A run ended with a clean exit 0 while the display title read "Loop interval
optimization", leaving four files uncommitted in the tree. Nothing crashed --
the loop was ended, and ending the loop ends the run: the container exits and
there is no next iteration.
The prompt said the agent did not NEED to arm a wakeup. It never said not to
stop one, and an agent that reads about a pacing control will reasonably try to
use it. Now explicit: do not call ScheduleWakeup at all, and if the cadence is
wrong, say so and leave it to a human -- the interval is set outside the prompt.
Recorded with the date and the symptom, because "the container exited cleanly"
looks like a finished job rather than a self-inflicted stop.
Corrects the split I got wrong in b5a1938. The container is for reverse
engineering, now focused on the menu port; a SEPARATE agent builds the port from
its investigation results. My previous version had the container agent writing
the exporter and the Godot project, which is not the intent.
This lands on the research/engineering line that was already in the estimate:
the container agent takes the research half, the port agent the engineering half.
docs/port/MISSION.md is now a list of open QUESTIONS (Q1-Q9) rather than build
milestones, ordered by what blocks the port earliest -- the keyframe time unit,
which build is which screen state, paint order for the six screens, button ->
GamePart, navigation semantics, the boot sequence driver, transitions, menu
audio bindings, and video binding. Each is done when a written result with
evidence exists, not when something compiles. S1, the Ready Room probe, stays
gated at one iteration and a go/no-go.
Most of these are BEHAVIOUR questions -- timing, transitions, what a d-pad press
does at the end of a list -- so the mission and the loop prompt both push hard
on measuring the oracle rather than reasoning from the file.
docs/port/FORMAT.md is deleted. The export schema is the port agent's design and
was not mine to specify. It is replaced by docs/port/HANDOFF.md, the single page
the port agent reads: a status table, what is already settled and can be relied
on today, and the facts that will trip the port up (the WMV3/WMA Pro intro, the
Static.slb size over-declaration, the voice-vs-music downmix, JNGL_001).
The derived/authored idea survives as the thing it always was -- a finding, not
a design. Every answer must be classified DECODED, MEASURED or UNDECODABLE-with-
reach, and never a fourth thing, because measured and undecodable both mean the
port agent is authoring that value and has to know it. Labelling a guess as a
decode would put it into the port wearing the badge of a measurement.
Reverts the Godot install from the RE container, its AGENT.md section, and the
export/ gitignore entry -- none of that belongs on this side of the wall.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sets a new mission: boot the real disc through developer splash -> intro video
-> title -> main menu -> submenus in Godot 4, interactively, with no gameplay,
no 3D and no emulator.
docs/port/MISSION.md defines it -- eight gated milestones, each finished by an
ARTIFACT rather than by compiling, plus the Ready Room as an explicitly gated
stretch goal with a one-iteration probe that decides go/no-go. GP_READY_ROOM is
1106 entries with 6 recoverable names and is ISL-scripted, so it is either a
week or a quarter, and the agent must not start it on its own authority.
Architecture, per the user's decision: the Godot project is INDEPENDENT of the
Rust viewer and never reads a disc format. An offline Rust exporter converts the
disc into open formats; Godot reads only those. No GDExtension, no Rust in the
Godot project, and sylpheed-viewer is off limits -- it stays the human's
verification tool with its static-data rule intact.
docs/port/FORMAT.md specifies the open format, versioned, because modding is the
port's second goal and that makes the layout a deliverable rather than a temp
directory: JSON over XML (Godot parses JSON natively; its XMLParser is SAX),
names never hashes, provenance in every generated file, and unknowns listed
rather than guessed.
The discipline the whole thing rests on is the derived/authored split. `export/`
is regenerated wholesale and never hand-edited; `authored/` is hand-written and
survives a re-export. Three things this milestone needs are NOT on the disc in
any decoded form -- which button does what, paint order, and menu sound cues --
so they live in `authored/` with a stated `why`. Deleting an authored entry
because the exporter can now emit it IS the measure of progress.
`export/` is gitignored: it is generated from the user's own disc and this stays
a clean-room repo.
Container: adds a pinned Godot 4 (windowed under Xvfb for screenshots, plus a
headless wrapper). ffmpeg already carries libtheora, which is the video target --
Godot 4 plays only Ogg Theora natively and the disc's ADV.wmv is WMV3/WMA Pro.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The autonomous agent's loop prompt had grown to ~9 000 words of accumulated
findings, refutations and traps. That is a symptom, not a style: it was doing
the job the corpus should do, in the one place that dies with the container.
Three concrete failures followed from it, and each gets a structural fix rather
than a louder instruction.
1. IT REPEATED WORK IT HAD ALREADY DONE.
The "do not revive" list and the method traps existed ONLY in the prompt, so
nothing pointed a fresh iteration at them. Extracted verbatim into two
tracked files:
docs/re/REFUTED.md 105 claims tested and dead, grouped by subject so a
grep for your noun finds the neighbourhood
docs/re/METHOD.md the traps already paid for -- controls, inference,
searching, reading data, runtime
Both are linked from INDEX.md, and the loop prompt now opens by requiring
them to be read. This is the fix for "re-derived something already known":
the knowledge is now where the next iteration looks, not in a context window.
2. IT FORGOT TO ARM THE NEXT WAKEUP.
The prompt tried to solve this by shouting at itself in the first line. The
real fix is to stop asking: `loose` now defaults to a FIXED interval (45m),
so the harness owns the cadence and a forgotten ScheduleWakeup cannot end the
run. SYLPH_LOOP_INTERVAL= (empty) restores self-pacing.
3. IT COULD NOT PUBLISH, SO THE WORK ONLY EXISTED IN THE CONTAINER.
New `push-work`, plus a read-only credentials mount
(SYLPH_GIT_CREDENTIALS, default ~/.sylph-git-credentials). It pushes the
CURRENT branch only, refuses anything that is not auto/*, and never
force-pushes -- so the consolidated line stays a human's decision and a
confused iteration cannot rewrite history. The loop prompt now requires a
push on every iteration that commits, rather than at the end of some longer
arc, which is exactly when a container dies.
The prompt itself drops from ~9 000 words to 85 lines and, more importantly,
stops accumulating: findings go in the corpus, and the prompt points at it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
`./sylph-agent loose [task]` starts Claude Code detached with
--dangerously-skip-permissions, running /loop on loop-task.md: work the RE
backlog one item at a time, commit to auto/* branches, never push, record
withdrawn results rather than deleting them. `logs`/`attach`/`stop` to watch and
end it. Runs -d WITHOUT --rm so the transcript survives the container exiting —
for an unattended run that is the only record of what happened.
Two things had to be fixed for an agent to survive being left alone.
MEMORY CONTINUITY. The project is now bind-mounted twice: at /work, and at its
own host path. Claude Code derives its per-project state key from the working
directory, so running at /work handed the agent an empty project instead of the
accumulated one. Verified: a loose run now reports MEMORY=yes and reads back the
same branch and backlog as the host.
FOUR INTERACTIVE GATES, each a silent permanent hang with nobody at the keyboard
-- no error, no log line, just a container that looks healthy and does nothing:
theme picker hasCompletedOnboarding + lastOnboardingVersion. Re-fires
whenever the container's Claude Code is a different version
to the host's, which is the normal case.
folder trust projects.<path>.hasTrustDialogAccepted
bypass disclaimer answered in a pty by bin/claude-autonomous. It has no config
key by design -- it wants a person to accept once, and the
person did so by launching this.
fullscreen upsell fullscreenUpsellSeenCount. This one fires MID-SESSION, after
the pty wrapper has already handed over, so it cannot be
answered the same way.
Config key names were read out of the shipped binary's own strings, not guessed.
The pty wrapper matches SINGLE WORDS. Claude Code draws its UI with
absolute-column escapes between words, so the prompt arrives as
`Yes,\x1b[13GI\x1b[15Gaccept` and a multi-word pattern never matches -- failing
in a way indistinguishable from the wrapper not running at all. It stops
matching once the session is live so nothing later is answered by accident.
~/.claude.json is now mounted read-only at a staging path and copied in, so the
container cannot rewrite the host config. Credentials stay shared read-write in
~/.claude, which is what token refresh and memory continuity need.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
