gate-house/CLAUDE.md

CLAUDE.md

This file provides guidance to Claude Code (claude.ai/code) when working with code in this repository.

Repository status

gate-house is currently specification-only. There is no source code, build system, test runner, or dependency manifest — the repo is Markdown documents plus its repo-manager baseline. Do not invent build/lint/test commands; if asked to "run tests", say there is nothing to run yet. The only commands that work today are the repo-manager ones below.

It is specification-only by design, not by earliness. Gate House is a Staff-layer repository: its artifacts are specifications, decisions, workplans, and tasks. Do not propose building a service here. Milestone M0 in the Blueprint (an /authorize skeleton) has lapsed — see the re-cut below.

What Gate House is

Gate House is the council where NetKingdom's security and defence doctrine is established, documented, taught, and supervised — a Staff-layer repository in the NetKingdom security layer model (net-kingdom/canon/standards/security-layer-model_v0.1.md). It holds no runtime position and renders no authorization decision.

The mandate and the operating mode are Gate House's. The decision is access-engine's. The credential is secrets-engine's. The perimeter is ops-mason's and ops-warden's.

The re-cut (2026-08-28) is the single most important thing to know here. Gate House was seeded as a deterministic authority plane — /authorize, grant storage, revocation — and that framing was withdrawn on its own argument: a decision point inside Gate House would put the deterministic authority boundary inside the non-deterministic management layer, violating INV-02, the first invariant this repo defends. access-engine (currently flex-auth) is the only policy decision point in NetKingdom.

Read decisions/decisions.md GH-DEC-2026-001 and history/2026-08-28-security-layer-model-and-gate-house-recut.md before proposing any architecture change. If a proposal has Gate House deciding, storing, evaluating, or enforcing anything at request time, it is wrong regardless of how well it is built.

The maxim that governs every design decision here — and, read across the layers, the estate's layering rule:

Cognition proposes. Authority disposes. Infrastructure executes.

Document hierarchy — read in this order

1. spec/ActiveSecretsManagementCanon_v0.3.md — the normative standard Gate House implements. Uses RFC-style MUST/SHOULD/MAY. Owns the numbered invariants INV-01…INV-12 and the assurance tests T-01…T-10. Gate House conforms to the Canon; the Canon is not edited to accommodate Gate House.
2. INTENT.md — mission, scope boundaries, domain concepts, the 15 numbered Core Rules, use cases UC-01…UC-05, success criteria. This is the "why".
3. decisions/decisions.md — decision records. GH-DEC-2026-001 ratifies the layer model, the re-cut, and the access-engine reframing. Binding.
4. ArchitectureBlueprint.md — predates the re-cut and is only partly valid. Its component architecture (§10–11), policy evaluation order (§13), API surface (§26), and storage model (§25) describe an engine and are withdrawn; ADR-003 and milestones M0, M3, M4 have lapsed. Its domain model (§6), authority context (§7), operating modes (§14–15), change dynamics (§20), MCP integration (§19), and security test program (§34) survive. Do not cite it without checking a section against INTENT first.
5. README.md — public-facing summary. A derivative, not a source of truth.

When these conflict: the decision record wins over everything, then the Canon, then INTENT, then the Blueprint. Fix the lower document rather than diverging.

The doctrine Gate House maintains

These are load-bearing. Gate House authors and maintains them; the engines and Staff repositories implement them. A document or proposal that violates one is wrong:

• No privilege from cognition. An LLM deciding an action is appropriate never makes it authorized. The final privilege boundary is deterministic policy.
• Tool availability is not permission. MCP tool registration/discovery means the operation exists, not that invoking it is allowed. No token passthrough — downstream authority is separately issued and bound to the target resource.
• Principal, actor, and runtime identity stay distinct and are never collapsed into one field. Delegation attenuates and never widens.
• Posture may only restrict. King's Guard (or any adaptive input) can reduce authority or demand step-up; it can never manufacture privilege. See Blueprint §16.2 for the explicitly forbidden pattern.
• Evaluation is monotonic toward restriction. No stage after the authority ceiling may expand beyond it. (Evaluation itself is access-engine's; Gate House states the property.)
• Fail closed. Unavailable policy engine, unresolvable context, unavailable audit, or stale authoritative state → DENY.
• Assistant mode and Autonomous mode are different security regimes. A human session ending must never silently promote the workflow to privileged autonomy.
• Agents cannot edit their own authority ceiling; policy self-modification is a separately governed path and high-value security telemetry.
• Audit evidence is protected from the actor being audited, and every privileged action must be reconstructable from it.
• Credentials are implementation artifacts of a grant, materialized by Secrets Engine / OpenBao after authority exists — never the source of authority, never placed in model context.
• Staff never touches Tooling directly. It acts only through Engine APIs. This binds Gate House itself: no direct database, OpenBao, or cluster client belongs in this repo.

Repo-manager registration

Registered with repo-manager as category: tooling, domain: infotech (secondary: agents), workplan prefix GH-WP (owned in ~/repo-manager/config/workplan-prefix-registry.yaml). .repo-classification.yaml, SCOPE.md, AGENTS.md, and workplans/ are that baseline.

rmgr conform --path .          # check against tooling-flavor standards
rmgr observe --path .          # snapshot JSON
rmgr workplan update --path . --workplan-id GH-WP-0001 --status active
rmgr update-task-status --path . --task-id GH-WP-0001-T01 --status progress

rmgr lives at ~/repo-manager/.venv/bin/rmgr. Workplan and task state is edited through these commands (file + git commit), not by hand-registering anything in the State Hub: write the file, commit, then sync. SCOPE.md is derived from INTENT.md — keep them consistent.

Conventions

• Stable identifiers. Invariants (INV-nn, A-nn), tests (T-nn), use cases (UC-nn), ADRs (ADR-nnn), and milestones (M0–M8) are referenced across documents. Reuse the existing id when writing about a concept; append rather than renumber.
• Canon prose is normative — preserve MUST/SHOULD/MAY exactly when editing it.
• Domain vocabulary is fixed by INTENT's Domain Vocabulary: principal, actor, runtime identity, mandate, delegation, authority ceiling, operating mode, posture, change dynamics envelope, decision evidence. Use these rather than synonyms ("user", "role", "token", "permission"). Two demarcations are normative: access lane (ops-warden, ops-mason) is not access rule (access-engine); doctrine (gate-house) is not runbook (the lane owner). "Control plane" is Engine vocabulary — do not apply it to Gate House.
• Documents carry a frontmatter-style header block (Repository / Project family / Status / Version / Date). Keep it, and bump Status/Version/Date on substantive edits.
• Diagrams and schema examples are plain text or yaml fenced blocks — no Mermaid.
• Decision types are GRANT, DENY, REQUIRE_APPROVAL, DEFER — rendered by access-engine, named here.

Where new work goes

• README.md, INTENT.md, and ArchitectureBlueprint.md live at the repo root, matching the Blueprint's own reference layout (§32). External standards Gate House conforms to — the Canon — live in spec/.
• ADRs → docs/adr/, from the Blueprint §40 backlog. ADR-003 (policy engine selection) has lapsed with the re-cut; ADR-001, ADR-002, ADR-006, ADR-009, ADR-010, ADR-013, ADR-014 remain meaningful as contract and doctrine.
• Decision records → decisions/decisions.md, via rmgr decision create|resolve. Never hand-write the YAML block; the tool mints identifiers and commits.
• History and reference notes → history/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md, matching the convention in ops-warden, zone-engine, and secrets-engine.
• Doctrine that stabilizes graduates into net-kingdom/canon/standards/, owned by gate-house and published by net-kingdom. security-layer-model_v0.1.md is the first.
• No implementation layout. Blueprint §32's reference tree (api/, policy/, grants/, deploy/, …) described the withdrawn engine and does not apply. If work here starts producing services, schemas that resolve, or anything evaluated at request time, stop — that belongs to an engine.
• Assurance tests T-01…T-10 are specifications authored here and executed by whitehat-security. Writing the specification is Gate House's job; running the attack and judging whether the control held is not.