one tar upload;
bindings resolve per agent at turn time so a per-mission subset is not knowable
here) and a `Read` of that path is a tapped tool call, so Trigger is exactly as
observable as before.

A third arm and not a replacement, selected per mission like the others, so
the comparison runs against one binary. `resolve` falls back to `inline` when
the files were not written, for the reason `index` does: a pointer to nothing
reads as an agent ignoring its skills.

The writer and reader of a path are one pair of functions
(`skill_file_path` / `skill_from_file_path`), matched by the scorer through
the same seam `parse_uri` uses, and the end-to-end test fails when the matcher
is broken. `Mode::is_retrieval` exists so the next arm cannot silently inherit
`inline`'s "not observable" for what is a miss.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WZb5A2kfVfjpdwSochkuHz
2026-09-12 22:33:41 -05:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 d341640255 fix(mission_fs): drop build output when collecting work back from a container
deploy / test (push) Successful in 4m25s
deploy / build (push) Successful in 5m39s
`pack_dir` (host -> container) skips `transport_excludes`; `copy_out`
(container -> host) is the raw Docker archive API and carries the whole tree,
`target/` included. The asymmetry was invisible for as long as the runtime
image had no cmake — nothing could compile, so no `target/` existed.

The moment missions could actually build, every collection died on a build
artifact:

    failed to unpack `…/repo/target/debug/build/ahash-…/build_script_build-…`

`phase_runner` then correctly refused to capture, rather than record a stale
tree as an empty diff — so mission 01a00c57's coding phase, which had done the
work, delivered nothing and retried forever. A fix that let missions compile
created a delivery failure one layer down.

`unpack_into` now skips excluded entries by NAME at any depth (a workspace has
a `target/` per crate) and logs how many it dropped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-16 15:09:24 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 85a6038c08 fix(missions): create /mission before copying the checkout in
`copy_in` cannot create its own destination, so a mission whose container
had no /mission directory failed its checkout sync outright. In copy mode
that is how the agent gets the code at all, so the phase launched against
an empty tree.

Exec `mkdir -p /mission` as root first. Idempotent, and it costs one exec
on a path that already shells out.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-16 07:25:58 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 4dec77ae6d fix(missions): give repo-less container missions the workspace they are promised
Every agent on a research_only mission refused to work, each reporting it was
"in Claude Code", had no /mission/repo, and only had Read/Edit/Bash. All three
statements were true. The run still recorded completed — 5 turns, 7.4k tokens,
0 artifacts, no error.

The machinery is correct when a repo IS bound (verified on a live prod
per-mission container: /mission/repo present, all 5 agents pinned). Only the
repo-less path was broken, in three layers that disagreed by construction:

- sync_in no-oped without a host checkout and copy mode does not bind /mission,
  so NOTHING created /mission/repo. The microVM tier already creates it, for the
  stated reason that "the guest needs the workspace to exist before the agent
  writes into it". Creating it host-side also un-breaks sync_out, equally a
  no-op before, so work survives across phases instead of being wiped.
- pin_agent_workspaces returned Ok after pinning ZERO agents, so the
  deliberately-fatal guard in mission_orchestrator could never fire. Its error
  text already described the exact outcome we got.
- The prompt advertised ZeroClaw tool names and explicitly denied `bash`, while
  every executor ends in `claude -p`: microVM passes Read/Edit/Write/Bash/Agent,
  session passes Read/Edit/Write/Bash, and claude_cli agents get Claude Code's
  native toolset — ZeroClaw's gating never reaches the subprocess. It was
  telling agents to use missing tools and avoid present ones.

And it went green because mission_outputs logged the failed collect and
continued — with the fail-empty rule and the NO-OUTPUT marker both BELOW that
continue, so the phase was retried forever and never failed. The retry is now
bounded by a grace window off completed_at.

Verified end to end: mission completed, agent wrote
/mission/repo/research/firecracker_vs_docker.md, collected and registered as a
document artifact (6.6 kB of real content).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-13 10:46:45 -07:00
Omar Sobh 4efcde9d4f fix(missions): #54 — the worker was killing live microVM runs at 180 seconds
My hypothesis in #54 was WRONG, and it was wrong because I built it on a bad
measurement: `grep -c 'microvm phase'` returned 0, so I concluded the completion
log never printed and blamed the 15-minute reaper. The line was there all along, at
14:17:45. The real cause is worse.

`requeue_stale` has NO TIER FILTER. A microvm run's `updated_at` is written once at
insert and never again — it is driven by a `tokio::spawn` that owns it start to
finish, and nothing in `microvm_executor` writes `topology_runs`. So at 180s the
sweeper declared a perfectly healthy run stale and flipped it to `queued`;
`claim_next_queued` (no tier filter either) handed it to the worker; `run_job`
tried to parse the microvm graph placeholder, which `TopologyGraph` cannot
deserialize; and it failed the run with "missing or invalid graph".

Mission 019fd43e: run created 14:11:16, mission failed ~14:14:46. 210 seconds — the
180s window plus a tick. The agent went on working and finished at 14:17:45 with
three modules written, by which time the phase was already dead and the VM was
orphaned. A firecracker process was still alive 1h37m later.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE PART: every microVM mission that appeared to work this session
did so only by finishing inside three minutes. The 90-second ones dodged this. The
harness scenario dodges it. Nothing about that was visible.

`WORKER_DRIVEN_TIERS` (team, company, org, swarm, compare) is now the allowlist for
all three sweep paths — claim, requeue, reap. An allowlist rather than a denylist so
the next self-driven tier is safe by default instead of exposed until someone
remembers the file. `tier='session'` had exactly the same exposure and is covered
too. A unit test asserts microvm and session are NOT in it, next to the code that
inserts them.

Two more fixes from the same wreckage:

  - `destroy` reported `killed: pgid.is_some()` — true whenever there was a pgid to
    signal, whether or not anything died. It now sends the signal, polls /proc for
    the group leader, retries, and reports what it OBSERVED; `signalled` keeps the
    old meaning so "nothing to kill" is distinguishable from "it would not die".
  - the run-status update is now guarded with `AND status <> 'cancelled'`. An
    operator cancelling is a decision; this task reporting an outcome minutes later
    is an observation, and it must not overwrite one with the other.

And the root cause of the collect timeout itself: `mission_fs::pack_dir` shipped
`target/` in both directions. `mission_delivery` has excluded build output from the
DIFF since day one; the TRANSPORT never knew. The host checkout was 9.4 MB of which
8.9 MB was `target/`, tarred and base64'd over vsock each way. `EXCLUDED_PATHS` is
now one list shared by both layers, matched on directory name at any depth so a
workspace's per-crate `target/` dirs are all covered.

483 tests pass, clippy clean.
2026-08-06 09:01:04 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 4f6719c80e feat(missions): make copy-in/copy-out the default filesystem model
Copy mode shipped opt-in so that changing how every mission receives its
code required someone to type it. Four production missions and a
fail-closed harness later, opt-in is the riskier setting: the bind path
is the one with four documented work-loss incidents, and leaving it as
the default means the untested path runs whenever nobody sets the
variable. `CLAWMATES_MISSION_FS=bind` still selects it; anything else —
unset, empty, misspelt — gets copy mode, so a typo lands on the safer
path rather than the one being retired.

Also fixes a real leak found while scoping the deletion below: the git
helper built its `safe.directory` argument with `Box::leak`, justified as
"the process is short-lived". That is true of a CLI and false of cm-api,
which is a long-running server — so it leaked one allocation per git
call, growing with every phase of every mission.

The A5 deletion is NOT done here, and two of its items should never be
done:

  - `scrub_remote_credentials` is a security control, not a uid
    workaround. Copy mode uploads the whole `.git` into a container the
    agent controls as root, which makes stripping the token from
    `.git/config` more necessary, not less.
  - `has_local_work` / `checkout_in_use` guard `fetch_and_reset` at every
    phase launch and have nothing to do with who writes the checkout.
    The host checkout still persists across phases under copy mode —
    mission `019fcf62` shows the marker firing there. Deleting them
    reintroduces PRIOR-PHASE-WORK-WAS-LOST.

The rest (`share_repository_across_uids`, `clear_stale_commit_editmsg`,
`-c safe.directory`) are genuinely obsolete under copy mode but stay
while `bind` remains selectable: a workaround may only be deleted once
the situation it works around can no longer be chosen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-04 18:29:29 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 1253595ba7 fix(missions): stop three launch failures from passing as success
A verification run against the deployed stack found a chain mission whose
phase 0 reported `completed` with zero files, no commit error and no push
error — indistinguishable from a phase that correctly had nothing to do.
Three separate defects had to line up, each of them the same shape: a
failure sharing its representation with a legitimate negative result.

1. `pin_agent_workspaces` embedded the whole config in one `sh -c` argv.
   That works until the file grows — config gains a block per provisioned
   claw — then fails with `argument list too long`. Now written through
   the tar upload API, which has no argv limit, so the failure mode is
   gone rather than merely further away.

2. A failed pin was logged "(continuing)". Without the pin, agents write
   to their sandboxes and the committer finds nothing in /mission/repo —
   the mission cannot deliver, so the launch now fails where someone is
   still looking. The restart that applies the pin is fatal for the same
   reason.

3. `capture_phase_diff_at` swallowed `git diff` failures with
   `unwrap_or_default`, so an unreadable base landed `empty: true,
   files_changed: 0` — byte-identical to an honest no-op. The error is now
   recorded as `diff_error`, and an empty patch that came from a failed
   diff is no longer trusted to mean an unchanged tree.

Adds scripts/verify-mission-delivery.sh, which found #1 and #2 on its
first real run. Its probes are fail-closed: no placeholder values, a
self-test that proves the uid probe can detect the split it looks for,
and FAIL-NORUN for a scenario that never executed. Its own first version
had this bug too — a `die` inside `$(...)` exited the subshell, so a run
that could not authenticate printed "all checks passed" and exited 0.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-04 18:01:02 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 7e07c389c6 feat(missions): wire copy-in/copy-out behind CLAWMATES_MISSION_FS=copy
With the flag set, ensure_container omits the /mission bind, the checkout
is pushed into the container at phase launch, and the agent's work is
pulled back before capture.

The simplification that makes this small: sync_out unpacks over the SAME
host path the checkout came from. The host directory stays a server-owned
staging area with exactly one writer, and capture_phase_diff_at needs no
change at all — it still finds a normal checkout exactly where it always
has. Delivery, gating, commit and push are untouched.

Two failures are deliberately loud rather than silent:

- copy-IN failure fails the phase launch. Continuing would start a phase
  against an empty directory, and the agent would cheerfully report having
  done work on a repo that was not there.
- copy-OUT failure SKIPS capture. Capturing anyway would diff a stale host
  tree and record "no changes" for work that exists — success reported for
  nothing, which is the exact failure mode this codebase keeps paying for.

Opt-in: the bind path is what production has run since the beginning, and
the test asserts a near-miss value leaves it there rather than silently
switching every mission.

414 tests, clippy clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-04 15:41:47 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 389b41f8e6 feat(missions): copy-in/copy-out primitive for the mission checkout
The first half of removing the shared bind mount. Not wired yet — this
adds the mechanism and its tests.

One cause, four fixes so far: .git/objects permission denied
(core.sharedRepository), the capture base being overwritten each phase,
COMMIT_EDITMSG root-owned, and reset --hard deleting a prior phase's work
(.git/clawmates-in-use). core.sharedRepository was never a general
solution — it covers objects and refs, and every OTHER file git touches
is a fresh opportunity. Copy-in/copy-out removes the cause instead: the
agent owns its filesystem with no second writer.

Measured before building, because the plan named copy cost as the open
risk: a real 65 MB checkout of this repo copies in 0.23s and out 0.18s on
gw-04. Not a risk at this size; re-measure an order of magnitude larger.
No compression — the payload crosses a local socket, so gzip would spend
CPU to save nothing.

Two safety properties, both tested:

- The archive comes back from a container the agent controls as ROOT, so
  it is untrusted input. A `../ESCAPED` entry must not write outside the
  destination. The test writes the tar header bytes by hand because the
  tar crate refuses to BUILD such an entry through its safe API — which
  is reassuring, but means the hostile case has to be constructed the way
  an attacker would.
- Symlinks are packed as links, never dereferenced. Following them on
  copy-IN would smuggle host files into the container; the test plants a
  host secret behind a symlink and asserts its contents never appear in
  the archive.

Ownership is deliberately not preserved on unpack: the archive's uids are
the container's root, and re-applying them on the host would recreate the
exact uid split this exists to remove.

413 tests, clippy clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-04 15:15:22 -07:00