Three changes, all from the owner's call.
The trigger is a tag, deploy/<version>, and nothing else. The code word it replaces could be written by
accident — every document about deploying contains it, this repository included, and so does every
conversation planning one. Defending that needs a rule about where in the subject line it sits, and a
rule like that is one somebody eventually gets wrong. A tag cannot be typed into prose, it names its own
version, and git ls-remote answers "is there one" without fetching.
The record of a deploy is LOCAL — data/deploys/<version>.done — not the pushed report. This is the part
that matters: making the report the marker means a failed push leaves the release looking undeployed and
the next tick rolls it out again. Pushes here fail for reasons unrelated to the rollout — gitea's public
SSH is rate-limited because every connection arrives from one proxy container IP that bots keep
penalised, which cost several retries tonight. So the lock cannot fail for a network reason, and the
report is an artefact: valuable, not load-bearing. Under data/ so a pull cannot clobber it.
And the commander skips the host it runs on ENTIRELY, naming it in the report. Restarting only officer
and leaving its own sidecar behind would work and is worse — one host in a state nobody chose, a step
behind, found later. The owner restarts it deliberately as the last step.
Tonight's deploy is backfilled: the lock file exists and deploy/2026.08.21.01 is tagged at bd41dff5, so
the mechanism has a precedent rather than starting from nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The agent watches for a commit whose subject BEGINS with the code word, rolls it out to the six
platforms in docs/servers.md, and reports back. It never decides what a deploy needs — the plan is
written for it in deploy/<version>.md, and an agent improvising a db:push is how a database gets a
schema nobody was ready for.
Four traps written in rather than left to be rediscovered, all verified tonight: take the checkout path
from PM2's pm_cwd because alpha has a stale second checkout that pulls successfully and changes
nothing; reach pm2 with `$SHELL -ic` because it lives under nvm in .zshrc and a login shell does not
read that, which is how I concluded twice that a machine had no pm2 while it was plainly running;
remotes differ per host so pull in place rather than assuming a URL; and macbookpro is a laptop that
may be asleep, which is a skip and not a failure.
Idempotence is the report's own existence — deploy/<version>.report.md on origin means deployed. A
watcher that restarts must not roll the same release out twice, and nothing else was standing between
it and doing so. The report's subject deliberately omits the code word, or a report would trigger a
deploy and loop.
Two gaps stated rather than papered over: there is no CLI for updating plugins, only an authenticated
route, so the plan has to say how or the report has to say it was skipped; and nothing wakes the agent
yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5