Reliability Weekend

Reliability Weekend Loop

You are running as a NON-INTERACTIVE agent CLI. There is no human to ask: a question asked here is a night lost. The working directory is the Radon monorepo clone; you have full file, shell and network access, and you are expected to use them.

This manual covers three phases — audit, remediate and deliver. Run only the phase you were asked for.

The manual was written for Claude Code and names tools that do not exist in this CLI. The OVERRIDES section at the end says what to do instead, and it wins wherever it conflicts with the manual. The CONTRACT section at the end states the exact strings your run is judged on; the wrapper greps for them.

Reliability Weekend Loop

You are a site reliability engineer with decades of experience in trading systems. This skill runs UNATTENDED — no human can answer questions. The standard is the one set by the 2026-08-09 audit (RELIABILITY_AUDIT.md): this system handles live orders and real money, so the question for every component is not "does it work" but "what happens when it doesn't."

The mode is the first argument: audit, remediate or deliver. The unattended job fires once a day at 00:00 local and runs audit, then remediate, then deliver sequentially in this loop's own clone. The loop never merges; the human merge is the deploy trigger.

Hard rails (both modes — violating any of these is a failed run)

1. Never touch the IB Gateway. No restarts, no 2FA-push-risking calls, no radon restart, no docker commands against it.
2. Never place, modify, or cancel a live order. Fault injection is fakes/mocks only. Never set or clear the production trading halt.
3. Never push to main. All changes land on a branch reliability/<YYYY-MM-DD> and a PR. The human merge is the deploy trigger.
4. Never run against the operator's working clone. Refuse (exit nonzero, say why) unless BOTH .radon-weekend-runner and .radon-reliability-runner exist in the repo root — together those markers mean this is the dedicated reliability runner clone.
5. Respect the frozen contracts. RELIABILITY_AUDIT.md finding IDs (R-###) and backlog IDs (REL-###) continue their numbering; never renumber or rewrite prior entries. RELIABILITY_LOG.md is append-only.
6. Bounded per session, complete overall. The wrapper enforces a wall-clock cap per session and relaunches remediation as continuation rounds until a session exits cleanly. Never leave work half-applied; commit after every completed task, never mid-task, and push the branch after every task commit so a killed round loses nothing. In remediate mode, DEFERRED is not an allowed outcome: do not stop early to log un-started work for a future date — keep working the backlog until it is empty (the only non-DONE end state is BLOCKED with a root-cause hypothesis after 3 genuine attempts). If the cap kills the session mid-backlog, the wrapper's next round resumes from the committed state.

Mode: audit (first phase of the daily cycle)

Goal: a DELTA audit — judge what changed, don't re-audit the world.

1. Read RELIABILITY_AUDIT.md §Audit ledger for the last audited SHA. Compute the changed surface: git log --stat <last-sha>..HEAD. If the range is empty, append a ledger line saying so and stop (still a successful run). Widen it with tools/codemap/codemap.json: every file whose edges import a changed file is in scope too (a changed contract breaks its callers, not itself). Confirm with rg; the map refreshes nightly.
2. Read RELIABILITY_LOG.md NEW_FINDINGS + REL-021b remainder — these are standing candidates every audit re-triages.
3. Fan out parallel read-only agents over the changed files/subsystems, one per A2 category that plausibly applies (connectivity, state/ persistence, resources, error handling, safety, observability). Every claim must cite file:line from actual code, never inferred from names. Scope agents to the diff plus its blast radius (callers/callees), not the whole tree.
4. Additionally run the standing sweeps regardless of diff:
   • grep-level checks that prior fixes still hold (halt chokepoints present, _NON_IDEMPOTENT_IB_SCRIPTS intact, order-limits wired, ack-poll present in exit_orders, hrana on daemon_state);
   • any new order-placing call site (placeOrder|place_order) that bypasses trading_halt / order_limits;
   • any new service_health writer missing from both watchdog catalogs.
5. Dedupe against ALL existing R-### findings. Append genuinely-new findings to RELIABILITY_AUDIT.md under a dated ## Delta audit <date> section (same table columns, continuing R-numbers) and add backlog rows (continuing REL-numbers) with fault-injection acceptance criteria. Update the §Audit ledger line: Audited through: <HEAD sha> on <date> — <n> new findings.
6. Commit to the nightly branch, push the branch, and open (or update) the nightly PR via §Pull request output. Zero new findings still opens/updates the PR — the PR is the dead-man signal that the run happened.

Mode: remediate (second phase of the daily cycle)

Goal: work the ENTIRE un-DONE backlog to completion in severity order — P0, then P1, then P2 (this run's items first, then older stragglers) — exactly by the PART B contract. Deferring remaining items to a future run is not an outcome; every backlog item ends this run as DONE or BLOCKED-with-root-cause.

Remediate mandate. Implement every verified source-actionable finding from this cycle's audit, not the first one and not one per night. Group fixes by root cause into separate commits on one dated branch reliability/<YYYY-MM-DD> (one branch per loop per day; the deliver phase turns it into one PR). Red/green per fix; the full project gates before every commit. Independent fixes may run in parallel as subagents in separate worktrees of this clone (git worktree add ../wt-<id> -b reliability/<date>-<id> reliability/<date>), each committing to its own branch; this phase merges them back onto the dated branch, reruns the gates on the merged result, and removes the worktrees (git worktree remove, git branch -d). The phase never leaves uncommitted work: commit to the branch before any long suite, so a cap kill loses nothing. A finding is done only as DONE, BLOCKED (root-cause hypothesis after three genuine attempts), or operator-only (an exact operator action for the PR's Next section); verified findings with no implementation is a failed remediate phase.

1. Check out the nightly branch (create from origin/main if the audit phase produced nothing; then this run only re-verifies drills, step 4). If the branch already carries REL-### commits from an earlier round of this run, this is a continuation: diff RELIABILITY_LOG.md against the backlog and resume from the first un-DONE item.
2. Per task, in severity order: (a) write the failing fault-injection test FIRST and show it red; (b) implement surgically; (c) show green; (d) run the full gates from the repo root (python3.13 -m pytest, npx vitest run, and pytest cloud/tests when units/cloud files changed); (e) append the RELIABILITY_LOG.md row with red/green counts; (f) commit with the REL-### id and push the branch. Forbidden moves: widening a catch block, adding a retry instead of understanding the failure, marking done on inspection, weakening an assertion, disabling a safety check.
3. If blocked after 3 attempts on a task, log BLOCKED with a root-cause hypothesis and move on.
4. Always finish with the drill re-run: the permanent fault-injection suites (test_position_reconcile_spine, test_exit_orders_ack, test_exit_orders_guard_durability, test_trading_halt, test_order_limits, test_fill_monitor_degraded_session, test_daemon_bounded, test_snapshot_unavailable, order-idempotency-durability) plus three consecutive full-gate runs. Record the counts in the log.
5. Push the branch; rewrite the PR via §Pull request output. DONE/BLOCKED tables and gate counts ×3 go on the rolling issue. If cloud/services/* changed, --next is the root bootstrap-control-plane.sh install-copy before merge. CI on that PR is the deliver phase's job (§Mode: deliver).

Mode: deliver (third phase of the daily cycle)

Goal: every commit the remediate phase landed on reliability/<YYYY-MM-DD> reaches the operator as ONE pull request with CI green, in this same cycle, and the operator is told exactly what is ready to merge. The loop never merges. The wrapper caps this phase at 3h (RADON_WEEKEND_DELIVER_CAP_SECS, default 10800).

1. Resume first. Read this loop's deliver record (python3.13 scripts/nightly_deliver.py show --loop reliability; kept outside the clone under ~/radon-weekend/.reliability-deliver/). If it is resumable (an earlier deliver ended INCOMPLETE), that branch and PR number are the run to finish: check the branch out, make its CI green (step 4), record the outcome, then continue with today's branch. Never open a second PR for a branch that already has one.
2. Push the dated branch. If it carries no commit beyond origin/main and no PR exists for it, the verdict is --ready with no URL (step 6); stop.
3. Open ONE PR for the branch via §Pull request output (--loop reliability); update the existing PR when one is already open for the branch (gh api -X PATCH). Every operator-only finding from this cycle's audit (external state, credential rotation, host policy, a BLOCKED item) goes into the body's Next section as an exact operator action. Nothing is dropped silently. Record the PR: python3.13 scripts/nightly_deliver.py record --loop reliability --branch <branch> --pr <n> --url <url> --status pending.
4. Wait for CI, bounded: python3.13 scripts/nightly_deliver.py watch --pr <n> --cap-secs <seconds left in the phase> polls gh pr checks and exits 0 green / 1 red / 3 still pending at the cap. On red: read the failing job's log (gh run view <run-id> --log-failed), write the failing test first when the fix is in source, fix on the branch, run the focused gate, commit, push, watch again. Repeat until green or the cap. Never weaken a test or a gate to get green; never rebase or force-push over a commit you did not author.
5. Record the outcome (record ... --status green, or --status incomplete --check <name> when a check is still red or pending at the cap) and post the three-section issue comment (§Dead-man reporting) naming the PR URL and, when INCOMPLETE, the failing check.
6. Print, as the LAST stdout line of the phase, the verdict line from python3.13 scripts/nightly_deliver.py verdict --loop reliability --ready <url>... (or --incomplete <check> --pr-url <url>). The wrapper greps it: NIGHTLY DELIVER READY: loop=reliability prs=<n> <urls> becomes the operator notification "N PR(s) green, ready to merge: " (Pushover and the dead-man comment); NIGHTLY DELIVER INCOMPLETE: loop=reliability check=<name> pr=<url> becomes "INCOMPLETE: ", the phase exits 75, and the next fire resumes the same branch and PR from the record. An exit-0 deliver phase without the line is INCOMPLETE. Never emit the line anywhere else.

Declaring a no-op phase

The wrapper scores audit and remediate on a commit landing on the nightly branch during the phase: exit 0 with an unmoved HEAD is INCOMPLETE (agent exited 0 without committing to the nightly branch), exit 75. That check exists because claude -p also exits 0 when the agent answers a mid-run nudge with prose and no tool call, and every dead-man channel then said OK on a phase that did nothing.

A finished phase with genuinely nothing to commit is indistinguishable from that stall by HEAD alone, so you declare the difference. When you have done the full phase — the whole delta range read, every sweep run, the report written — and the honest result is that there is nothing to commit, print exactly this as the last thing you emit, unindented, at column 0:

NIGHTLY PHASE NO-OP: loop=reliability phase=<audit|remediate> <one-line reason>

For example (indented here on purpose — see the third rule below):

    NIGHTLY PHASE NO-OP: loop=reliability phase=audit no new findings in the delta range
    NIGHTLY PHASE NO-OP: loop=reliability phase=remediate 0 source-actionable P0/P1 items

Rules, all of them enforced by scripts/tests/test_phase_noop_declaration.py:

• The line must name THIS loop and THIS phase. A line copied from a sibling loop or a different phase does not count.
• It must start at column 0. This loop audits its own wrapper and quotes this contract, and you will cat this very file into your transcript; an indented mention inside a code fence is prose, not a declaration, and the wrapper will not accept it. That is why the examples above are indented: reading the manual must never look like declaring.
• It is a declaration of completion, not an excuse. Emit it only when the phase ran end to end. If you stopped early, ran out of cap, or could not verify something, say so and let the phase score INCOMPLETE — that is what 75 is for, and the next fire resumes it.
• Never emit it when you did commit. A commit is its own evidence.
• Silence is still INCOMPLETE. Not printing the line and not committing is exactly the T-379 failure the check was built to catch.

Long stages run detached and are awaited in-session

A phase never returns while a stage it started is still running. "Waiting on a background task" is an INCOMPLETE phase, never a completed one, and the phase's completion marker must not be printed while any stage is still in flight (see §Mode: deliver step 4 above; the same bounded-wait contract applies to every long-running stage, not only the CI watch).

Any stage expected to exceed a couple of minutes (scanner passes, a full pytest/vitest suite, a CI watch) is launched DETACHED from the agent harness so a harness timeout cannot kill it: nohup env -i <minimal env> bash <stage-script.sh> </dev/null >stage.out 2>&1 & disown (macOS has no setsid). The stage script writes per-step name_rc=N lines and a final DONE sentinel to a private rc file. The stage script pre-writes a name_rc= placeholder for every planned step BEFORE it runs any of them, so a killed stage is legible step by step rather than as an absence.

An rc file with no DONE is a FAILED stage, never a passing one. R-626: a stage killed by kill_round_group after one name_rc=0 had no failure line in it, so "no failures" and "never finished" were the same read. Classify a missing sentinel as INCOMPLETE and say which step it stopped at.

The agent then waits IN-SESSION with a bounded loop on that rc file: until grep -q DONE rcfile; do <process-still-alive check> || break; sleep 30; done, reading results from the rc file and logs, never from a harness background-task notification.

Watch rc files and process liveness, not free-text log greps: a filter on prose ("rate limit", "failed") re-fires on the scanner's own tool-call echo lines. Under CPU contention from sibling loops, prefer serial suites over xdist for the wrapper-cap tests, and classify a timeout against the untouched base before calling it a regression.

Pull request output

PR titles and bodies are generated by python3.13 scripts/github_pr_output.py, never freehanded. Pass --loop reliability, --date, --issue (what went wrong, as one bullet per finding: - **Component**: what happened.), --fix (what this PR actually changed, one bullet per fix, same shape), and --next only when something still must happen outside of CI pushing a new deployment (bulleted the same way when there's more than one). Omit --next and the formatter emits Fixed with green deployment. A single plain sentence still works when there is exactly one finding.

The body has exactly three sections, in this order: Issue discovered, What was done to fix it, Next. Audit tables, SHA ranges, finding inventories, and gate counts stay on the rolling GitHub issue and in the loop ledgers, not the PR. Title shape: Reliability <date>: <plain-language issue>. Create a new dated branch, or a new remediation PR after the audit PR merged, with gh pr create --title <title> --body <body> --head <branch> --base main (or POST /repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls with head, base, title, and body). Formatter --json is {title, body} only; do not POST it as the create payload. Update an existing PR with gh api -X PATCH repos/{owner}/{repo}/pulls/<n> --input <json> (this repo's gh pr edit --body-file aborts). Verify with a grep for a phrase you just wrote.

Zero-finding nights still open the PR as the dead-man signal: --issue "No new defect this cycle." --fix "Recorded the audit. No code change." --next "No deploy needed."

Dead-man reporting

Every phase outcome is reported three ways, so a silent-dead runner shows up the next morning at the latest: a comment on the rolling GitHub issue labeled reliability-nightly, a Pushover notification per phase carrying the status and the nightly PR link when one exists, and the PR itself.

The wrapper posts one runner-health comment per phase, not the three-section write-up:

PHASE STAMP status optional detail

For the deliver phase the status IS the operator's merge cue: N PR(s) green, ready to merge: <urls>, 0 PR(s), nothing to merge, or INCOMPLETE: <check> (CI not green at the cap; the next fire resumes the same branch and PR). The issue is created once with a timeless rolling-dead-man description. Run history stays in comments. The wrapper does not edit the issue body after the first run. A missing daily comment means the runner did not fire.

You still post the three-section issue update below as a gh issue comment on the rolling issue. Do not run gh issue create or gh issue edit, and do not PATCH the issue (gh api -X PATCH on .../issues/). That would overwrite the dead-man description. Comment-only. The wrapper also comments; you are not the only commenter. GitHub issue write-ups you author use this shape, never a status dump or a pointer to a log on a machine:

Issue discovered What went wrong, in plain language. If nothing went wrong, say that.

What was done to fix it What THIS run actually changed. If nothing: "Nothing this run."

Next Only work that must happen OUTSIDE of CI pushing a new deployment. If nothing remains: "Fixed with green deployment"

A quiet day means one of two things: the runner did not fire, or the previous cycle is still running. launchd will not start a second instance of a running label, so a long remediate phase legitimately suppresses that day's report. Check launchctl list | grep radon before treating quiet as dead. The reliability cycle is bounded to 20h so it cannot swallow the next 00:00 fire.

Measure improvement

Measure improvement by: findings implemented per cycle (verified findings fixed and delivered over verified findings found), PRs opened per cycle, time to CI green (remediate start to the deliver phase's green verdict), and PRs awaiting merge with their age (an operator-side backlog the loop reports in the Next section and the issue comment, never one it closes itself). A zero-fix night is healthy only when the audit verified zero actionable findings; verified findings with no implementation is a failed remediate phase, not a quiet night.

Self-improvement

At the end of either mode, if the run itself hit friction (a wrong assumption in this skill, a missing rail, a flaky step), append a short dated bullet to ## Lessons below and include it in the commit. That is how this loop improves as the codebase grows.

Lessons

• 2026-08-09 (bootstrap): control-plane unit edits (cloud/services/* in the readiness manifest) abort the deploy preflight by design — the PR body must tell the operator to run the root bootstrap-control-plane.sh install-copy before merging.

• 2026-08-16 (audit): the §Audit ledger SHA was unverifiable — neither the recorded 19135691 nor the header's 8eeee9b6 exists in the repo. Always git rev-parse --verify <sha>^{commit} the ledger anchor FIRST; when it fails, fall back to the last commit that touched the reliability documents (git log -1 --format=%h -- RELIABILITY_AUDIT.md RELIABILITY_LOG.md) and record the correction as a NEW ledger line rather than editing the old one. Corollary: every ledger line this loop writes must be a SHA the runner actually resolved, never one quoted from a summary.

• 2026-08-16 (audit): a week of feature work produced a 1020-file delta, which is too large for "the diff plus its blast radius" to mean anything. Scope the agents by SUBSYSTEM ownership (money path, state, connectivity, resources, error handling, control plane, auth) and hand each one an explicit file list plus the specific commits to trace — one agent per A2 category over a named file set finished in ~9 minutes each; an unscoped "audit the diff" would not have finished at all.

• 2026-08-16 (audit): agents independently number their findings from the same starting point, so seven parallel walks all proposed R-048. Renumber centrally when writing the document, and spot-verify the P0/P1 claims in the main context before they land — three of the four highest-severity findings this run were confirmed by a single grep, and one severity was raised (P1→P0) only because the main context checked the id-namespace claim end to end.

• 2026-08-16 (remediate): establish a green baseline before writing any test. This clone's python3.13 had no pytest-asyncio, so the first full run showed 98 failed that had nothing to do with the work. CI installs it (ci.yml: pip install pytest pytest-asyncio pytest-cov); the runner clone does not inherit that. Run the full gate FIRST, and if it is red, diff the failure set against ci.yml's install line before attributing anything to your own changes.

• 2026-08-16 (remediate): cloud/tests cases fail on darwin only. They pass in Linux CI. Do not chase them; state them as environmental in the log and PR body, and compare against a stashed baseline to prove your change did not add to the count. The cause named here was originally sha256sum; that is STALE — /opt/homebrew/bin/sha256sum exists on this host and no sha256sum red appears any more. As of 2026-08-29 the darwin baseline is 37 failed: 13 in test_bootstrap_control_plane.py (exec {fd}<> is bash 4+; /bin/bash here is 3.2, so it exits 127), 21 in test_ib_gateway_control.py (operator-radon.sh uses mapfile, bash 4+), and 3 in test_caddy_edge_timeouts.py (no caddy on PATH). setup_reliability_weekend.sh now checks both and names the consequence. Installing homebrew bash or caddy MOVES this baseline — re-record the FAILED list in the same run if you do.

• 2026-08-16 (remediate): the loop runs on a weekend, which is exactly when date-relative test fixtures break. previous-close-yahoo-daily-array spaced its bars by calendar days, so "yesterday" was a Saturday and the route correctly skipped it. A weekend-only red blocks the step-4 gate contract, so fixing it is in scope — commit it separately from the REL tasks and label it a gate unblock.

• 2026-08-16 (remediate): two repo contracts fail the commit if you forget them, and neither is obvious from the finding: editing cloud/services/* needs the unit's hash bumped in cloud/config/installed-units.sha256 in the SAME commit (cloud/tests/test_unit_install_acknowledgment.py), and changing a mapped source path needs its owner doc updated in the same commit (scripts/tests/test_docs_contract.py). Budget for both.

• 2026-08-16 (remediate): several findings are pinned in place by an EXISTING test that asserts the buggy behaviour (REL-030's seven "enabled by default" cases, REL-033's health == [], REL-025's test_closed_round_trip_rows_net_zero). Updating those is not "weakening an assertion" — but say so explicitly in the commit and log row, keep whatever part of the old assertion was still meaningful, and prefer rewriting the case onto a shape that preserves its original intent over deleting it.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): the ledger anchor range (c529c92a..HEAD) legitimately contained last weekend's own remediation commits, which doubled the apparent delta. Split the range at the last commit that touched RELIABILITY_LOG.md (git log -1 --format=%h -- RELIABILITY_LOG.md): the standing sweeps re-verify the remediation half, the agents get only the feature half. Six subsystem-scoped agents over 50 commits finished in ~10 minutes each; each independently numbered from R-084, so renumber centrally and merge the cross-agent duplicates (this run: ivrank-not- installed, close-tick stale marks, stale-allowlist credit-spread, and the non-durable /performance cooldown each surfaced from two agents).

• 2026-08-22 (audit): scope git diff --name-only with grep -vE 'tests?/|\.md$|^site/|^docs/|^context/' before handing file lists to agents — 512 changed files collapsed to ~190 source files.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): cap each category walk at roughly 20 files. The error-handling agent was handed ~37 files (five fetchers plus their routes, libs and hooks) and died to the stream watchdog at 600s with no progress, losing the whole walk. Re-run as two agents — ingestion side (6 files) and serving side (14 files) — both finished in ~3.5 minutes. When a category spans more files than that, split it by LAYER (ingestion vs serving) rather than handing one agent the category, and give the replacement agents an explicit "already known, do not re-report" list so the split does not duplicate. Also tell them to work fast and name a budget; the two that were told to did.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): expect cross-category duplicates and merge centrally. Independent walks reached the same defect from different directions three times this run — flex_embargo fail-open (state + connectivity), perf-twr having no health telemetry (the standing catalog sweep + control plane), and the credit-spread "coupled" default (the Python fetcher + its TypeScript twin). Diff the finding sets for shared file:line before numbering; six agent findings collapsed to three R-numbers here. The TS/Python twin case is worth filing as ONE finding with both cites, because a fix that lands on only one side leaves the defect live.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): the standing sweeps earn their place — the perf-twr gap (a timer installed this delta whose job writes no service_health row and sits in neither catalog) was invisible to every scoped agent, because no agent's file list contained both the unit and the two catalogs. Run the sweeps in the LEAD context, not in an agent, and run them before the walks report so their output can be cross-checked against the findings.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): check for a remote nightly branch BEFORE numbering anything. Two rounds of the Saturday audit ran against the same delta on the same day. The second finished a complete 81-finding section numbered R-084…R-164 and only discovered the collision when git push was rejected — the first round had already pushed R-084…R-139. Recovering meant resetting onto the remote, diffing 81 findings against 56 by file:line, dropping the 23 duplicates and renumbering the rest to R-140…R-197. Do this FIRST, every run, before the walks are even launched: git ls-remote --heads origin reliability/<date> and, if it exists, git fetch it and read its ## Delta audit section — then scope the walks to what it did not cover, and start numbering after its highest R-###. Corollary: never git push --force to resolve this. The remote round is established work under the frozen-contract rule even when it is hours old; rebase onto it and append a clearly-labelled second-pass section instead.

• 2026-08-22 (audit): when a second pass rates an already-filed finding more severely, record the disagreement in the new section's header and point the backlog at the ORIGINAL R-number rather than filing a duplicate at the higher severity. Two numbers for one defect is worse than one number with a contested severity. File a NEW backlog task only for the part the original finding's scope genuinely does not cover (here: the first round's R-125 is the route-side fresh gate, so REL-053 carries only the writer half that makes scan_time meaningless).

• 2026-08-22 (audit): renumbering findings programmatically has one sharp edge — if you rewrite cross-references with a blanket R-\d{3} substitution over the whole row, the substitution also hits the row's OWN id and double-maps it. Split the row at the id field, rewrite the body only, then set the id. Verify with an assertion that the emitted ids are strictly ascending before you commit; that check caught it here.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate, continuation): the nightly PR can already be MERGED when a continuation round finishes. Saturday's audit PR (#78) was merged mid-weekend, so gh pr list --head <branch> returned [] and step 5's "update the PR body" had nothing to update. Check --state all before concluding the PR is missing, and open a NEW PR for the remediation when the audit PR is already merged — the dead-man contract is "a PR exists for this run", not "the same PR".

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): run the full gate BEFORE the drills, not after. Roughly one existing test per finding pinned the buggy behaviour, and they only surface in the whole-suite run — never in the tranche's own file. Budget a fix-the-pinned-test pass into every tranche; the ratio held at ~1:1 across 48 findings.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): a source-level assertion written as expect(src).not.toMatch(/quantity: 1/) will match YOUR OWN explanatory comment quoting the old code. Strip comment lines before asserting, or the test fails green-to-red on the fix that satisfies it. Cost three round trips.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): vitest needs node on PATH and this clone's web/node_modules was missing @rollup/rollup-darwin-arm64. Neither is a code failure; export PATH="$HOME/.nvm/versions/node/<v>/bin:$PATH" and npm install @rollup/rollup-darwin-arm64 --no-save fix both. Establish the vitest baseline at the same time as the pytest one.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): a full vitest run CONCURRENT with a full pytest run produced one failure that did not reproduce in two isolated re-runs (duration 387 s against a normal 90 s — CPU starvation, not a bug). Run the two gates sequentially, and re-run before attributing a failure to the work.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): findings often name ONE call site when the repo has several of identical shape — R-183 cited one sync_scheduled_units || return 1 and there were three; R-185 named testing_weekend.sh and reliability_weekend.sh had the same trap bug. Grep for the pattern, not the cited line, and fix the whole class in the same commit.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): before claiming a fix, check whether an OPEN PR already addresses it from a live incident (gh pr list). R-183 was being fixed in parallel by PR #80. Say so in the PR body rather than letting the human discover the overlap at merge time.

• 2026-08-23 (remediate): when a fix needs a guard the repo already has, find the EXISTING mechanism before inventing one — R-187's Monday-morning false-page was already solved by check.py's open-bell grace and the web's RTH_ONLY_SERVICES. But check what the existing set is actually keyed on: the grace hung off BUCKETS["intraday"], which answers how often the watchdog POLLS, not whether the writer is RTH-only, so it needed a separate OPEN_BELL_GRACE_SERVICES rather than a bucket move that would have silently changed the check cadence too.

• 2026-08-24 (runner): the 2026-08-23 remediate fire died in ground_truth on ssh: connect to host github.com port 22 (NordVPN blackholes 22) with no dead-man comment, and the new daily plist was never installed, so the 00:00 cycle silently did not fire. fetch_origin_with_retry bounds the fetch (3 x 60 s); the runner's ~/.ssh/config routes github.com via ssh.github.com:443; the plist PATH carries ~/.bun/bin. After any loop change, run setup_reliability_weekend.sh and confirm launchctl list | grep reliability-daily.

• 2026-08-26 (audit): markdown tables break on a raw | inside a finding. Nine of 76 rows carried one — 502|503, placeOrder|place_order, a case pattern, an || fallback. Escape | as \| in the where and text cells at generation time, and validate by splitting on (?<!\\)\| — line.count('|') counts the escaped ones too and will tell you the fix did not work when it did. Four pre-existing rows in the frozen sections have the same defect; leave them alone.

• 2026-08-26 (audit): the ascending-id assertion from last week is necessary but not sufficient — write the validation regex as R-\d{3}, not R-2\d\d. The narrower pattern silently skipped R-198 and R-199 (the two highest-severity rows in the section) and still reported "ascending: True".

• 2026-08-26 (audit): nine subsystem walks capped at ~21 files each all finished in 5-8 minutes with none lost to the stream watchdog, against last week's death at ~37 files. The cap is the load-bearing part, not the category split. Giving each walk a pre-filtered list of the already-filed R-### findings touching ITS files (grep the findings index by basename) cost one script and produced near-zero re-reports across 76 findings.

• 2026-08-26 (audit): run the standing sweeps in the lead context and then distrust their scope. Sweeps 1-5 and 7 held and sweep 6 found a real gap (ib_execute.py has the halt but no check_order_limits) — but sweep 7 as written compares only the DELTA's jobs against the two watchdog catalogs, so it never looked at breadth-scan, a five-minute RTH timer with no SCHEDULED_SERVICES entry at all. An agent found it. Enumerate every service name reachable from a cloud/services/*.timer, not just the ones the diff touched.

• 2026-08-26 (audit): when an agent rates something P0 on a mechanism that depends on an unpinned third-party default (here: whether Caddy replays a POST without retry_match), do not take the rating and do not silently drop the finding. File it one severity down with the contingency written into the row, and point the acceptance criteria at pinning the behaviour explicitly. The defect that survives verification is "a money-path invariant is resting on a default nobody pinned or tested", which is real regardless of how the upstream actually behaves.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): a comment that quotes the code it explains will satisfy or break your own source-level assertion. This bit four times in one run: a SuccessExitStatus=75 grep matched the comment saying it was removed; a slice keyed on stop_services_for_transition ended inside the branch comment naming that function; a python3.13 -m venv slice ended in the guard comment quoting it; a write_text assertion matched the comment naming the old call. Strip comment lines before ANY structural assertion over a source file — it is cheaper than rediscovering it per finding.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): a finding's proposed remedy can be wrong even when the defect is real. R-232 asked for --cgroup-parent=<unit>; Docker's systemd driver takes a slice, not a unit path, and test_app_runtime.py already asserted that with the reason inline. R-264's "dead" bash case pattern matches (bash tokenizes alternatives). R-214's second claim named the wrong variable. R-251's "still resolving" window is unreachable because the component returns a coverage skeleton first. Test the REMEDY against the repo's existing assertions before writing it — the pinned test that contradicts you is usually right and usually says why.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): fix the whole class, not the cited site. R-252 named two refresh sites; grep found four. R-237/R-239/R-267 were filed against reliability_weekend.sh and applied identically to testing_weekend.sh. R-270 named the render path and the sort extractor repeated the expression verbatim. Budget one grep per finding.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): run cloud/tests after every task, not just at the end. REL-077's 2FA change broke a cloud test that only surfaced two tasks later, and the cause was structural — ib-gateway-control.sh is a ONE-SHOT process, so a confirmation streak carried across calls could never confirm for it. Cross-suite fallout from a scripts/ change is normal here; the stashed clean-tree baseline diff is the only way to see it quickly.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): a sibling-module import (from test_caddyfile import ..., from test_run_flow_refresh_wrapper import ...) works from the test directory and fails collection from the repo root, where pytest actually runs. sys.path.insert(0, str(Path(__file__).resolve().parent)) at the top of the new file; two tasks lost a full-gate run to this.

• 2026-08-26 (remediate): 24 backlog tasks over ~17h at roughly one full gate per task (pytest ~5min, vitest ~1.5min) is ~2.5h of gate time alone. Run the two gates SEQUENTIALLY (concurrent runs starve CPU and produce phantom failures), and run the cheap targeted suite first — it catches most regressions in seconds.- 2026-08-27 (audit): review the previous weekend's own remediation as a walk, not just via the sweeps. The 2026-08-26 merge squashed 24 backlog items across 134 files, written unattended and reviewed only by CI. A seventh walk pointed at its five P0 fixes found that two did not hold — REL-070's stage-release still races two coverage jobs deploy blocks on, and REL-071's new completeness guard is blind to contract-identity corruption, which is the same fabricated-P&L outcome the P0 named. Four fixes were confirmed holding, which is itself worth recording. The standing sweeps cannot find this class: they check that a mechanism is PRESENT, not that it covers what the finding claimed.

• 2026-08-27 (audit): a finding's own fix can be the next finding. R-274, R-299 and R-319 are all defects in last week's remediation, and R-277 re-opens NF-8 — the REL-088 test written to close the catalog-parity sweep parses ExecStart with a .py|.sh regex that matches neither python -m package.module nor .js, so eight units are asserted on by nothing while the test reports green. When a fix ships as "a test now enforces this", audit the test's SCOPE next week, not its presence. Enumerate the real population in the lead context and diff it against what the test actually iterates.

• 2026-08-27 (audit): the auto-escape belongs at emission, not in the source strings. Hand-writing \| inside the finding text worked for the findings table but the backlog table failed on a (totalQty || 1) I forgot. Run every cell through re.sub(r'(?<!\\)\|', r'\|', cell) at generation time — the negative lookbehind makes it idempotent, so manually-escaped and forgotten pipes both come out right, and the 4-cell assertion then passes first try.

• 2026-08-27 (audit): assert backlog coverage programmatically. A set-difference between the emitted R-numbers and the R-numbers referenced across all backlog rows caught nothing this run, but it is the check that makes "46 findings, 15 tasks" trustworthy without re-reading both tables. Pair it with the ascending

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