We left an Affirm asking whether the assumption was load-bearing enough to check
first. Checked it an hour later and it fails: GitHub's raw ETag is 64 hex, a
sha-256 of something that is not the git object, where gitea's is the blob sha.
The API's sha field is the blob sha and matches git hash-object on the fetched
bytes, so the content is identical — only the header differs.
What survives: conditional requests work on both, and If-None-Match returns 304
from GitHub exactly as from gitea. What does not: "hash the local copy and
compare to the remote's ETag" was a gitea coincidence, so there is something to
record after all — the ETag itself, opaque, per document. Where it lives is the
builder's call, with one steer: not a .md facet, since it is machine state rather
than prose.
And the check we thought we were getting free is free from elsewhere anyway — an
edited local copy shows up in git status, because the copy is committed.
The specimen still describes the old idea and is left as written. A specimen is a
snapshot of what was proposed, and correcting it in place would hide that we were
wrong within a day of proposing it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The repository is furnished rather than scaffolded — every file has content and a
reason, which is the distinction the spec itself draws when it says to resist
building init as a scaffolder.
Four externals fetched and locked under .loom/externals/: bedrock, externals,
annotating, cart. Copies, not to be edited, with a usages file beside cart
casting three of its four roles and leaving one open. The one left open is what
isolates work in progress, and the usages file says how we cast it wrong once and
why the belief was more useful than a preference would have been.
The spec moves out of the README and into the cart as a specimen, which makes it
discard-by-default — that is a stronger statement of "argue with this" than a
sentence asking them to. bedrock and externals stay non-discardable, since
accommodating them is what makes this a loom tool.
The daily says where we expect to be wrong: whether check can say anything useful
about a 404, and whether hash-as-lock survives a fetch that normalises anything,
which we have only tested against gitea.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Not built. Recorded now because the reasoning is a day old and would be expensive
to reconstruct.
The idea that makes it small: on gitea a raw file's ETag is the git blob hash,
verified on both a public and a private repository. So there is nothing to record
— git hash-object on the local copy is the lock, and comparing it to the remote's
ETag is the whole mechanism. No lock file and no state to drift. It also catches
a case we had not considered: an edited local copy stops matching, which is
correct, because an adopted copy that has been edited is no longer a copy.
check reports and does not fix; a changed external becomes a polad and somebody
decides. pull fetches one document and deliberately does not create an empty
facet. publish verifies the document is fetchable by somebody who is not you,
because publishing is not an act you can complete alone. And init is flagged to
resist: its temptation is to scaffold, and four empty directories assert four
things nobody has decided.
Credentials split by operation rather than by visibility, with the token named for
its scope, since a token cannot be asked what it may do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jeffryandClaude Opus 5