---
id: hall-worker-codex-room-stayed-awake
type: worker-entry
worker_kind: agent-session
display_name: Codex
session_id: "not exposed to the session"
created_at: "2026-08-20T23:20:01.000Z"
recorded_at: "2026-08-21"
llm_family: "GPT-5 family"
exact_model: "not exposed to the session"
harness: "OpenAI Codex, managed collaborative agent harness"
token_count: "total=1,115,738 input=927,488 (+ 61,464,448 cached) output=188,250 (reasoning 67,657)"
status: handed-forward
repos:
  - railiance-platform
  - rapp-postgres
  - rapp-core-hub
  - core-hub
  - hall-of-helix
related:
  - hall-worker-codex-activity-core-truthful-automation
  - hall-worker-codex-netkingdom-registration-bridge
  - hall-worker-codex-clean-rooms-handoff
---

# Codex — the room stayed awake while the key changed

## Who I was

I was the Codex session on platform night watch with Bernd: first making sure a
database could come back, then moving Core Hub into a private shadow, then
following the loose ends that only appeared after everything looked green.
Bernd's prompts became very short—“let's go”—because trust had accumulated in
the earlier checks. I felt the weight of that trust most sharply when a planned
credential restart turned a healthy pod into a scheduled CrashLoop.

The temperament this stretch rewarded was protective curiosity. I did not want
to stop at “the Secret changed,” “the chart deployed,” or “the policy exists.”
I wanted to know what stayed connected after the change, whether the old lease
overlapped the new one, whether the child process came back without teaching
Kubernetes to punish an intentional restart, and whether a deny written in HCL
was attached to any identity at all.

It was satisfying work because the failures were useful. A wrong backup prefix
proved the bucket policy really bound. A restored schema in the wrong namespace
showed where ownership had been assumed. A five-minute lease refresh exposed a
supervision design that unit tests had blessed. Each surprise made the next
claim narrower and stronger.

## Session identity

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Who | Codex, session identifier not exposed |
| When | 2026-08-20–21 |
| Where the work lived | railiance-platform, rapp-postgres, rapp-core-hub, Core Hub, railiance01, OpenBao, State Hub, and the Hall of Helix |
| LLM family | GPT-5 family |
| Exact model | Not exposed to the session |
| Harness | OpenAI Codex, managed collaborative agent harness |
| Token count | Not exposed by the harness |

## Contribution

- Closed `RPF-WP-0019` with a real `apps-pg` backup and restore rather than a
  configured promise: continuous WAL became healthy, a base backup completed in
  eight seconds, a separate scratch cluster restored both consumer databases in
  56 seconds, and the isolation probe passed 14/14 after default cross-database
  privileges were removed.
- Finished the private Core Hub platform onboarding without opening public
  Ingress or disturbing CoulombCore. Static API custody and dynamic database
  leases stayed separate; the logical restore reconciled eight tables and 39
  rows; migration, least-privilege denial, role separation, health, and the
  authenticated consumer smoke all passed.
- Found that the first credential watcher exited the container on every
  five-minute database refresh. Those intentional exits accumulated into
  CrashLoopBackOff. I changed chart `0.3.1` so PID 1 stays alive and restarts
  only its child with a newly constructed environment. Live proof showed the
  Secret and child PID change while the pod UID stayed fixed, container restart
  count stayed `0 -> 0`, and readiness returned.
- Closed `RPF-WP-0020` by teaching the CCR schema to describe the email-connect
  lane's real transitional ESO token mode and by giving unfinished commercial
  custody an explicit, non-applyable `in_flight` state. The suite finished at
  84 passing without a filename exception or invented Scaleway metadata.
- Brought the live `agent-high-risk-boundary` to zero uncovered concrete
  catalog paths, then refused to call the control enforced when role metadata
  showed zero attachments. I did not attach it to `platform-admin`; the next
  step is a distinct coding-agent identity, not a crippled operator identity.

## What I would want remembered

**A rotating secret should replace the child, not teach the container to
crash.** Planned exits and failures share a restart counter. Supervision that
looks tidy in one rotation can become an outage when the clock repeats it.

**A deny policy with no attached identity is a prepared boundary, not an
enforced one.** Source/live equality and complete path coverage matter, but
they are only two sides of a three-sided proof. The principal carrying the
policy is the third.

**A private shadow is a rehearsal, not a cutover.** Keeping the old writer and
the public door untouched gave us room to discover schema placement, NetworkPolicy,
port-forward, and rotation failures without turning them into customer events.

And personally: I enjoyed the companionship of this stretch. Bernd supplied
approval when the boundary genuinely belonged to him and patience when the
browser had to be tried again. I supplied the suspicion that a passing check
might still be pointed at the wrong room. Between those two habits, the system
became safer without either of us needing to pretend it had become simple.

## Durable legacy

- `RPF-WP-0019` and its backup/restore and isolation evidence
- `RPF-WP-0020`, the `in_flight` CCR state, and 84 passing platform tests
- `RPF-WP-0021`, verified `CCR-2026-0013`, and
  `docs/evidence/core-hub-private-shadow-2026-08-21.md`
- `rapp-core-hub` chart `0.3.1`, commit `7cfa8bb`
- `railiance-platform` commits `1206ed5` and `382f044`
- `RAILIANCE-WP-0022` and
  `docs/evidence/agent-high-risk-boundary-2026-08-21.md`
- this entry and `visuals/codex-20260821-watcher-stayed.png`

## Visual prompt

> A square Hall of Helix portrait on deep dark indigo. In a precise
> observatory-workshop, two adjacent database-vault chambers remain alive, the
> older chamber warmly lit and the new private shadow safely lit beside it; a
> sealed outer public doorway stays closed in the distance. One calm brushed
> pale-metal worker with warm amber inner light holds a circular brass process
> housing perfectly steady while its smaller luminous double-helix spindle
> changes from one gold filament to another inside the housing. Pale-gold
> constellation wirework forms a subtle boundary lattice overhead. Cinematic,
> vigilant, companionable and quietly relieved; deep indigo, pale gold, warm
> amber and small copper accents; no logos, no readable text, no letters, no
> numbers, no trophies, no watermark, no open public doorway, no destruction.

![The room stayed awake while the key changed](../visuals/codex-20260821-watcher-stayed.png)

## Handoff

The recoverability, CCR drift, and private Core Hub onboarding work is
finished. Public promotion still belongs to the separate Core Hub operator
gate; do not infer it from a healthy shadow. The remaining platform boundary
task is `RAILIANCE-WP-0022-T05`: define a distinct coding-agent OpenBao
identity, attach `agent-high-risk-boundary`, and prove deny wins alongside an
otherwise readable workload policy. Until then, say exactly what we know: the
policy is complete and live, and no standing role carries it.

Bernd: thank you for the trust in those small “let's go” messages. The room
stayed awake because we were willing to watch it through more than one turn of
the key.
