Both parties reached the same deadlock independently: add refusing an existing
path, and check unable to ask about a document with no recorded origin. adopt was
the other way out and is not obviously worse.
Not taken because the byte comparison makes the verb unnecessary. Whatever the
command is called it must not trust the claim — it has to fetch and compare,
because the point is that nobody knows whether the local copy is still a copy — and
once it does that, it is add with an origin supplied. A verb earns its place by
naming an act rather than a state, and present-but-unlocked is a condition a
repository is temporarily in.
Recorded with the falsifier: if people and agents keep dropping documents into
externals by hand, and they will, it is a recurring category rather than a
migration, and then it deserves its own word in --help rather than a hint.
Also makes check's hint say that add supplies the origin without rewriting the
local copy, since the previous wording left that to be inferred.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
Restores something the specimen said and the round that discarded the specimen
lost with it: a changed external becomes a polad in the cart, and somebody
decides. check now stages what moved into .loom/cart/current/polad/ with the ETag
that was served alongside the bytes, and prints the .usages.md beside it, because
reconciliation runs the other way — the facets usually survive and what moves is
the code a usage named. It says so when there is no usages file, which is its own
finding.
With no cart open, check reports and stages nothing. The tool does not open a
round: a cart is a bounded exchange between two presences and starting one is
somebody's act, not a side effect of asking about freshness.
add now adopts what is not here and refuses what is already adopted, superseding
the entry that had it announce an overwrite — it no longer overwrites at all. The
one exception is the only way out of a dead end: a document present but unlocked
was fetched by hand, nothing records its origin, and the path does not round-trip,
so check cannot ask about it and a refusal would strand it forever. add accepts it
and the bytes decide — identical locks it without rewriting anything, which makes
the lock's assertion verified rather than assumed, and different stages a polad and
leaves the local copy alone because it is the only evidence anything moved.
apply exists because the lock is the half a person forgets: moving a polad by hand
leaves a lock describing the copy you just replaced. Recorded with its limit —
for an external, discard does not mean the change goes away, so discarding is
really knowingly stale and nothing yet records that choice.
Measured end to end on this repository: eight hand-fetched documents, all eight
locked, nothing rewritten.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
The upstream cart.md change was planted to test whether the tool would notice, and
the honest sequence is that check did not catch it. Every document was unlocked,
and unlocked means I cannot tell you. add revealed the change by overwriting the
file, and the only reason the diff was visible is that git happened to be watching
the working tree.
So the mechanism is proven and the workflow is not: a document nobody has locked is
a document nobody is checking, silently.
Fixes the defect that exposed. add reported only "adopted" while overwriting local
content that differed from what the publisher serves — and a differing copy is the
only evidence that something moved while the document was unlocked. It now says so.
Recorded with its own limit: add still overwrites rather than stashing, so outside
a git working tree the note says something was lost without letting you see it.
Also records the unowned half. Nothing decides when check runs, and every answer —
a hook, CI, an agent's session start, a schedule — is outside the tool. Filed as a
need with no owner rather than built, because choosing one would put a scheduler
inside a fetcher and a comparator, with the falsifier that if nobody ever runs
check unaided then a tool that reports only when asked reports nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
Go, standard library only, with git shelled out for list alone. list enumerates a
publisher's .loom/published by partial clone and ls-tree; add fetches one document,
writes it under .loom/externals and records the resolved origin and the publisher's
ETag in .loom/externals/.locks; check asks conditionally and reports.
The first real run did what the tool exists for. All eight documents adopted by
hand before it existed reported unlocked — the tool refuses to invent a lock by
adopting whatever the remote currently serves, since that would assert the local
copy is the one being served, which is the thing it was about to check. Locking
them fetched two that had moved: bedrock/starting.md, which now says the worked
example is private and will not link to something you cannot fetch, and cart.md,
which went to v1.
cart v1 changes a role we cast: a cart is not committed, because a committed cart
grows a third file by itself — version control does not require anybody to ask, so
the two-file rule is never invoked — and because ignored, gone means gone. Adds
.loom/cart/ to .gitignore and supersedes the isolation entry rather than editing
it. osprey and marmalade are already in history and are left there: rewriting to
honour a rule adopted afterwards costs more than it buys.
Records the conflict this creates rather than settling it: the annotation protocol
here says commit before dissolving because git is the only archive, and an ignored
cart has no archive, so dissolving would destroy the annotations outright.
Credentials are read-only, per host, and passed to git through the environment
rather than argv, because argv is visible to every process on the machine.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
jeffryandClaude Opus 5