epiphany/CLAUDE.md

Epiphany — working agreements for agents

FOSS music-notation platform: a specified, deterministic, CRDT-based score model with a LaTeX specification suite as its source of truth.

Read this first

1. spec/HANDOFF_2026-08-07.md — current state of both tracks, what transfers between machines, environment setup, and what to do next. Start there; everything below is the standing rules that document assumes.
2. spec/PASS13_CANDIDATES.md — the spec-track ledger. Status cells are appended to, not rewritten, so an opener can lag the truth by several rungs. Read the whole cell.
3. The contract for whatever you are about to touch: spec/CONTRACT_*.md.

The two tracks

Track	Lives in	Current head
Spec / Pass 13 — wire format, bundle, ops, text projection, the .tex suite	spec/, crates/epiphany-{core,ops,bundle,textproj,testkit}	P13-S27 LANDED (4df8e25); P13-S16 unblocked, contract still DRAFT
Editor / T4 — the editing seam, engraving, the toolkit spike	spec/PLAN_EDITOR_APP.md, spec/CONTRACT_EDITOR_*, spikes/, crates/epiphany-{editor-core,editor-gui,engrave,layout-ir,glyphs,render-svg}	T4 spike, round 2 built but not run

They are currently independent. The T1b/P13-S27 collision in epiphany-bundle/src/bundle.rs is resolved — S27 landed 2026-08-09. This does not make T1b free: it stays blocked on Ruling B blocker (ii), versioned decode (handoff §2.3). Any future epiphany-bundle rung re-creates a collision with T1b on its own terms — that is a property of the crate, not of S27.

How work is done here

Contracts are ratified, then frozen. Substantive work is scoped into a spec/CONTRACT_*.md with numbered pins, tests, mutations, a touch table and a gate; it goes through adversarial review rounds before dispatch. After ratification the pins are executed, not edited. A defect found during execution is reported, not patched in place — if it needs a pin change, that is its own amendment with its own review round.

The touch table is the staging allowlist. A file that must change but is not listed silently drops out of the commit. Two recurring escapees, in no contract's table: crates/epiphany-testkit/tests/requirement_labels.rs (its hardcoded requirement counts move whenever a .tex gains a requirement), and version literals in .tex prose.

Mutation-first. Every regression test is verified by re-introducing the bug and observing the failure. Reasoning that a mutation would fail signs nothing. A compile error is not a test failure — a mutation that does not compile observed nothing. Restore by hand-editing back, never with git.

Verify subagent claims before committing them. Re-run the tests, re-read the diff. Agents in this repo have misattributed failures, missed failing suites, and guarded the wrong code path — all found only by re-running.

Before believing a zero-result search, ask what it would miss if the claim were false. Different encoding, different spelling, a propagating rather than constructing path, output truncated by head. Never conclude a universal negative from a piped head.

Guard every reachable path, not the one the spec sentence names. Enumerate the public entry points into an invariant and ask which a caller can actually reach today.

Git

• Stage explicit paths. Never git add -A.
• Never git reset, git restore --staged, git checkout, or git stash against the working tree — sessions have run concurrently here, and these destroy work that is not yours. Undo by hand-editing.
• Re-check HEAD before staging and before committing.
• Subagents do not commit. They leave work for review.

Build and environment traps

• Never run cargo fmt --all. It reaches the spikes/ workspace through path dependencies and reformats across workspaces. Use cargo fmt -p <crate>. The --check form CI runs is safe; the writing form is not.
• The spec builds with xelatex, not pdflatex — fontspec refuses pdfTeX outright: cd spec && latexmk -xelatex -interaction=nonstopmode <doc>.tex. Re-run until undefined references clears; one pass is often not enough. The six PDFs are tracked and must be rebuilt when their .tex changes.
• Toolchains: pinned stable 1.95.0, MSRV floor 1.85. The MSRV CI job excludes epiphany-editor-gui.
• spikes/ is its own workspace — root cargo test --workspace does not reach it. Gate it separately.

Green baseline

cargo test --workspace                                 # expect 1577 passing, 0 failed, 0 ignored
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings   # clean

This is the single origin for the count — spec/HANDOFF_2026-08-07.md used to repeat it in three places and now points here. It moved 1570 → 1577 when P13-S27 landed.

If the count differs on arrival, reconcile that before starting new work — the mutation discipline above depends on a known-green baseline.

The canonical-base rule — the "one live constraint" is LIFTED

P13-S27 landed 2026-08-09 (4df8e25), so the blanket prohibition is gone. It read: until P13-S27 lands, no bundle anywhere may carry a canonical base. It no longer applies, and base-bearing bundles are constructible again through the ordinary API.

What replaced it, and it is not "anything goes": a canonical base is accepted only when its reduction_algorithm_version equals the running authority, epiphany_ops::CURRENT_REDUCTION_ALGORITHM_VERSION — currently 0. A mismatch is CanonicalBaseRequiresRebuild { base, current }, refused on both the read side (open) and the write side (commit/commit_versioned). Legacy-epoch bundles still refuse a base outright.

The bump discipline is the whole guarantee. Any change to a canonical reduction verdict MUST bump that constant — no mechanism can detect a semantics change, so nothing will catch a missed bump. P13-S16 is the first rung that must move it to 1.

Fixtures deliberately exercising arbitrary wire versions take BundleCapabilities::synthetic_for_fixture(v); production paths take the crate-local production_caps(). Never the former on a production path. craft_image / craft_image_with_base still exist for hand-built images, but are no longer the only way to get a base. See handoff §1.2, marked as a dated record.