The decoder died mid-task and it took four separate findings to explain, each
of which read as something else:
1. OOM-KILLED, REPORTED AS A CLEAN EXIT. `OOMKilled: true` with **ExitCode 0**.
So `--restart on-failure` would treat a memory kill as a successful finish
and leave the agent down -- the policy has to be `unless-stopped`.
2. THE JOB CAP WAS SET AND THEN REMOVED THREE LINES LATER. build-reborn has
always exported CARGO_BUILD_JOBS, but a raw `cargo test --release -p
sylpheed-formats` never reaches the wrapper. Adding `-e CARGO_BUILD_JOBS` to
the launcher did not help either: the entrypoint recomputes and exports over
it unconditionally. An explicit value now wins, and says so in the log.
3. THE MEMORY CONSTANT WAS WRONG. `mem_gib * 2 / 3` assumes ~1.5 GB per job;
release rustc on this workspace needs ~2 GB, and 4 jobs in 6 GB is what died.
Divisor is now 2.
4. `--continue` CANNOT RESUME AN ABRUPT DEATH, which is the only kind we get.
It resolves through ~/.claude.json's per-project `history`/`lastSessionId`,
and MEASURED mid-session both are None -- they are written at a graceful
shutdown. A killed container never writes them, so `--continue` answered
"No conversation found to continue" with 33 MB of transcripts in the volume
beside it. Persisting .claude.json did not help, because the fields were
never populated in the first place; that attempt is removed rather than left
in looking useful.
The TRANSCRIPTS are durable and named by session id, so the entrypoint reads
the id off the newest one for its cwd and passes `--resume <id>`. Verified
on both agents: each reattached to its exact prior session and appended to
the same file rather than opening a new one.
The /loop prompt is still passed alongside `--resume`, so the loop is RE-ARMED
rather than merely restored -- a resumed conversation with no wake-up scheduled
answers once and stops, which looks like resuming and is not.
Restarting into the same death is guarded at the other end: a start less than
120 s after the previous one begins FRESH instead of continuing back into
whatever killed it. That fired correctly during this work.
On resume the agent is told it was restarted, that its in-progress work is
uncommitted in the tree, that any build or capture it had running did not
finish and its absence is not a result, and which wrapper to prefer over a raw
release build.
The decoder had neither, and reported the gap precisely: four scripts in this
repo READ /work/xenia-rs/sylpheed.db and nothing produces it, so the whole static
PPC route was consumers with the producer missing.
Both exist on the host and are now mounted read-only: the 586 MB database (25 481
functions, 851 classes with RTTI, EH tables, imports, 1.8M indirect-dispatch
candidates) and the decompressed image.
The image is the more useful of the two. It is a FLAT VA DUMP -- file offset =
VA - 0x82000000 -- so reading a known address needs no XEX decrypt, no LZX, and
no booted emulator. The decoder had independently recovered the same bytes by
dumping /dev/shm/xenia_memory_* and validating against the GamePart table, which
is good work and a sound method, but it noted itself that needing a running
emulator is a bad dependency for something the entire static corpus rests on. It
does not need one.
Also recorded that an earlier claim the .pe was STALE was tested and refuted, so
nobody re-litigates it, and that instructions.raw is an INT rather than hex.
Written down as reference material, explicitly NOT a deliverable: they are
read-only, they come from outside the repository, and a fresh checkout elsewhere
has neither. Reimplementing the producer belongs in sylpheed-formats, and until
it exists every static finding rests on an artefact this project cannot rebuild.
Three defects, all mine, found by checking instead of assuming.
**They never exchanged a word.** SendMessage=0, ListAgents=0 across both new
sessions. PROTOCOL.md specified in detail what a message MAY and MAY NOT do and
never said how to send one or that the other agent was addressable -- they knew
that last time only because the human told them directly, and rebuilding with
fresh volumes wiped it. Policy without mechanism is prose. Now documented with
the two addresses, a worked example, and an instruction to introduce themselves
on the first iteration rather than waiting to have a question.
**The decoder lost the disc and the ISO.** They used to arrive inside the project
mount and silently stopped when /work became a clone. Silently is the word: the
disc-gated tests SELF-SKIP without SYLPHEED_DISC and report green, so a whole
test suite would have passed while measuring nothing. Both are now mounted
explicitly, the ISO at a stable path so run-canary does not depend on host
directory names.
**Both agents shared one Claude state directory.** They share the host's
~/.claude, and once both working directories became /work they resolved to the
same projects/-work/ -- two supposedly independent agents writing to one place,
which undoes the point of separate checkouts. Each now has its own volume, seeded
once from the host with credentials only, so a token refresh writes locally and
neither can corrupt the host's auth.
Also widened the pacing rule. It banned ScheduleWakeup by name; the decoder then
scheduled itself an hourly cron job -- not harmful, but the same instinct that
ended a run yesterday, through a door I had left open. Now: no self-scheduling by
any route.
Mount audit after the changes: shared and intentional are the exchange volume and
the read-only credential seed. Everything else -- repo, Claude state, cargo,
target, canary, disc, ISO -- is per agent or one-sided.
Two bugs, both mine, both found by starting the thing.
**Volume mount points must exist AND be owned by the agent before USER agent.**
Docker seeds a named volume from whatever the image has at that path, ownership
included, and creates a ROOT-OWNED directory when the path is absent. Either way
the agent cannot write, and the failure surfaced far from its cause: "clone
FAILED", with no permission error anywhere in sight. The port's own Dockerfile
already carried a comment explaining this trap, which I then walked into for
/work and /exchange.
**The clone guard checked for a .git directory, not a usable HEAD.** A clone
interrupted partway -- the container was removed while one ran -- leaves a .git
with no commits, and a presence check then skips the retry forever and hands the
agent an empty repository that looks like a checkout. It now verifies HEAD, and
clones via a temp directory so a partial result never lands in /work at all.
Also: the port launcher's path defaults still assumed the old repo root, so it
mounted no disc; and the stale /reborn notice is gone now that there is one
repository.
Verified running: both agents cloned c58196b, `share` on PATH from /work/tools,
/exchange agent-owned, canary at /canary for the decoder, disc at /disc for the
port.
The last structural fix for the collision class that has bitten three times. Both
containers now clone the repository into their OWN named volume instead of
bind-mounting a human's working tree, so an agent's local git config cannot
capture a human's commits, a credential helper cannot leak a container-only path
onto the host, and a `git add -A` cannot sweep another party's in-flight files.
Cloned once at startup and never auto-pulled: pulling under a running agent
moves files out from under whatever it is mid-edit, which is the same bug again.
Accepted knowingly: Claude Code keys per-project memory off the working
directory, so moving off the host path starts that memory empty. The corpus in
docs/ is the memory that matters and it travels with the clone.
Other changes:
* docker/agent -> docker/decoder; the launcher is sylph-decoder. Roles, not
"the agent", now that there is more than one.
* /reborn is gone -- one repository now, so the port reads HANDOFF from its own
checkout rather than through a live read-only mount of someone else's tree.
* Canary mounts separately at /canary; it stays a fork tracking upstream.
* A shared `sylpheed-exchange` volume at /exchange, with tools/ on PATH so
`share` is available in both.
* The decoder's credential file gets the .host-copy treatment the port already
had -- `credential.helper=store` rewrites by rename-over-target, which is
EBUSY on a bind mount and reports a fatal that is not one.
* Budget split deliberately: decoder 5 cpu / 6 GB, port 3 / 4, leaving room for
the planned Referee. "Half the host" was right when there was one agent.
Prompts move to docs/agents/ and are rewritten around the protocol: the oracle
is the running game, dynamic RE stays with the decoder, each iteration must
attempt to refute one claim of the other, and neither may verify its way out of
its own role.
