Ghostlight/notes/local-live-smoke.md

Local Live Smoke

The one place the road is tested: the seed lane, the production tick driver, elaboration sweep, and clock against a real CodexConnector on a created world, for a configured number of seed sessions and ticks. Everything else proves the machine under fixture inference ports. The harness is the ignored test runtime::tests::live_smoke_seeds_then_ticks_a_world_against_the_connector; its log is the deliverable.

Substrate

Machine-local, outside the repo: F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\.

• codex-home\auth.json: a copy of ~/.codex/auth.json. The connector spawns the official codex app-server child against this home and may refresh it.
• connector\ghostlight.key: 64 hex characters, no trailing newline; the shared connection secret. Both sides read the same file.
• connector\connector.cc: the daemon's single-caller config.
• logs\: connector stdout/stderr and pid, smoke logs.

The connector binary is F:\Projects\CodexConnector\target\debug\codex-connector.exe built from the repo head with the daemon feature. Ghostlight's Cargo.lock pins the connector library at an older revision whose daemon does not build against its own lockfile; the head daemon speaks the same wire law, proven by the handshake in the run below.

Bring-up

Initialize the config once (the codex executable path and SHA-256 are the newest codex.exe under %LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenAI\Codex\bin\):

F:\Projects\CodexConnector\target\debug\codex-connector.exe --initialize-single-caller-config F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\connector\connector.cc 127.0.0.1:4103 <codex.exe> <sha256> F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\codex-home F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\connector\replay.cc ghostlight-smoke F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\connector\ghostlight.key 1 gpt-5.6-luna,gpt-5.6-sol,gpt-5.6-terra 4 1052672 16000

Start the daemon detached; it prints one ready line to stderr:

$R='F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke'; $p = Start-Process -FilePath 'F:\Projects\CodexConnector\target\debug\codex-connector.exe' -ArgumentList @('--config', "$R\connector\connector.cc") -RedirectStandardOutput "$R\logs\connector.stdout.log" -RedirectStandardError "$R\logs\connector.stderr.log" -PassThru -WindowStyle Hidden; $p.Id | Out-File "$R\logs\connector.pid"

Stop it with Stop-Process -Id (Get-Content F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\logs\connector.pid).

Run

export GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_CONNECTOR=127.0.0.1:4103 \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_CREDENTIAL='F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\connector\ghostlight.key' \
  GHOSTLIGHT_ACCEPTANCE_RUNTIME_ID=ghostlight-smoke \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_PROJECTOR_MODEL=gpt-5.6-luna \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_PERSONA_MODEL=gpt-5.6-terra \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_INTERPRETER_MODEL=gpt-5.6-terra \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_OPERATIONAL_MODEL=gpt-5.6-terra \
  GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_ELABORATOR_MODEL=gpt-5.6-terra \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_TICKS=3 \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_LOG='F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke\logs\smoke-ticks.log' \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SEED_VAULT_ROOT='F:\Projects\Kalsa\Kalsa' \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_VAULT_SCOPE='Public' \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_SEED_SESSIONS=4 \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_SEED_TARGET=6 \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_SEED_ROOT_LABEL='Low Sere' \
  GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_SEED_BRIEF='A dry basin town that owes its water to the gate above it.'
cargo test -p ghostlight-dungeon --bin ghostlight-dungeon live_smoke_seeds_then_ticks -- --ignored --nocapture

GHOSTLIGHT_SEED_VAULT_ROOT is required; the runner refuses to seed with it unset. GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_VAULT_SCOPE and GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_SEED_BRIEF are optional; the brief is the world's brief, set at creation and projected to every lane as guidance, and the world is titled by the seed root label unless GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_WORLD_TITLE names it. The scope is a directory under the root; Kalsa's spoiler split is that scope, so a world that must not see Spoilers is seeded from Public. The root label must name a place the Vault knows; Low Sere has a Public note. The caller runtime id must equal the one the connector config admits.

First run, 2026-09-05, before the seed lane

Genesis: Active, three subjects (Operator, Persona, Operational Agent) in commons, three opportunities, no boundaries, no deficit rows (no scale intent at genesis).

Tick	Wall time	Cells	Revision	Persona speech
1	71 s	2 singletons	2 → 5	"I am here."
2	41 s	2 singletons	5 → 8	"I am here. Time 60."
3	44 s	2 singletons	8 → 11	"Is anyone there?"

Each tick committed one narrative command, one operational command, and one clock advance; the elaboration sweep returned clean every tick because the world derives nothing to answer. The store's final digest is in the log.

What this proves: the connector handshake, the Persona membrane end to end (projector, persona, interpreter), the operational lane, the cover, the tick driver, the clock, and the elaboration sweep all work on the road. What it does not prove: anything about a world with structure. The prose is thin because the world is three subjects in one room with one affordance; that is the seed-producer gap, not a cognition fault.

The older ignored test real_codex_connector_cognition_modes_commit_speech in world/controllers.rs predates pass 6 and declares its subjects unplaced, so it fails at NoAudience before reaching the provider; retire or place it.

Seeded run, 2026-09-05

Kalsa Public scope, root Low Sere, target six persons, brief "A dry basin town that owes its water to the gate above it."

Stage	Wall time	Result
Seed session 1	39 s	one round, committed: six persons in Low Sere, all qualified, deficit 6 → 0; session 2 skipped, no shortfall left
Activate		nine subjects, nine opportunities, six boundaries for the elaborator
Tick 1	95 s	8 singleton cells, revision 3 → 7, Bren Ash: "I'm here."
Tick 2	95 s	8 singleton cells, revision 7 → 11, Mara Dene: "Bren?"
Tick 3	123 s	8 singleton cells, revision 11 → 15, Tovin Rusk: "Bren?", the Persona asking for a beginning

Twelve runs were needed to get here. Every failure was on the road, not in the kernel, and each became a rule the tree now carries:

• The copied Codex credential diverged from the live session and its refresh token was invalidated; the connector's Codex home is now the operator's real ~/.codex, one credential family.
• Strict function schemas refuse oneOf and a const without a type; the emitter uses anyOf and types every tag, and a test walks every tool of both authoring lanes against the strict rules offline.
• gpt-5.6-sol is not available to a ChatGPT account; the Persona runs on gpt-5.6-terra here.
• A seed generation exceeded the five-minute socket read; the connector's expiry skew stays at five minutes while the response read timeout is fifteen.
• The model referenced existing things by label; the brief prints every canonical id beside its label.
• One tool call per response spent the six-round budget; the seed lane has its own budget of 24, requests parallel tool calls, and submits the draft as authored when the budget ends instead of discarding it.
• A repair round re-used the first attempt's provider request id and the connector refused it as a replay conflict; request ids are content-addressed.
• Obligations carried a period; the tool description states the commitment shape rule the resolver enforces.
• The first landed seed put all six people in the commons; the brief states that a subject must stand at the row's root or inside it to count.

The harness fails when no seed patch lands, so a run that reaches the provider and authors nothing is a failed run. Silence is not failure: a person given a place, a debt, and a clock and nothing else says nothing, and since run 6 the prompts render that honestly instead of borrowing a voice.

Claude SDK route

Run; see "SDK runs, 2026-09-10" below. world/sdk_inference.rs's SdkInferencePort gives the same ignored smoke a second transport: a lane whose configured model is claude-prefixed (matching GHOSTLIGHT_SDK_MODEL_PREFIX, default claude) routes to a Node sidecar instead of the CodexConnector, so the road can run on the Claude subscription with no Codex budget. LiveController and ControllerRunner::open (through open_inference) already carry this optional binding; only the operator side and a real run are outstanding.

Operator prerequisites, none of which Ghostlight performs:

1. Install the Claude Code CLI.
2. Sign in with /login, or mint a token with claude setup-token.
3. Verify the login with one plain claude -p query.

The harness never reads, copies, forwards, or logs that credential; the sidecar inherits it from the ambient environment the same way the CLI does.

Build the sidecar, once the CLI login is verified:

npm --prefix sidecar/claude-sdk install
npm run sdk:build

npm run sdk:build is the root package.json alias for npm --prefix sidecar/claude-sdk run build, emitting sidecar/claude-sdk/dist/main.js.

Environment, in addition to the connector variables above:

GHOSTLIGHT_SDK_SIDECAR='F:\Projects\Ghostlight\sidecar\claude-sdk\dist\main.js'
GHOSTLIGHT_SDK_MODEL_PREFIX=claude   # optional; this is already the default

GHOSTLIGHT_SDK_SIDECAR's absence means no SDK binding at all — a claude-prefixed lane model then fails at open with UnroutableModel rather than silently reaching the connector. Any of the five GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_*_MODEL variables can be set to a claude-prefixed model (for example claude-opus-5) to route that lane through the sidecar; the connector variables (GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_CONNECTOR, GHOSTLIGHT_CONTROLLER_CREDENTIAL) are only required for the lanes that still route to the connector, and an all-claude configuration needs neither.

The harness is the same ignored test, runtime::tests::live_smoke_seeds_then_ticks_a_world_against_the_connector; its #[ignore] reason names both prerequisites this route adds: "requires a vault plus either a running CodexConnector or a built Claude SDK sidecar with an ambient Claude Code login; see GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_* and GHOSTLIGHT_SDK_* environment."

SDK runs, 2026-09-10

Every lane on claude-sonnet-5, Kalsa Public, Low Sere, target six, two seed sessions, three ticks. The operator installed the CLI and logged in interactively; the sidecar inherited the login. No connector variables were set.

Run	Seed	Ticks	Result
1	both sessions refused: subjects with no grant, twelve commitments due at or before the clock	3 committed, 2 cells each, Persona spoke	harness failed on the empty seed; the transport itself worked end to end
2	one session, one round, 89 s: six qualified persons, deficit 6 to 0	456 s, 395 s, 326 s; 8 singleton cells each; revision 3 to 24	passed; tick 3 quarantined one cell
3	one session, one round, 109 s: six persons and an institution, deficit 6 to 0	two ticks, 230 s and 138 s; 9 singleton cells each; revision 3 to 15	passed; no quarantine; speech cited by quote arrives whole
4	one round, 87 s	two ticks, 219 s and 235 s; 8 cells	passed; Projector now carries the subject's own life; five people say "Fourteen days", the due on their obligation
5	one round	two ticks, 316 s and 251 s; 9 cells; whole membrane traced (GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_TRACE)	passed; first exchange: Sera Venn "Maro first, then the rest.", Maro Seln "First for what, Sera?"; every voice was the model's
6	one round, 90 s	two ticks, 299 s and 235 s; 9 cells; flat prompts	passed; eighteen cells, nobody spoke; the honest baseline of an unauthored person
7	refused: six distinct people with memories, reads, and worded promises, every declare_subject carrying "controller": {}	2 ticks on genesis alone	harness failed on the empty seed; the repair continuation faulted on the SDK lane (one user turn)
8	one round, 97 s: six people, each with a voice, values, memories, reads, and a promise in words	two ticks, 191 s and 261 s; 8 cells; 43 speak captures to 9 gaps	passed; seven distinct lines about the grate, the roll, and the crew
9	one round, 94 s; world titled Low Sere with its brief on every lane	two ticks, 218 s and 209 s; 8 cells; 20 speak captures to 24 gaps	passed; no fixture name anywhere in the trace; promises and speech in the world's own terms (the grate, the ration boards, the kiln on stored ash)
10	one round, 95 s	two ticks, 220 s and 166 s; 8 cells; revision 3 to 15; 29 speak, 18 display, 10 gaps	passed; the first displays ("I set the spindle down where both of them can see the face of it", "I look to Yeshe, not unkind."); every gap is private reasoning; the first live interrupted cell (below)
11	one round, 100 s	two ticks, 241 s and 221 s; 8 cells; revision 3 to 16; 27 speak, 24 display, 14 gaps	passed; three interrupted cells, each printed as its own line with the subject and both digests; the operator feed shows displays beside speech ("So, [seen: I shift the spindle from one hand to the other, then back]")
12	round 1 rejected after 200 s (the seed model wrote kind where the controller schema says type, omitted the over tag, and narrated it as tool bugs); round 2 committed in 99 s: six people and an institution	two ticks, 288 s and 150 s; 9 cells; revision 3 to 16; 39 speak, 6 display, 10 gaps	passed; every cited span landed, no overlap gaps; two interrupted cells in tick 1; a two-sentence act arrives as one display ("I stand near the wall where the shade still holds... I watch the dust settle where their boots have been.")

Rules run 1 imposed are in the implementation plan under step 11 (descriptions carried through the sidecar, due described and the clock printed, the grant rule on the subject tool, raw tool calls logged, refusal continues the conversation). Run 2's two findings: three of eight speech captures were cut mid-word ("just t", "a?" I") because the Interpreter cited byte spans the model counted wrong, and the tick-3 quarantine was a mis-spanned utterance failing the canonical-text rule at invocation, which is a translation gap wearing an infrastructure fault's coat. Run 3, after speech and gaps moved to source_quote, shows every utterance whole and no quarantine. Ticks are slow because singleton cells run in sequence at roughly 15 to 50 s per cell on this lane.

Runs 4 to 6 read the membrane itself. Set GHOSTLIGHT_SMOKE_TRACE to a file and every request is appended with its purpose, model, instructions, input turns, tool catalog, and output, so a cell can be read end to end: Projector in and out, Persona in and out, Interpreter in and out. Run 5's trace showed the machine working as designed (the Interpreter captured only quoted speech and recorded honest gaps for posture, private priority, and provisional belief) and two faults of context, not of prose: a Commitment carries no statement of what is promised, so due: 1000 was read as a thousand owed; and the ontology's PersonaMaterial (values, voice, memories, reads) is named in the doc and built nowhere, so every person spoke in the model's one voice. Run 6, after the prompts were flattened to render only what the context carries, is silent, which is correct. Run 6's trace also shows the Projector saying "no one before me" for two people in the same house: the context carries the subject's own place and not who else stands in it.

Run 10 is plan step 14 on the road: a visible act is captured by display and lands as a seen row on the room. Sera set the spindle down where Maro and Behn could see it, and Maro's re-lowered turn read it as seen and her "Not finished yet." as said. The ten gaps are what the cut leaves private on purpose ("There's nothing to tell them until the spindle's finished telling me."). Run 11 showed the one fault the runs 10 and 11 shared: "So," was captured whole and the rest of the sentence dropped, and a turn with four visible acts kept one, because the fold allowed one span per kind and made the rest ambiguity gaps. The Interpreter was citing correctly; the fold was discarding. The fold now takes every span cited for a kind, in prose order, as one utterance and one display, and only an overlapping span is an ambiguity (controller_work.v15; run 12 below).

Runs 7 and 8 are plan step 12 on the road. Run 7 authored the best seed so far and lost it to a field with no description and a tool result that said only "recorded as a gap"; the controller variant now describes its shapes, a decode failure's reason goes back to the model, and the SDK lowering carries a later user turn (the refusal) in its transcript. Run 8 is the first run whose people are people: Maro "Sera. Where's the crew.", Sera "Not yet, Bren. I haven't given Maro the condition of the intake, and until I do, I won't say send them down.", Iva keeping the roll of names before anyone goes below. Speech captures went from one per tick to twenty-one, and gaps from most of the prose to nine. One promise in run 8 read "I promise Maro Seln I will mend the tick fixture by the appointed hour, though Maro Seln holds no authority to command my compliance and no forum will hear a suit": the world was still titled "Cover Tick Fixture" and the brief's boundary language leaked into a vow. Run 9, after world_create.v3 gave the world its title and brief, has no fixture name in its trace and its promises read "I want every one of the forty-one hearths accounted for on the ration boards, with no favorites".

Interrupted cell

Exercised live in runs 10 and 11. A subject whose room changed mid-turn gets one re-lowering, not a lost turn: in run 10 Maro Seln's turn was bound, Sera Venn then spoke and set the spindle down in the same room, and the runner re-lowered Maro's prose once with the section "What was said or done before this person since" carrying her line as said and her act as seen. Run 11 printed the line this section asked for, once per re-lowered cell, after the tick line:

  interrupted cell subject=Sera Venn bound=sha256:8ac0… renewed=sha256:2c71…

The pair of digests is read from the committed turn's own receipt (NarrativeDecision::re_lowering, the interrupted_from binding and the one that replaced it), the cover driver carries it on the tick summary (CoverSummary.interrupted) and logs it per cell, and the harness prints it from the summary. Three cells re-lowered in run 11, three lines printed, three Interrupted: sections in the trace, and each act appears once in the operator feed.