Skip to content

What is left

Written 2026-08-19, replanned 2026-08-20 after the agent-neutral change and after Codex stopped being available on this machine. It replaces three overlapping planning documents that between them had grown to 7,500 words describing mostly finished work. This is the one list, in the order the items should be taken.

The evidence notes beside it are the record of what was done, and they stay: D-014 demonstrated, Windows end to end, the shipped database container, the clean repository and the rename.

What changed on 2026-08-20

There is no Codex subscription on this machine. Two consequences, and they pull in opposite directions, which is why this file was replanned rather than amended.

It unblocks the systemd item below. That item was blocked on a judgement call rather than on work: driving a real agent under systemd meant putting Codex credentials on a disposable Linux host. The claude preset removes the need, because there is now a second real agent to drive it with.

It defers anything that needs Codex itself, which is now exactly one item: re-running the codex preset for real. Nothing else in this project depends on it. Delegation of implementation work goes to subagents rather than codex exec for the same reason.

1. Done, and it was the last unobserved seam

~~A real agent under systemd.~~ Done 2026-08-20 (evidence). The conductor sat idle for forty seconds, picked up a lane registered through the API, spawned claude under laneward-conductor.service with no terminal and the stripped environment, and recorded the lane completed with its evidence. The lane wrote exactly the one file it owned.

It also showed something the preset comment does not say: the nine Git refusals in the guard log are the agent's internal calls, which --disallowedTools "Bash(git *)" does not reach. All of them were reads, so check-evidence passed them, but an agent whose internal Git use includes a write would fail a lane for a reason its operator could not predict from the preset.

2. Needs one action from the operator

~~The Windows logon trigger.~~ Done 2026-08-20 (evidence). Both tasks fired at logon, tolerated a database that was not there yet, and completed a lane with a real agent once it arrived. It also found that install.ps1 had been registering only the conductor and never the hub, which would have left a first-time Windows user with a task reporting Running and a dashboard that never loads.

~~Logout on Linux.~~ Done 2026-08-21 (evidence). Closing the session stops every unit without linger and leaves all three running with it, which is exactly what install.sh claims. It also found that loginctl terminate-user ends the user manager whatever linger says, so anyone testing their own setup that way will conclude linger is broken. Linger stays a persistent host change the installer will not make on your behalf.

Reboot survival on Windows. A logoff and logon is not a cold boot, so Windows still has a reboot to survive. It needs a real restart of the machine, which is the operator's to give.

Note that nothing starts the Podman machine at logon, and nothing here should: it is a machine-wide service rather than Laneward's to register. Both platforms therefore come up before their database does, which this run showed they survive.

3. Deferred until Codex is available again

Re-run the codex preset for real. Codex drove a lane end to end on 2026-08-19, before the agent-neutral change. That change did not alter the argument array it is spawned with, but it did start setting the child's working directory and it renamed the model tiers, so the codex path is currently covered by tests rather than by a run. The risk is low and the fix if it is wrong is small. It is listed so nobody mistakes test coverage for a run.

4. Deferred, and deliberately so

More presets. Only codex and claude ship, because only those two were run against this project. Adding an agent is a preset plus a real lane driven by it, in that order, and never the preset alone. A preset written from a help text is a guess with an argument array around it.

Two things learned from adding the second one, worth knowing before a third. An agent that reaches for Git to orient itself will have those calls refused, and that is survivable now, but its mutating calls will still fail the lane. And an agent with no way to express a read-only mode disables the reader rather than running it unconfined, so check for one before writing the preset.

5. Decisions, not work

Visibility. ~~The repository is private.~~ Public since 2026-08-20. The last distribution step, taken after a final sweep found no host details, no credentials and no tracked .env across nine commits and the whole tree. The scrub that made it safe is recorded in the rename note.

Clean shutdown on Windows (CP-3). Windows has no catchable SIGTERM, so stopping the conductor strands its lanes. Two ways to stand:

  1. Accept it and make recovery the mechanism. This is the current position and it is now evidenced rather than assumed: stopping the task kills the tree with no orphan, reset-stranded returns the lane to pending, and the next start picks it up. tests/reset-stranded.test.ts asserts that behaviour.
  2. A cooperative stop signal the loop polls between passes, so a stop is honoured at a pass boundary. Real work, and worth it only if stranding turns out to cost something in practice.

Recommendation: stay with 1 until it hurts.

Deliberate gaps, not defects

These are decisions about what Laneward is for. They are listed so nobody mistakes them for oversights.

  • Plan creation and approval are manual. The bridge exists; no editor drives it end to end.
  • Commit, merge and push are manual, by D-009 and D-011.
  • Secrets. scripts/new-lane.ts copies the driven repository's .env into the lane worktree, so a worker reads real secret values. Only DATABASE_URL is rewritten, to a database made for that lane. Redaction is unimplemented and the README says so above the install instructions rather than below them.
  • Multi-conductor operation is unsafe and nothing prevents a second one. reset-stranded warns in prose; the hub does not enforce it.
  • Single user, 127.0.0.1, no authentication. The reason the README says not to expose it.

Host faults that decide what can be tested here

Not project work, but they shape every item above.

  • No systemd user manager starts in this WSL: user@1000 and user@0 both fail with Failed to spawn executor: Device or resource busy under systemd 259. Linux verification therefore runs in a privileged Fedora container on the Podman machine, which is real systemd and real podman but a shared kernel, so it is not evidence about bare metal.
  • The Podman machine's port forward to the Windows host is dead. A container reports its port published while nothing listens on the Windows side; the machine's own address is the only route. Both installers now warn when the configured DATABASE_URL is unreachable, which is the one-line version of a diagnosis this cost once.