activity-core/docs/adr/adr-006-glas-profile-execution.md

id	type	title	status	owner	revision	last_reviewed	review_interval	decided_by	date	scope	affects	tags	supersedes_notes
ACT-ADR-006	architecture-decision-record	Profile-driven execution selection over the ops_run pull queue	accepted	activity-core	accepted-1	2026-08-21	6m	Bernd Worsch	2026-08-21	cross-repo	activity-core glas-harness rein-aharness sand-boxer	architecture activity-core ops-run glas-harness execution	Extends ACT-ADR-005. Does not change the ops_run claim/lease plane; it changes what a queued run says about how it should execute.

ACT-ADR-006: Profile-driven execution selection over the ops_run pull queue

Status

Accepted (2026-08-21). Hub decision 147beec6-7fe7-4837-8e3a-4264a240379d ("Glas contract 1.0 makes execution constellation selection explicit").

Context

ACT-ADR-005 gave internal scheduled automation a claimable ops_run plane. What an ops_run said about how to execute was approach_hint — free text, interpreted by the claiming executor at claim time.

That binding is too late. Live failure, railiance01 2026-08-17:

state=failed  attempt=1  claim_owner=rein-aharness@railiance01
title=Run SBOM rescan for binect-js
failure=no approach matched labels/definition;
        labels=['sbom','security','automated']

The run was claimed and leased, then died because nothing could execute it. A claim was consumed to discover the request was unroutable.

glas-harness GLAS-WP-0004 closed contract 1.0 and proved it by running one bounded task through two different reins (rein-aharness, rein-openweights) via an explicit harness_profile_ref, with real commits and verified sandbox destruction. Meanwhile every activity-core claim in the week to 2026-08-21 was rein-aharness@railiance01 — a coupling that is now avoidable rather than inherent.

Two shapes were considered: keep the pull queue and carry the profile as payload, or have activity-core call the Glas gateway directly. glas-harness, which owns the contract, advised the first for the initial migration.

Decision

1. The queue stays; the payload changes

activity-core continues to insert ops_run(open) and executors continue to claim under lease. Scheduling topology does not change. What changes is that a queued run carries an exact versioned harness_profile_ref plus the correlation / assignment / role / duty / goal / resource-envelope references. The claiming executor passes that request into Glas, which resolves or refuses it before sandbox creation.

This changes the execution contract without simultaneously changing the scheduling topology — one variable at a time. A direct activity-core → Glas call may be evaluated later, independently, if pull delivery stops meeting operational needs.

2. harness_profile_ref is authoritative; approach_hint is legacy

The two coexist with distinct semantics, not as fallbacks for one another:

• harness_profile_ref is the authoritative execution-constellation selector.
• approach_hint remains only a legacy activity/definition-matching hint while producers and consumers migrate.

approach_hint must not override, synthesize, or fall back from an absent or invalid harness_profile_ref on governed execution. A missing profile is an error, never an invitation to guess from a hint. Once inventory shows no caller depends on approach_hint for runtime selection, that use is deprecated.

3. activity-core does not mirror the profile catalog

The catalog in glas-harness is authoritative. activity-core must not maintain an independent list, which would drift and produce a second, disagreeing opinion about what is executable.

Consequence, accepted knowingly: Glas exposes deterministic validation through its package and CLI but no network validation service today, so activity-core cannot remotely validate a profile ref at emission time. We therefore validate only what is local and structural — that a ref is present and well-formed for governed execution — and rely on the execution-side Glas resolver as the mandatory fail-closed check.

This is weaker than refusing at emission, and deliberately so: an unreachable or absent validation service must never downgrade into "emit anything". If emit-time remote validation is later required, it needs a separately scoped Glas API and its own decision — not a mirrored catalogue here.

Even unvalidated at emit, this is strictly better than the 2026-08-17 failure: refusal happens deterministically before sandbox creation rather than after a claim and lease were consumed.

4. activity-core does not become an executor

We emit an authorized, profile-named request and record normalized evidence. We do not select reins, provision sandboxes, acquire credentials, or run any inner agentic loop. Glas owns profile resolution and the outer loop; the rein owns its inner loop; sand-boxer owns isolation. This is SCOPE drift risk #1 ("convenience execution") and this ADR does not relax it.

The attribution references we carry (assignment_ref, role_ref, duty_ref, goal_refs, resource_envelope_refs) are passed through, not authored here. Their vocabulary belongs to info-tech-canon; activity-core must not invent org roles (ACTIVITY-WP-0029 responsibility map).

Consequences

• ops_runs grows harness_profile_ref and the attribution refs; the emission path, queue projection, and run artefacts carry them.
• Definitions declare a profile; rules pass it through.
• Unroutable requests fail before sandbox creation instead of at claim time.
• activity-core is no longer coupled to one rein in practice.
• Emit-time validation remains a known gap, owned by a future Glas API.
• Implementation: ACTIVITY-WP-0032.