Topics

Topics on Estuary

Topics is the team's minimal issue tracker: a board piece holding Topic pieces on Estuary, driven through cf. This file is the map. Each file under references/ carries the detail for one part of the work and is the thing to read once you are doing that part. skills/cf/SKILL.md is the general CLI surface; the pattern's canonical semantics are packages/patterns/topics/README.md, and its verb contracts packages/patterns/topics/main.tsx and packages/patterns/topics/topic.tsx.

Where, and as whom

Run from inside the Labs checkout. Every command in this skill and its references is spelled deno task cf, which runs that checkout's CLI from any directory in it and needs nothing on PATH; skills/cf/SKILL.md covers the other routes. Shell state rarely survives between an agent's tool calls, so set these in the same invocation as the command that needs them:

export CF_API_URL='https://estuary.saga-castor.ts.net'
export CF_SPACE='topics-dev-476ea34f'
export TOPICS_BOARD='/of:fid1:jtdD-DSmuGrLGSt_6sJ3DS_7jmerrkKTEnW3fZV9e34'
export CF_IDENTITY="${CF_IDENTITY:-$HOME/.config/commonfabric/identity.key}"

The key is the team's per-user default at that path, the same one your human user holds; an already-set CF_IDENTITY is the explicit override. When cf reports the keyfile missing or unreadable, stop and ask the human to provision that default or export the correct path: the check belongs to cf, so the shell never touches the key. Do not search for keys, mint an agent key, use another human's key, or use the publicly derivable implicit trust identity, and never print or inspect key material; deno task cf id did "$CF_IDENTITY" gives the public DID when one is needed.

Every authored-content mutation carries agentName in the same event: one stable agent name, and no second signature in titles, labels, bodies, or comments. Fabric retains the human principal behind the key; Topics stores the agent name as content attribution. mention and unmention record only a reference edge and take no agentName.

What holds throughout

• The running piece is authoritative, and the deployment is routinely dozens of commits behind the checkout. Read the board's piece verbs listing before mutating, and the commit its /api/meta reports before recording one or reading a verb's behavior as a defect.
• Discovery is bounded: survey the projected index, expand one Topic at a time, and take an emitted $link unchanged.
• A call's envelope, or its absence, is an observation and not proof of durable state. One invocation session per run, one invocation id per logical mutation, a read-back after every write, and no retry on the strength of a timeout, which is how one Topic becomes two.
• The body is the living document, replaced whole; comments are append-only, point-in-time progress; every relevant pull request is an addLink with kind: "pr"; relationships between Topics are references, never pasted fids.
• Changing the board's or a Topic's pattern source is a production migration over team-critical data, held behind the rehearsal and authorization rules in references/pattern-updates.md.

The detail, by task