The handoff was comprehensive as a document and unreachable as a
bootstrap. An agent starting cold on a new machine reads CLAUDE.md
automatically; it would have to be told to open spec/HANDOFF_2026-08-07.md,
and the rules this work actually ran on lived only in conversation and
in an agent memory directory that git does not carry.
So the method is now a tracked file and the handoff is the state it
assumes. CLAUDE.md carries what an agent must not learn by discovering
it: contracts are frozen after ratification and defects are reported
rather than patched in place; the touch table is the staging allowlist,
with the two files that keep escaping it named; mutation-first, and a
compile error is not a test failure; verify subagent claims by re-running,
because agents here have misattributed failures and guarded the wrong
path; never git add -A, never reset/checkout/stash against a tree another
session may share; never cargo fmt --all, since it crosses into spikes/
through path dependencies; xelatex not pdflatex; the green baseline; and
the live no-canonical-base constraint that makes correct refusals look
like bugs until P13-S27 lands.
The handoff gains §0a pointing at it, and saying plainly what an agent
does not inherit — the memory directory and the conversation — so a thin
inheritance is stated rather than papered over.
The editor/T4 track's half of these rules is recorded as observed from
its contracts; that session should review it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QjsEnYhm1gPpf6ii2iFxFV
The boundary on the editor/T4 files was lifted for this handoff, so §2
stops being a list of leads and becomes an assessment. Read
PLAN_EDITOR_APP.md, CONTRACT_EDITOR_T4_SPIKE.md revision 6, the spike's
DECISIONS.md, and the spike tree.
Where the spike stands: round 0 complete with iced eliminated, round 1
complete with both surviving candidates passing, round 2 built but not
run — apparatus and candidatekit landed, no round2-evidence directory,
no verdict document. Rounds 3, 3b, 4 and 5 not started.
Two machine-specific facts a hardware change puts at risk, neither
recoverable from the documents alone. The spike's harness refuses to
report PASS unless it finds both a discrete and an integrated Vulkan
adapter, and the integrated one's figures are what decide round 4 — so
a different GPU configuration does not just change the numbers, it
breaks comparability with round 1's completed results. And the
accessibility rounds need two settings that are off by default; without
them AT-SPI enumerates zero applications and the result reads as a
candidate limitation when it is an environment absence.
Checked the one place the threads could collide: the spike path-depends
on layout-ir, core, glyphs, determinism and ops, not on epiphany-bundle,
and no editor crate depends on it either. The no-canonical-base interval
cannot reach T4's measurements. The threads collide only when T1b opens,
since it and P13-S27 both land in bundle.rs — recorded in §4.
§4 now sequences both threads, and the two items that had to happen
while this machine still exists are marked done or assigned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QjsEnYhm1gPpf6ii2iFxFV
The first version answered "what is the state of the work" but not
"what actually has to move", which is the question a machine change
asks. Audited it instead of assuming.
Most of the risk turned out to be already retired: spikes/ is tracked
(106 files), the editor-t4 worktree is clean with zero uncommitted and
zero untracked, there are no stashes, and every commit on every local
branch is already on origin. There is no unpushed work on this machine.
What a clone still will not give you, now enumerated: the gitignored
root HANDOFF.md (18KB, not regenerable, deliberately kept out of git),
.claude/settings.local.json, and — outside the repository entirely —
the 21-file agent memory directory both threads have been accumulating
track notes in.
One real exposure found: the branch ref editor-t4-packet2b exists here
and not on origin, which has only refs/heads/main. Its commits are
reachable through the f33673d merge so nothing is lost, but the pointer
is local and should be pushed before this machine is wiped.
§4 is restructured into before-wiping, on-arrival, and then-work, since
two of those steps have to happen while this machine still exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QjsEnYhm1gPpf6ii2iFxFV
spec/HANDOFF_2026-08-07.md: state of the spec / Pass-13 / format-epoch
thread at be244df, the live constraint that no bundle may carry a
canonical base until P13-S27 lands, the S28 -> S27 -> S16 chain with
S27's three inherited obligations, the working agreements that are not
derivable from the code, and the environment notes the other machine
needs (xelatex not pdflatex, the 1.95.0/1.85 toolchain pins, the
cargo fmt --all trap and why its --check form is safe).
Section 2 covers the parallel editor/T4 thread and is explicitly
bounded: those files were out of bounds for this session all along, so
it records only what shared git history shows plus leads to verify, and
says plainly that it is not a substitute for that session's own handoff.
It does name the one place the threads can collide — the canonical-base
interval — which neither side can see from its own side.
Ledger: P13-S27 and P13-S28 both still opened with "open" while their
resolutions sat further down the cell. S27 is UNBLOCKED and
dispatchable; S28 is IMPLEMENTED. The cells are appended to rather than
rewritten, so an opener can lag the truth by several rungs; the handoff
records that as a reading hazard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QjsEnYhm1gPpf6ii2iFxFV
Levi Neuwirth