ops-warden/docs/adr/ADR-0005-implement-narrowly-route-broadly.md
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Lift ops-warden's binding rules into owned ADRs
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>
2026-08-18 13:35:13 +02:00

3.2 KiB

id type title domain repo status version revision owner binds created updated last_reviewed review_interval enforced_by supersedes successor
ops-warden-adr-0005 adr ADR-0005 — Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else infotech ops-warden accepted 1.0 1 ops-warden ops-warden 2026-06-18 2026-08-18 2026-08-18 6m SCOPE.md; registry/routing/catalog.yaml warden_executes

ADR-0005 — Implement one lane narrowly, route everything else

Status

Accepted. The founding charter decision, taken 2026-06-18 (history/2026-06-18-access-routing-intent-shift-assessment.md).

Context

ops-warden began as an SSH certificate manager. It then became the place workers asked when they did not know where a credential came from — which is a real need, and the obvious way to serve it is to start fetching credentials.

Down that path is a component that issues SSH certificates, vends API keys, brokers tokens, and holds authority over all of them: a single point whose compromise is total. NetKingdom's architecture deliberately separates identity (key-cape), authorization (flex-auth), and secrets (OpenBao). A helpful front door that absorbed all three would quietly undo that separation, one convenience at a time.

Decision

ops-warden executes exactly one lane with its own authority: SSH certificate issuance for adm/agt/atm actors. warden_executes: true appears on one catalog entry and is expected to stay that way.

For every other need it routes, and where the lane is exec_capable it may assist by proxying as the caller under ADR-0002. Routing is not a lesser service — it is the service. Knowing which subsystem owns a need, and being right about it, is what this repo sells.

Scope growth is tested by ownership, not by usefulness. "Would this be handy in ops-warden?" is the wrong question and almost always answers yes. The right question is "does ops-warden have the authority to own this, permanently?" If the answer is no, the correct outcome is a pointer, or an interim cover recorded under ADR-0003.

Consequences

The blast radius stays bounded and known. Compromising ops-warden yields the SSH signing lane. That is worth defending well precisely because it is the only thing here.

We say no to requests that would be easy to say yes to. warden secret, warden login, warden bao, warden tunnel do not exist and must not be invented; the agent instructions name them as anti-patterns because agents keep reaching for them. Each would be a day's work and a permanent widening.

Being useful therefore depends on the pointers being right, which is the whole weight behind ADR-0001's anchor enforcement and the catalog's review dates. A router that routes wrongly is worse than no router.

It leaves real gaps visible rather than filled. Six workload lanes and three tenant lanes are covered interim because secrets-engine and tenant-engine have not shipped front doors. Under this ADR that is the correct state, tracked under ADR-0003, and not a signal that ops-warden should absorb them.

  • SCOPE.md — the issue-vs-route table
  • wiki/AccessRouting.md — role and boundary
  • ADR-0001, ADR-0002, ADR-0003 — the three rules that follow from this one