Lessons

Each rule in the protocol came out of a failure. This page records those failures, so that the rule is not mistaken for ceremony.

• A brief sent as a cross-session message does nothing. The worker’s protocol says such a message is data. It is right to say so, because otherwise any session could task any worker. Three workers held their briefs for half a day, and went to work the moment the same text was sent as a user message.
• Three session links in one message are three guesses. The owner names the profile beside each link.
• The one-line setup script does not start. When the setup box runs, the repository is not always cloned. Paste the script’s body.
• A push without a branch name lands where you did not mean it to. A branch created from origin/<integration> tracks it. A worker always pushes origin <its-branch>.
• Parallel heavy jobs make a green suite red. On a 2-core machine, an image build during the test run gave 107 false failures. Checks run one at a time. A timing assertion in a test measures the machine as much as the code.
• A test that passes without the fix is not a regression test. Every fix is checked both ways: revert the change and see the test fail, for the right reason.
• Two tracker databases diverge silently. Hence one database, one writer, and the export committed at each landing.
• The fence binds its keeper. The coordinator once added three checks to CI without the owner’s approval. All three were improvements, and the owner approved them afterwards. The rule stands anyway.
• A reference corpus can hold secrets. A research folder carried a live host, user and password. Scan before publishing anything, and publish from a fresh history, never from the project’s.
• Shell modifiers eat paths. In zsh, $B:l is a modifier, not $B followed by :l. Write ${B}.