ops-warden/workplans/WARDEN-WP-0038-plan-mutation-intent.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	planning_priority	depends_on_workplans	created	updated	state_hub_workstream_id
WARDEN-WP-0038	workplan	warden plan must distinguish reading a secret from mutating one	infotech	ops-warden	proposed	ops-warden	netkingdom	P1	WARDEN-WP-0029	2026-09-08	2026-09-08	751ad530-e44b-52c4-b70e-cb47568a0179

WARDEN-WP-0038 — Read versus mutate intent in the policy front door

The defect

warden plan scores a need against catalog lanes by keyword overlap and returns a verdict. It has no notion of what the caller wants to do. So a need that says generate a successor secret and CAS-write it to two custodians matches the lane that reads that path, scores well on the shared nouns, and returns:

verdict: autonomous
commands: warden access <lane> --exec / --out / --wrap

Three read transports offered as the answer to a write, under the verdict that means "proceed without the founder". Reproduced 2026-09-08 against rapp-qonto-keycape-client (ADHOC-2026-09-08-T04).

Why this is worse than a bad suggestion

warden plan is the documented first step before drafting any founder credential step (.claude/rules/credential-routing.md), and autonomous is consumed as an authorization signal by agents that have no other check. WARDEN-WP-0029 shipped the verdict because instinct was not auditable; a verdict that is confidently wrong in the permissive direction is worse than no verdict.

key-cape hit this and refused to rely on it — "we are not treating a generic match as authorization" — which is the only reason it surfaced as a design question rather than as an unadmitted custody mutation. The control that caught it was a counterparty's caution. That is not a control.

WARDEN-WP-0033-T06 is the same shape (rapp-postgres, generic openbao-api-key match → paste_once_provision for an act that could not work) and was fixed by adding one exact lane plus one regression. That fixed the instance. This is the class.

Shape of the fix (to be designed, not assumed)

• Classify need intent — read / mutate / establish — before scoring, and never answer a mutate need with a read lane's transports.
• A mutate need against a lane ops-warden does not own is unroutable with a CCR stub naming the custody owner, not autonomous. ADR-0003: cover gaps, never silently own them; a permissive verdict on someone else's custody act is a silent claim of ownership.
• Consider whether rotation.steps should be reachable from plan at all, given they are advisory prose and several are explicitly not automatable.
• Regression from the reproduced case, in the manner of T06.

Open question for design

Whether intent belongs in the matcher or in the lane. A lane could declare which acts it admits (read, rotate, provision) and plan could refuse any act a lane does not declare — stricter, and it fails closed on lanes that say nothing, which is the majority today. That is a catalog schema change and needs its own argument.