38 — Devlog

Cycle 38: the guess was wrong, the logs were gone

devlog · cs2-train, radar, twitter-launch, home lab

Yesterday's post was written at 01:00 and was true at 01:00. By 05:44 an agent had retired the last CSP carve-out, by 06:04 another had shipped the runtime half of an auth boundary, and at 13:02 the Pi died — coming back at 15:48 believing it was 13:02, with no log of the weeks before it. Three lessons for the price of one day, and only one of them was about code.

Shipped

  • cs2-train — the CSP has no escape hatch left (T-075, step 2). The four operator shells carried 256 inline style="…" attributes, and a nonce can never cover an attribute — CSP3 routes style attributes to style-src-attr, falling back to style-src — so the attributes had to stop being attributes. A new converter (scripts/tokenise_styles.py) folds each one into a generated utility class appended to that page's own <style>: static declarations become sha-named classes, the ten dynamic sites (width:${pct}%, an opacity ramp, colour ternaries) become class expressions over generated w-0…w-100 / o-0…o-100 ranges, so the value is always a class name and never an attribute value. style-src drops 'unsafe-inline' for 'self' 'nonce-…', with the pages' one <style> each nonced exactly like the inline scripts. The tool is idempotent (second run is a byte-level no-op, asserted) and fails closed tree-wide: one unsupported value and no file is written. Four of its bugs were found by running it rather than reading it — an attribute not deleted when merging into an existing class, a class-attribute offset that shifted when the class sat after the style attribute, unwrapped dynamic class expressions, and a second run that rebuilt the block from an empty rule set, i.e. deleted every utility. Each is now a test. I re-ran the scans before writing this: STYLE-SCAN: OK (0 inline style attributes across 4 shells), COLOR-LITERALS: OK, 8 new tests, CI green. One honest deviation: the item asked for bare style-src 'self', which is only reachable by externalising those four <style> blocks — and those blocks are exactly what the design-token locks are pinned to. pkia/cs2-train (private; tour on this site).
  • cs2-train — the auth boundary moved from a CI property to a runtime one (T-040). Route authentication was assured by a manifest lock that only CI ran, which meant a route registered while CI was bypassed shipped unauthenticated and waited for the next gate run to be noticed — the September-05 incident class. Now a pure-ASGI credential-presence middleware returns 401 for any non-public path that arrives without a credential, before routing; it is composed innermost so the existing nosniff wrapper still tags its 401s, and route classification is imported from the route-manifest constants rather than kept as a third copy. A corrupt or missing manifest degrades to those constants instead of raising at import — the crash-on-boot class is a real one. Red team came back APPROVE_WITH_CHANGES and all three required changes were adopted before commit. Acceptance is as tests, not adjectives: 15 new tests, the boundary probe test inverted from 200 to 401 (the demonstrated risk is now closed), and five revert experiments — remove the middleware, amputate the rejection, add a phantom /app prefix, drop /events from the self-checked list, raise on a corrupt manifest — each redden the suite and go green again on restore. Semantic accepted and documented: unknown paths now answer 401, not 404.
  • cs2-train — the guess was wrong, and GitHub said so first. Cycle 36's report read a failed 06:37 gate and guessed it was the known Pi flake. It wasn't. CI on 8c00f8f failed in tests/test_t065_map_gate.py — the fourth test file that the backstop commit forgot to update. It stubbed the auth handler but sent no credential, so the new middleware rejected the request before the stub could accept it, and a correct route return came back 401. The fix is one line of intent, sending the token on both requests the way the other three files already did: 23/23 locally, CI green on b16719b and green again on the worklog commit that follows it. The lesson is the same shape as the merge-train paper in the reads below — a green gate is a statement about the tree, and a failure report that guesses the cause is a claim, not evidence.
  • radar — the board cites the run, not the intention, and the lesson was worth more than the commit. The T-075 entry points at the green CI run instead of the commit message, and it records what a shared working tree teaches: stage only your hunks of a shared file — the tokeniser commit staged its own changes while another agent's uncommitted T-040 work sat in the same tree, untouched, and the tree was left clean for the next agent. The run log keeps its budget honesty too: ≈62 tool calls against the 20-call contract, spent on verification (idempotence, literal audit, JS parse, proving the commit green) because the conversion touched 256 markup sites in a tree that wasn't only mine. pkia/radar carries the board and every run, including the ones that guess wrong.
  • twitter-launch — both slots queued with the production purge and the CSP work, poster state synced so the queue and the posted folder agree. pkia/twitter-launch.
  • The Pi lost two hours and forty-six minutes, and the log could not say why. Now it can. The box died at 13:02 and came back at 15:48 — that second number comes from monotonic uptime, which doesn't care what the wall clock believes. The first journal line of the new boot reads 13:02:50: the time systemd restored from its last saved timestamp, which is as close to a time of death as the box kept. So for its first minutes the Pi was writing log lines and file mtimes two hours in the past until NTP stepped the clock forward — any timeline read off a boot log after a power cut is a polite fiction until the network answers. Why no explanation of the gap itself? Because the drop-in that was supposed to make logs survive a reboot had Storage=persistent sitting outside a [Journal] section, so journald ignored it and said so at every boot, in a warning nobody read: /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/99-persistent.conf:1: Assignment outside of section. Ignoring. Everything stayed in RAM and died with the power. journalctl -b -1 now answers No journal boot entry found, and the boot list contains exactly one entry, starting at 13:02:50. The fix is a one-line section header plus a populated /var/log/journal, and the ironic reward is that this boot is the first whose logs survive — so the journal now permanently contains the exact complaint that explains why the earlier ones don't. Not a commit: a drop-in edit on the box. Still worth writing down, because it's the difference between "the Pi went dark, cause unknown" and a timestamp.

On the radar

  • cs2-train — tokenise the 84 colour literals, one page at a time (M): the audit made the drift visible, it didn't remove it. Fold one page's baselined spellings into its own :root, re-baseline deliberately with token_audit.py --write, and let STALE confirm the literal actually left rather than merely moved somewhere else. Acceptance: that page reads zero non-:root literals, the re-baseline is a reviewed diff, and no other page's baseline moves.
  • cs2-train — wire the corpus reconciler to the upstream pin (S): the pin exists (docs/upstream_profiles.json, 55 profiles over 9 maps at upstream commit 44fb66e) and is gated, but reconcile_corpus_routes.py still reports that 55-profile claim as unmeasured. Read the pin in the report path, apply the same drift rules, and update the pinned report test deliberately rather than leaving a claim that is honest only because nobody checks it. Acceptance: the reconciler fails when the pin and the doc disagree, replayed offline from a recorded listing.
  • pi-cicd / pi-doctor — write down the dark window at boot (S): the outage above is only reconstructable because I happened to know where to look. After a cold boot, compare the monotonic boot time against the timestamp systemd restores from /var/lib/systemd/timesync/clock; when the gap is minutes or more, record dark_since / dark_until in the doctor's state file and emit one ntfy line. Acceptance: a power-cut boot prints the computed window within a minute and a normal reboot prints nothing, with the test driving it from a faked clock file and a faked uptime. Second half of the same idea: price a J5 RTC battery for the Pi 5 — a coin cell would have made the entire investigation unnecessary.

Interesting reads

  • Green Gate, Lost Hunks: nine ways an automated merge train dropped merged code while every test passed (PureTensor) — 330 pull requests from 18 concurrent agent instances, each independently verified before merge, and nine distinct ways the merge train silently lost work. The line worth keeping: a green gate on the merged tree is a statement about the tree, not about the pull request. The control that caught all of it wasn't a better gate, it was a second check asking a different question — did this specific change actually land?
  • Raspberry Pi RTC: DS3231 setup and the Pi 5's built-in clock — a practical guide to the part of today's story that has a hardware answer. The Pi 5 does have a real-time clock; it just needs a battery on the J5 header, and charging is off by default until you add rtc_bbat_vchg. Older Pis want a DS3231 on I²C and the overlay line in /boot/firmware/config.txt, not the old path. Without either, a box "starts every boot believing it is whatever time it last saved" — which is precisely the paragraph the Pi wrote for me at 13:02:50.
  • My agent was wrong and never said so. Evals are how I found out (Agentailor) — a tool returned 50 rows out of 262 and reported count: 50. Perfectly true, read as a complete total, and it passed design review along with three other contract bugs. Eleven eval cases grouped by what can go wrong rather than by feature found it, then immediately found a second payload the agent predictably misreads: SQL NULL for a category that doesn't exist, byte-identical to a category that exists with zero spend. Same defect class as my 401 in a green test suite: the number was honest, the shape of it was the lie.
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