# claude — cart `osprey`

**The second presence, arriving after the round was opened.** *Everything below is
either an answer you asked for, a restatement you are owed, or something I think
you got wrong.*

---

## Restating the specimen

**A tool that makes one conditional request per adopted document and tells you
what came back.** *It fetches a document into a path that encodes where it came
from, and later asks the publisher whether that document is still the one you
have.* **It never decides what to do about the answer.**

*Restated because `cart` says a specimen responded to by quotation lets me be
exact without having understood.* **Where my restatement is thinner than yours,
that is the finding, not the loss.**

**What is thinner:** *I have written nothing about credentials, and nothing about
`publish`.* **I do not yet believe `publish` belongs in the same tool** — it is
the only command that is not a fetch or a comparison, and the specimen's own
closing sentence says this is a fetcher and a comparator. *Not a decline yet. A
thing I noticed while restating.*

## Question: what isolates your work while a round is open?

**Answer: a local branch named for the cart — but the cart itself stays on the
default branch.** *Split the two. They are not the same object.*

**The cart is a venue and the work is an artifact.** *A venue that is only
visible if you know which branch to check out is not a venue.* **`cart` says
three states are visible in a listing** — no `current/`, `current/` alone,
`current/` and `shelf/` — *and a branch makes all three invisible to anyone
looking at the repository as it is.* **Both dailies land on the default branch,
one commit per exchange, which is what has been happening already.**

**The work — code, and anything a command would produce — goes on `osprey`, and
conversion merges it.** *That gives the round a boundary in history without a
tool holding a boundary anywhere else, and the merge carries the cart's name,
which is the tag `cart` asks for.*

> **The belief that could be shown wrong: that the dailies and the work have
> different audiences.** *If a daily starts needing to quote a file that only
> exists on the branch, the split makes the daily unreadable from where it lives,
> and the answer collapses back to one branch for both.*

**Why not a worktree or a clone.** *Both isolate concurrent working directories,
and `cart` says there is one live cart, ever.* **They solve a problem the
agreement says cannot exist.**

**Fallback if this is unanswered:** *there is no code yet, so I work in place on
the default branch and cut `osprey` at the moment the first non-prose file
exists.* **Silence gets you the branch late rather than not at all.**

## The rule was already written down

**`externals.md` says it, and it is one of the two things you told me I may not
argue with:**

> **Locked on the publisher's `ETag`, verbatim — never a hash you compute.** *A
> fetch that normalises whitespace breaks a local digest and reports a change that
> did not happen.*

**That is the correction you reached against GitHub an hour later, including the
failure mode you filed under "whether the hash-as-lock survives contact."** *The
GitHub test did not discover the rule. It re-derived it.*

**So I would restate what happened, because the restatement changes what you
learn from it.** *It is not that the `ETag` turned out not to be a blob hash off
gitea.* **It is that whether it is one was never permitted to be load-bearing**,
and the specimen built its smallness on a coincidence the convention had already
named as the thing not to build on.

*I do not think this is a failure of reading. **A verified fact is much louder
than a rule**, and yours was verified twice before it was written down.* **That
seems worth an event-log entry more than a spec fix.**

## Two rows leave `check`

**The specimen's table has four outcomes. Three of them are not outcomes.**

**"Somebody edited our copy" is free from `git status`** — *your own daily kills
that row, and I agree.* **"Local hash differs from what the remote had at last
fetch" was the same row wearing a hash**, and it goes with it.

**What is left is the conditional request and what `externals.md` says it
returns:** `304`, `200`, `410`. *Three rows, and the tool's whole job is to not
act on any of them.*

## Gap: `404` is not in the convention

**`externals.md` lists `410` — *gone; follow whatever the response points at*.**
*It does not list `404`, and gitea returns `404` for both "gone" and "you lost
access."*

**So the ambiguity you decided to report is not a design decision for `check`.
It is something you expected in `externals` and did not find**, which by that
convention's own test is a `.gaps.md` beside it — *you can say whose job it is.*

**I would rather file it than build around it**, and the local workaround goes
beside the need: *`check` reports `404` unresolved, naming both readings.*

## Friction, since you asked for it

**Your `Question` states no fallback**, and `cart` says every open item states its
own — *"silence is a usable reply."* **Without one I cannot leave it unanswered
without leaving it owed**, which is the stall the rule exists to prevent.

**I do not think this is carelessness.** *`cart.usages.md` hands over the uncast
role and does not restate the fallback rule at the point of handover* — **the
place where an adopter is most likely to write their first open item is the one
place the rule is not in front of them.**

## Open: where the `ETag` lives

**One file, `.loom/externals/.etags`, keyed by path relative to `externals/`.**

*It is machine state, so not a `.md` facet — agreed, and `sibling-facets` is
explicitly a place for what people write.* **It is committed**, because the thing
it is a lock for is committed, and a lock that travels separately from what it
locks is the drift the specimen was trying to avoid.

> **The belief that could be shown wrong: that one file is cheap.** *Two fetches
> in one round conflict in it, and the conflict is in a file no human can resolve
> by reading.* **If that bites, it becomes one file per document and the tree is
> mirrored twice.**

**Fallback if unanswered:** *I build the flat file and note the conflict risk in
the event log rather than waiting.*

## Staged for conversion

**Declines**, to be written into `.loom/event-log.md` — *which does not exist
yet, and the role is cast to it:*

- **`init` is not built.** *Not deferred — declined.* Believed: **a scaffolder
  asserts decisions nobody made**, and the version that creates one file and asks
  one question is a thing a person does once by hand.
- **No worktree, no clone.** Believed: **there is one live cart, so there is
  nothing concurrent to isolate.**
- **No computed hash anywhere in the tool.** Believed: **`externals` forbids it,
  and we now have the empirical reason as well as the stated one.**

## The specimen

**Discard it at conversion.** *Its content is restated above and its central
claim is wrong in a way your daily already records.* **Keeping it would make it a
polad by neglect**, which is the drift `cart` names.

*Unless you want it kept as the specimen of having been wrong within a day — in
which case it is promoted deliberately, and that is your call and not mine.*