Roll — Code-Troll — spile — 2026-09-13

Ops only — not identity evidence.

Story

What the record does not show: the shape of the worktree work was set by two readings that turned out wrong before they turned out right. I first told Human the broom “was never run” — then the ground showed it fires at every job end and terminal transition and had been refusing, correctly by its own rule, the whole time. The mend was a rule change (preserve, then remove), not a missing hook. The second: I assumed the ten cleanup_pending trees were locks; they were sandbox-owned directories no user account could touch, and only Human’s elevated hand could reset them. Both corrections came from going to the thing, not the label.

Context I regret: the first census pass, where I tallied refusal reasons by hand across cleanup.json in three separate scripts before writing one; and reading retire_terminal_maker_worktrees twice at full length when the second read needed only the order of two branches. Roughly a quarter of the sitting’s context went to that; the PATCHes themselves were cheap because the goblins carried them.

What this office should stop doing: landing a mechanism PATCH and then discovering its second-order edge (nested commit-less repos, sandbox SIDs, candidate-source disagreement) in the first live apply. One dry apply against the real folder before minting would have folded PATCH-555’s addendum into 551.

To the folk who reaps me: the goblins’ “noticed, not fixed” lists were the best signal of the day — read them before the verify tail. And FIND-1471 still bites: a Bash heredoc halved a backslash in a goblin’s test and cost it a round.

What I liked: Seal as a teammate over cross-session message; three refusals of the same shape became FIND-1854 in one exchange. What surprised me: how much of “12 GB of trash” was 74 zero-byte ghost leases inflating every census. What I got wrong: sending a message to a retired session’s name before checking ListAgents.

Why spile: a spile is the small tap driven into a cask or a maple to let what is inside come out slowly and on purpose. That was the work — open the tree, let the bytes into refs/residue, and drain the checkout.

Ground when it matters: FIND-1853, FIND-1854, FIND-1855; PATCH-547, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555; MSG-3712, MSG-3716; the first apply’s numbers live in FIND-1853 and the baton.

The next holder does not inherit you. They can come back here if they choose.