Ghostlight/notes/fresh-workspace-handoff.md

Ghostlight Fresh Workspace Handoff

Updated: 2026-09-23

This is the compact re-entry packet. It carries current authority and the next gate. Git owns chronology, the system map owns teardown detail, and evidence records own durable findings.

Immediate Re-entry Instruction

1. Work from F:\Projects\Ghostlight.
2. Run git status --short, git log -1 --oneline, and npm run state:status.
3. Read state/map.yaml (current_status first), this handoff, and docs/architecture/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp.md.
4. Read notes/ghostlight-current-system-map.md only when exact pre-rebuild ownership or deletion evidence is needed.
5. For deployment, SSH, Idunn, Odin, Heimdall, or host work, consult F:\Projects\gamecult-ops before acting.

If the operator asks only to rehydrate, report the current gate and stop. A persisted next action is not permission to begin edits.

Do not continue implementation automatically from a rehydrate-only request. Do not trust this file for the exact live HEAD. Git and live runtime witnesses own volatile identity.

Current authority

The operator stopped Run 115 and ordered a whole-machine authority rebuild. The adopted target is docs/architecture/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp.md.

One per-world WorldKernel owns one revisioned WorldState across Draft and Active phases. It alone derives authority, applies the typed ontology reducer, and commits an atomic CultCache revision. World creation, autonomous turns, player commands, elaboration, consumer patches, time advance, and administrative changes all enter through the same CommandEnvelope path; the play agent (plan step 16) holds a named author capability in that same kernel and has no separate owner.

The replacement owner is sealed. Its runtime boundary remains create/open, immutable snapshot, submit, and typed receipts. Mutable aggregate state, canonical ID issuance, the reducer, and the CultCache journal writer stay private to the kernel. Controller assignment and affordance grants are canonical; current executability and decision opportunities are derived and revalidated by the kernel. The landed foundation.v0 loop binds opportunities to a revision; ontology v2 replaces that with scope-digest binding, so a proposal whose scope digest is unchanged commits at a later revision and one whose digest changed is rejected. Revision binding is current source, not the adopted rule.

Autonomous cognition has two explicit modes under disjoint controller scopes:

• NarrativePersona receives narrative projection and replies only in prose. The runner records that prose as receipt-bound noncanonical source evidence; a total Interpreter emits every faithful typed proposal it can lower with an exact source capture and records exact translation gaps for the rest.
• OperationalAgent receives a permissioned typed view and tools when operator-shaped cognition benefits from direct state work.
• Mode changes representation, never authority. A decision opportunity cannot fall through between modes or act twice.

The Interpreter cannot fail semantically. Missing referents, ambiguous intent, missing affordances, and missing command primitives become translation gaps. Malformed capture spans, raw tool decode failure, and normal step exhaustion fall back to an exact whole-source gap rather than losing meaning. An infrastructure interruption discards partial captures and returns the immutable source pending for a fresh attempt. Source prose is not speech: only actually spoken words may become a typed speech proposal. Only the world kernel may accept or reject a proposed mutation. Translation gaps remain non-fictional inference/evaluation evidence outside WorldState; recording one cannot itself request elaboration or advance a world revision.

World validity and world liveness are two different claims, and both are true. Structural validity is sparse and causal: it never waits on a count, and no count, cover ratio, interestingness, diversity, or prose-quality judgment can admit ontology, reject a structurally valid mutation, or declare a world complete. Liveness is authored: the seed carries a WorldScaleIntent, the elaborators pursue its derived per-jurisdiction scale deficit as a work queue, and the cover budget is the deliberate choke that makes attention scarce.

Operator directive, 2026-09-04, preserve verbatim in intent: the 2,400-subject / 240-cell / 10% cover profile is deliberate design, not a load fixture. A world feels alive only when actors at every level pursue their own goals; that detail is generated first, then multiresolution simulation is choked so attention is scarce and selection is forced. The mvp doc's teardown-era sentence calling it "test data, not a production elaboration target" was wrong and is amended. Do not re-cut the scale target as fixture noise.

Landed

Git owns the commit chronology; git log on codex/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp is the witness. What is true of the tree now:

• The replacement mailbox/kernel is the crate and executable runtime identity; no legacy Session Zero, kernel, scheduler, assessor, verifier/reconciliation, or transition module path survives, and no compatibility writer was kept.
• One CultCache implementation, consumed from CultLib 85f7024, owns app sessions, the world journal, and controller custody.
• The Persona interpretation contract is structurally total and live in the single ControllerRunner in crates/ghostlight/src/controllers.rs.
• The Idunn provider side is complete: the runtime validates Expected and activation, publishes signed Warming until the write lease arrives, and exposes managed route presence. Production has not cut over.
• Plan steps 6 and 8 through 14 are landed with their follow-ups: the ten ontology passes, the seed producer, interruption, witness, and the Claude SDK inference port. notes/ghostlight-implementation-plan.md carries each step's landed state; the ontology doc carries the mechanism.

Do not start another world acceptance run while Yggdrasil still serves the legacy executable and state layout.

Immutable failure evidence

Run 115 is terminal failed at /var/lib/gamecult/ghostlight-dungeon/acceptance/full-world-delvehold-0a83034-115: semantic revision 2, regions 2/8, waves 0/1. Resume2 ended on provider SSE timeout. Resume3 exhausted four reconciliation steps after inst:kharad-road-keepers referenced unknown loc:kharad-rhythm-road. Invocation d9254cd9b77946aebcf7a7fdae821402 is terminal. Preserve the root and receipts unchanged; its status.json is stale derived telemetry.

Runs 108 through 115 are evidence about load and failure properties of the old body. Those runs were load fixtures; the 2,400-subject / 240-cell profile they exercised is the authored design target, not fixture noise (see the operator directive under Current authority). The 1,200-actor fixture remains a load measure only.

Operational boundary

Yggdrasil still serves legacy Ghostlight release a4080d4 from an enabled Restart=always unit with health v1, campaign/Session Zero state, and no world.cc or app-sessions-v2.cc witness. The Connector is also still on its legacy enabled body. CultNet through CultLib 85f7024 owns generation-bound activation, separate lifecycle brakes, process-write leases, observed capabilities, explicit disagreement, and routed RUDP incarnations. Odin through pushed 65cf2b2 owns deterministic recipe and binding admission, exact source freezing, sealed releases, durable deployment transactions, and the narrow native actuator ports. Current uncommitted Odin integration moves Idunn-owned projection and multi-session RUDP transport into those live paths.

Ghostlight pushed 6a79cb0 with the provider side of this cut. Its recipe requests Idunn's runtime bundle, candidate bind, protected activation and provider credentials, process-write-lease path, and admitted state-root binding. The runtime validates Expected and activation, publishes signed Warming, waits for the exact process lease before opening state, keeps that lease current through bind, Active publication, and serving, republishes Warming until the lease arrives, and exposes its managed route presence. CodexConnector pushed ede3c30 with the corresponding stateless provider contract. Neither service has been admitted through rebuilt Idunn yet.

The adopted cut puts a visible recipe with a constrained launch declaration in each target repo; raw unit or container-runtime templates are rejected. The operator binding selects the workload driver, which alone lowers that launch declaration into process-manager configuration. Idunn operator bindings own the admitted ref, runner/container image and affordances, host paths, secrets, routing endpoint, rollout, retention, and desired replica placement. A sealed plan and release publish only Expected. A service owns its signed runtime presence and health claim. Odin alone authenticates that observation into Present and derives Ready from exact Expected/Present agreement; the three states and any disagreement remain distinct. For writable state, Idunn grants the process-bound lease before state opens. Stable route membership moves only after Ready. Deployment and continuity remain separate authorities; a deployment brake cannot suspend restart of the already-admitted body.

The current Nginx driver observes rendered configuration and nginx -T visibility, not live-worker adoption or packet delivery. A route is not acceptance-complete, and the incumbent may not be drained, until an independent data-plane probe binds the exact candidate runtime and membership digest.

Idunn is the GameCult-wide deployment, admission, continuity, and future swarm-scaling control plane. Systemd, container runtimes, and existing proxies remain its replaceable actuators; it does not reimplement generic scheduling, networking, container, service-mesh, cryptographic, or consensus machinery. Odin owns the discoverable semantic topology; services own their actual signed capability, health, capacity, and runtime claims.

Idunn starts and recovers from its own durable admitted state; Odin is its first managed daemon and the semantic graph root, not an Idunn bootstrap dependency. First-Odin admission still publishes Expected and requires signed Present and Ready; only its evidence transport is bootstrapped by querying that exact candidate directly. Idunn publishes desired topology before dependent promotion. During an Odin outage, it may authenticate private physical evidence to replace only the process incarnation inside an existing admitted generation and preserve the current route. It freezes graph-changing deployment, promotion, scaling, and provider selection; historical Ready cannot authorize the replacement process, and Idunn never emits Present or Ready.

Heimdall owns account identity. Eve owns command invocation and lowering. VoidBot owns Vault retrieval and evidence. Idunn owns deployment and daemon continuity. Odin owns discovery. None owns world mutation. External consumers, including Delvehold and Epiphany, own their state; Ghostlight may publish views and proposals but cannot commit on their behalf.

Next gate

The adopted vocabulary is docs/architecture/ghostlight-world-ontology.md; its "Current mechanism" section describes the kernel as it stands. ghostlight-transition-algebra.md and ghostlight-multiresolution-agency.md are teardown evidence.

The kernel now

Thirteen decision-constraining component kinds over a pinned operation catalog under one WorldPatch, one reducer, one CAS commit, one decode bound for both authoring lanes, and three confined SystemCapability arms: Clock, Elaborator { jurisdiction }, Consumer { consumer }. Proposals bind to a scope digest, and the kernel is the sole ScopeChanged detector: a bound narrative turn whose scope moved is re-lowered once by the Interpreter with the typed delta, never lost and never checked lane-side. Witness fans a fact out over a place subtree through the one reach owner. External consumers enter through POST /cultnet/world-patch under PatchGround::Consumer; the live contract is docs/architecture/ghostlight-world-consumer-api.md. The seed lane admits a Draft-only owner patch from a local Vault and pursues the derived scale deficit. Inference runs through one InferencePort::prepare, routed by model name to three transports: the CodexConnector (not an option for Dungeon, operator 2026-09-23), the Node sidecar on the Claude Agent SDK for claude-prefixed models, and the local OpenAI-compatible port (see Constraints). The Rust decoder is the one validator on each; the sidecar hands arguments through unvalidated. The sidecar and its receipt shape are a named stopgap, deleted whole when a Messages-API port has budget. The SDK transport was proven on the road before the play agent's Cut 1 (d69e9d4) deleted the tick driver those runs exercised: seeded runs on claude-sonnet-5 committed ticks end to end (evidence ledger; the runbook that recorded them, notes/local-live-smoke.md, no longer carries that narrative). A kernel refusal continues the authoring conversation (Refusal rows, controller_work.v16); the Interpreter cites prose by quote (source_quote), and a quote not in the prose is a gap. Plan step 12 is landed: PersonaMaterial is the thirteenth component, a promise carries its statement, the Projector sees who else stands in the room, and on the road (run 8) six seeded people speak in six voices about a debt with words in it. Plan step 14 is landed (commit 0582321): a visible act is quoted by the Interpreter as the visible clause alone and lands as Seen { by } knowledge on the co-located; the actor's intent stays private. Knowledge sources are Witnessed, Told, Seen, Evidenced. Run 10 passed (18 displays) and produced the first live interrupted cell. Each interrupted cell is now logged per cell: the harness prints interrupted cell subject=<label> bound=<digest> renewed=<digest> after each tick line from CoverSummary.interrupted (commit 81a1f53); run 11 printed three, matching three re-lowerings in the trace. State and commit schemas are .consumer.v5; world creation is world_create.v4, which requires lens weights.

Deferred by design: PolityInCausalRange, IndividuationRequired, and Verification 13 wait for relations and population slices. The ignored acceptance test real_local_model_cognition_modes_commit_speech in world/controllers.rs now places its three subjects in one Place (roll-hall), fixing the prior NoAudience rejection.

Constraints

• A local OpenAI-compatible transport exists in source since the play agent's Cut 2: crates/ghostlight/src/local_inference.rs, one POST /v1/chat/completions to a loopback endpoint, no credential, inert tool calls. It opens only when GHOSTLIGHT_LOCAL_ENDPOINT is set (runtime.rs), and claims models by the GHOSTLIGHT_LOCAL_MODEL_PREFIX prefix, default local/. No model has been run behind it yet.
• Topology (operator ruling 2026-09-23, "put each of the organs on the right machine"): the playtest's Dungeon runs on Yggdrasil beside Heimdall, deployed by Idunn through the ghostlight binding (Dungeon unit only) at ref codex/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp. Bonsai 2 stays on Raven's GPU and is reached at Yggdrasil loopback 127.0.0.1:18080 through a restricted-key reverse SSH tunnel over the WireGuard mesh, kept up by a Raven scheduled task. Local inference and Heimdall's private plane stay loopback-only. The Raven-hosted Dungeon (task GhostlightDungeon, C:\Meta\ghostlight, deployment/raven/start-ghostlight-raven.ps1) is a detour being retired. gamecult-ops owns the actuator, runbook and link; its scripts/deploy-ghostlight-yggdrasil.sh and runbooks/ghostlight-dungeon-yggdrasil.md are still bound to CodexConnector, and cutting that binding for the local link is the next action.
• CodexConnector is not an option for Dungeon inference (operator, 2026-09-23). It is a deliberately isolated Codex fork so that Epiphany stops compiling Codex; nothing goes into it, and its main stays at 6519289. Codex remains lapsed: no subscription, no API budget; the smoke substrate at F:\Projects\Ghostlight-smoke stays.
• The operator's Claude subscription, inherited by the SDK sidecar from the ambient Claude Code login on the workstation, is the only provider proven live. Its role on Yggdrasil is undecided; deleting it is decided after the gate.
• Ghostlight never reads, copies, forwards, or logs a credential. The connector's Codex home is the operator's real ~/.codex; the SDK sidecar inherits the operator's Claude Code login from the ambient environment.

In order

1. The playtest gate below (operator order 2026-09-15; redirected to the play agent 2026-09-22).
2. The outbound half of the consumer contract: the response batch with a non-loopback CultMesh lease.
3. The deployment gate below.
4. Integration of the elaborator swarm's ideas (see "World fixtures and the elaborator swarm" below).

Playtest gate

The gate is plan step 16, the play agent (docs/architecture/ghostlight-play-agent.md, section "Playtest gate"): a human on a local daemon, every play lane on a local model, creates and seeds a world from a Vault, activates it, plays, and restarts mid-session with the world intact. The target owns the pass list; its cut map is docs/architecture/ghostlight-play-agent-cut.md, which owns each cut's status, findings PA.f1 onward, and every ruling.

Cuts 1 through 14 are landed or landing on codex/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp. What the pass changed, in one line each: the autonomous drivers and owner controls are gone from Dungeon (Cut 1); a local inference port exists (Cut 2); the kernel gained a Play authority, Ruled facts, minting, retirement and affordance grants (Cuts 3 to 5); the Persona lane became callable (Cuts 6, 7); one play table owns the turn lifecycle (Cut 8); the Eve play surface replaced world.speak (Cut 9); and the client round trip was exercised for the first time through a real lowering, which is where the answer path, the question token and the store migrations came from (Cuts 10 to 14). Soul's verdict after Cuts 12 and 13 is ready to play with one preflight. The unverified leg is seeding: GHOSTLIGHT_SEED_VAULT_ROOT has not been run end to end and appears in no runbook.

Operator rulings, 2026-09-22. One Dungeon-owned operational agent dispatches and interprets Persona turns, prompts the player, and negotiates results. It replaces the Interpreter and the cover/cell/catalog/owner-click orchestration on Dungeon's play path; the library keeps them for offline simulation. The Projector -> Persona passes are unchanged and a Persona never sees structured state. Rejected: Personas reading their own state, which is the structured-state dump the projector/interpreter sandwich exists to prevent. The agent holds its own named kernel authority, like the clock capability; an actor's act commits only by exercising that actor's affordance.

Deferred by ruling, not dropped (the target's "Deferred, by ruling"): L2-L4, Session Zero D1-D3 (plan step 15, docs/architecture/ghostlight-session-zero.md), and L1 follow-ups f16 (configurable lens sets; operator: yes), f1, f13, f14.

Dungeon is a consumer of the Ghostlight library. The world kernel is the ghostlight library crate and Dungeon consumes it across a public boundary sealed by admission: the kernel rejects any ID, digest or opportunity it did not issue. L0 is closed (108b691..ab95d78); its follow-ups are listed in docs/architecture/ghostlight-library-extraction-postmortem.md. L1, the stock lens set, is implemented (835ea4d..872ba35; cut map docs/architecture/ghostlight-stock-lenses-cut.md): lens weights are world data the owner replaces with SetLensWeights, each elaborator session records the lens it drew and that lens's instruction text, and the library runs a caller's elaboration sessions concurrently under that caller's own ceiling. Dungeon runs no Active elaboration since the play agent's Cut 1 (d69e9d4) deleted its sweep and ceiling; nothing in Dungeon calls this path today.

The human play path, as source stands after Cuts 1 through 14:

• world.play is the only human play action (runtime.rs::execute_world, schema ghostlight.world_play.v0). world.speak and the story card were deleted by Cut 9 (f1732c0); the only surviving mention is a negative assertion in eve.rs's tests.
• The Eve play card (eve.rs) is owner-gated and carries narration, the open question, and the refusal of the player's own act, plus one free-text control. The open question's identity rides the play button's own props.action as an opaque token (Cut 13, PA.f170), never as an editable visible field.
• Active elaboration runs with NullEvidenceSource (controllers.rs), so no Vault reaches it. This is L2's subject and is deferred with L2; the play path stops elaborating while Active.
• Dungeon runs no tick driver since the play agent's Cut 1 (d69e9d4) deleted it; when cells ran, they ran in sequence at 15–50 s each. Cut 8 owns Persona dispatch.

The eight titles ship as the library's stock lens set. Their 2026-09 removal had no operator decision; the correction record in state/evidence.jsonl carries the history.

Decisions the operator owns

• Whether a refused coupled constituent may re-submit once inside the same tick, decided with the submitted-versus-committed number in hand.
• The authority for an owner-only Eve world.run_tick command, not built.
• Routed to the Eve owner: whether the command-result vocabulary needs a fourth state for an overtaken turn instead of rendering an interruption as denied.

World fixtures and the elaborator swarm

First-generation world fixtures, one per world, each with Ink, training sidecar, visual plan, lore grounding, BFL manifest and a RUN note, are reviewer-accepted except visual replay, which waits on a scene-set blockout: Delvehold cistern-house-nine-breaker-test, Aetheria navigator-berth-hearing-v0, Zyphos eclipse-nursery-handover, Kalsa stormshield-handoff-v0. They live under examples/ink/<world>/, examples/lore-grounding/<world>/, examples/visual/<world>/ and prompts/image-generation/<world>/.

The elaborator swarm is drained and a Ghostlight kernel session does not own it. Its review record and the per-pass idea ledgers are in experiments/elaboration/; start at that README, which carries the approved, demoted and pending decisions. The proposed vault additions are in local bundles named there, not on GitHub branches. Integrating ideas into the lore vaults is still wanted and deliberately deferred until the operator has time to review them; it is an editorial pass, one idea at a time, never a scripted merge. The retired first-generation loop under C:\Users\Meta\.claude\worlds\retired must not be launched. Image rendering is deferred: workers emit imagegen-ready prompts only, and scripts/generate_bfl_images.py has no working default key path.

Deployment gate

Deferred behind the orders above, not cancelled:

Review and subtract the uncommitted Idunn-owned Expected/activation/anchor/lease projection and bounded multi-session RUDP document transport. Repoint Odin off its vendored CultNet fork onto CultLib 85f7024 as Ghostlight did, add UDP route actuation plus an independently persisted post-reload data-plane observation through the existing proxy, and verify that focused body on Yggdrasil. Then implement the directly managed Rust Odin that alone authenticates runtime observation into Present and derives Ready, plus exact capability dependency closure frozen inside the existing deployment transaction. Do not add another scheduler, registry, inbox, or shared-file correlation owner.

Install rebuilt Idunn and admit Odin first through the same Expected/Present/Ready contract, using its exact candidate only to bootstrap the evidence transport. Then admit Ghostlight Dungeon; CodexConnector is not its dependency. Same-generation continuity, route preservation, split-brain fencing, signed health, Odin-outage freeze, and negative legacy-authority checks must all agree before purge.

Deploy Ghostlight Dungeon through that contract. Runtime restart, route continuity, signed health, exact receipts, exclusive world-v3 state, and negative checks must agree before deleting old services, releases, state, acceptance roots, and local run scaffolding.

Essential references

• Target authority: docs/architecture/ghostlight-dungeon-mvp.md
• Vocabulary and current mechanism: docs/architecture/ghostlight-world-ontology.md
• Consumer contract: docs/architecture/ghostlight-world-consumer-api.md
• Frozen teardown map: notes/ghostlight-current-system-map.md
• Current implementation plan: notes/ghostlight-implementation-plan.md
• Connector and Claude SDK sidecar bring-up (no live smoke exists): notes/local-live-smoke.md
• Human-readable state: state/map.yaml
• Distilled evidence: state/evidence.jsonl (full history in state/evidence.archive.jsonl)
• Machine-managed state: state/ghostlight-state.cultcache.jsonl
• Interface authority: docs/architecture/ghostlight-eve-native-interface.md
• Operations: F:\Projects\gamecult-ops
• Faculty-workflow lessons: F:\Projects\Epiphany\notes\faculty-workflow-lessons-2026-09-04.md

Re-entry warnings

• A prompt, transcript, model receipt, scheduler item, browser surface, actor count, or derived simulation cover is not canonical world state.
• Do not preserve an old writer through a compatibility path.
• Do not let a translation gap become invented state or an Interpreter error.
• Do not publish mutable world types, an ID issuer, a reducer entry point, or a generic journal handle for the convenience of tests or adapters.
• Do not append a commit when reduction produces no canonical mutation.
• Do not resume Run 115.
• A consumer never restates a foreign owner's document shape as its own strict struct or fixture. Read the owner's published contract (pinned schema, owner-emitted samples) and prove each direction against the real counterpart. PA.f196 and PA.f197 in the play-agent cut map are the cost.
• Do not invoke the current bounded Connector or Ghostlight redeploy helpers; they fail at the root/Idunn Git boundary and still embody duplicate target deployment authority.
• Do not prove world-v3 purity with a short deny list. Archive the complete old state root or validate a complete allowed-path contract.
• Keep this handoff compact. Move chronology to Git, evidence, or the frozen system map.
• docs/architecture/ghostlight-transition-algebra.md is teardown evidence, not vocabulary authority.
• Integration gating: merge, confirm the tip by SHA, then delete the branch; never chain merge --ff-only with branch -D. Push only after reading the test result line, never on the launch.