tegwick
35aff380a3
Five rules that governed this repo lived in wiki prose, a workplan, and a comment at the top of catalog.yaml. All were followed; none was addressable. A reader outside ops-warden could not cite one, could not tell whether it was current, and — the point of this change — could not tell whether it was ours to change or someone else's that we merely obey. ADR-0001 The routing catalog is a pointer layer, never a second copy ADR-0002 ops-warden is a transparent conduit, never a secret broker ADR-0003 Cover gaps, but never silently own them ADR-0004 High-risk lanes refuse raw value streaming to agent sessions ADR-0005 Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else Each carries owner: ops-warden, which is the load-bearing field. It says we follow the rule AND we are responsible for changing it — by superseding ADR, never an in-place edit. The failure this prevents runs both ways: a rule we own mistaken for inherited canon never gets fixed, because we wait for an owner who does not exist; inherited canon mistaken for ours gets quietly bent, and the drift is invisible until it breaks a repo that trusted the canonical version. Rules we follow but do not own — NetKingdom canon, the IAM profile, the credential-management standard, the-custodian's ADR-001 workplan convention — are cited, never copied into docs/adr/. Copying them would recreate exactly the second-source-of-truth failure ADR-0001 exists to prevent. architecture.md also now flags the three-digit/four-digit ADR-001 vs ADR-0001 collision, which is itself an ours-versus-inherited confusion waiting to happen. Publication verified rather than assumed: all five render through policy-nexus tools/render.py, and owner reaches the reader in three places — the page eyebrow (render.py:346), the index Owner column (build_site.py:123,137), and the publication manifest. build_site.py:179 makes title/status/owner required, so ownership cannot be dropped on the way out. policy-nexus publishes and never writes back; docs/adr/ stays the source of truth. Documentation adapted: SCOPE.md gains a Governing rules section and an orientation entry; .claude/rules/architecture.md replaced its stub with the ADR index, the owned-versus-inherited rule, and ADR-over-wiki precedence; finding-routing.md's ADR-gap section closed; catalog.yaml's no-double-source header now cites ADR-0001 rather than the originating workplan. uv run pytest -q → 338 passed, 4 deselected. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Finding routing (risk-nexus) and policy publication (policy-nexus)
Two estate repos exist that did not when most of ops-warden's practices were
written. Both are owned by the-custodian and both are downstream by
construction — the same rule ops-warden's own catalog lives under.
| Repo | Owns | ops-warden's relationship |
|---|---|---|
risk-nexus |
Findings, severity, disclosure timing, escalation, regulatory intake. Serves risk.coulomb.social |
Route findings to it. It does not fix; ops-warden fixes what ops-warden owns |
policy-nexus |
Publication of canon and ADRs at permanent addresses. Serves policy.coulomb.social |
Source repo. It publishes; it never writes back |
When a session discovers or receives a defect, route it
A design question is not a finding. A defect is. The distinction matters because ops-warden receives both through the same channel — the State Hub inbox.
This was gotten wrong on 2026-08-17. flex-auth reported directly to ops-warden
that /v1/check authenticates no caller — a live authorization bypass in the
service ops-warden's own pre-sign gate consults. ops-warden answered the design
question well and wrote the recommendation into
wiki/NetKingdomSecurityMap.md. It did not route the finding. rapp-postgres
filed it as RISK-F-0001, which is why that record reads
reported_via: rapp-postgres and not ops-warden, despite ops-warden being a
first-hand recipient and the affected PEP.
The failure mode is exactly the one risk-nexus/INTENT.md names: "findings
landed in whichever document was open." A wiki section answers the question; it
does not carry a severity, an owner, a date, or a review that fires when nobody
looks.
So: when an inbound message or a session turns up a defect — in any repo — answer it and route it. They are not alternatives.
How to route
Write the finding file into ~/risk-nexus/findings/ following
RISK-F-0001/RISK-F-0002, and commit it there. This is the established
pattern: a repo routes a finding by writing the record.
Leave severity, disclosure, and escalation unset. They are
risk-nexus's to set, not the reporter's. The reporter says what is true; that
repo says how bad it is and who hears about it. State exposure only as far as
you can support it — do not infer a mitigating control (a NetworkPolicy, a
deployment flag) on a system you do not own; say it should be verified.
What does not go there
risk-nexus/INTENT.md is explicit that a register nobody can read is worse than
none: "if a finding would not change anyone's decision, it is a note, not a
risk."
The delegation register is not a findings feed. warden route gaps lists
interim lanes with an intended owner, a blocker and a review date — that is
already tracked, already legible, and already ops-warden's. Do not bulk-file it.
What goes to risk-nexus from ops-warden is a defect or an exposure, not a
known gap that is being worked under a workplan.
Also re-read a blocker before trusting it. A blocker is a claim about the
world at a date; RISK-F-0001 invalidated one of ops-warden's in a day and
nothing would have re-checked it.
Escalation: ops-warden already solved this shape
risk-nexus carries an unwritten escalation duty — deciding what reaches the
operator personally rather than sitting in a register — and says the rule
"must be written down rather than exercised by instinct".
ops-warden shipped that classifier for the credential domain in WP-0029.
warden plan "<need>" returns autonomous / founder_required / unroutable,
and when it escalates it returns a typed act (approve, login,
provision) plus the reasons that produced the verdict, with warden desk as
the surface that actually executes the act. The transferable design properties:
- escalation is decided by properties of the thing (lane type, status, request signals), not by the assessor's judgement in the moment
- every verdict carries its
reasons, so the rule is auditable after the fact - there is a typed act, so "needs the operator" says what the operator does
- there is a real surface for the act, so escalation is not just a flag
Offer this rather than let a second, incompatible escalation vocabulary grow. Do not implement it for them — routing work is theirs to own.
Policy publication (closed 2026-08-18)
This section previously recorded that ops-warden had no ADRs and that its binding rules — the no-double-source catalog rule, conduit-not-broker, interim-by-default, the agent read-boundary — sat in wiki prose, unaddressable and unpublishable.
That is now resolved. They live in docs/adr/ as ADR-0001…ADR-0005, each
carrying owner: ops-warden, and each verified to render through policy-nexus's
own tools/render.py. See .claude/rules/architecture.md for the owned-versus-
inherited rule and the three-digit/four-digit ADR naming collision.
What matters when routing something to policy-nexus: it requires title,
status and owner on every published document (tools/build_site.py:179),
renders owner in both the page eyebrow and the index Owner column, and records
source repo, path, revision and content digest in its manifest. Ownership survives
publication — a reader landing on the URL can tell the rule is ours.
policy-nexus publishes and never writes back. The file in docs/adr/ is the
source of truth; if the site disagrees, the site is the defect.
When you record a new binding rule, write the ADR. Not a wiki section — that is the habit this whole rule file exists to correct, in the other direction.