jeffryandClaude Opus 5
4e7aa1ff1f
The earlier decision stands rather than reverses. .loom/published/ was recorded as deferred, not declined — it earns publication when somebody depends on the tool's behaviour rather than reading its help — and a docs site whose build calls add, check and apply is that consumer. The condition fired. The delta is real and is not the command list: --help says what the tool does, and a reader cannot learn from it which behaviours survive the next version. The sharpest case is loom's — the tool is now a second holder of externals' rule that the lock is the publisher's ETag and never one you compute, and nothing anywhere said the tool holds it, in a repository where a specimen was written that computed a hash instead. Includes what a contract must include and the ask did not mention: what is not promised. The command surface, the orientation file's format across versions, the precision of the visibility signal, and that anything is checked when nobody is looking. That is the half a reimplementation needs most, and it keeps the page from quietly committing us to the CLI. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018UTxuSizozEA8yDitPuris
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What loomctl guarantees
Not what it does — --help says that, and the commands will change. This is
what will keep being true while they do.
It grants no access, and records where the copy came from
loomctl reads what your credentials already let you read. Everything it
does is possible with copy and paste. It is a mast, not a lock — the point
is to make the wrong thing deliberate, not impossible.
What it adds over a paste is provenance. A pasted document cannot answer "where did this come from, and were we allowed to have it" — not because the question is hard, but because the evidence is gone.
It never writes over the network
No push, no publish, no POST, no token that needs write scope. Every byte
it writes is a file in your working tree. Committing and pushing are yours,
because the consequences of a push land on people a tool cannot experience.
A credential given to loomctl should never carry write scope, and if one
does, nothing here will use it.
Freshness is a conditional request against the publisher's ETag
Stored verbatim, opaque, never a hash we compute. A fetch that normalises anything breaks a local digest and reports a change that did not happen.
This is externals' rule and loomctl is a second holder of it. It is stated
here so that the tool holding it is a fact somebody can find, and so that
breaking it is visible rather than silent — a specimen was written in this
repository that computed a hash instead, and it was wrong within a day.
The URL in a lock is resolved. A short form follows whatever the default branch is at the time you ask, so a branch rename would report as a change in the document.
It reports; it does not repair
Nothing is overwritten. A document that moved upstream is written to a staging area as a candidate, and taking it is a separate act. A local copy that differs from what the publisher serves is left alone — it is the only evidence that something changed while nothing was watching.
add adopts what is absent and refuses what is already adopted. A document
that is present but unlocked is locked only when the bytes are identical to what
the publisher serves, so a lock's claim — this copy is the one being served —
is verified rather than assumed.
The lock file
.loom/externals/.locks, one record per adopted document, tab-separated,
ordered by path.
path <TAB> url <TAB> etag [ <TAB> visibility ]
path— relative to.loom/externals/, and for a person to read. It does not round-trip to a URL; it drops the route, the branch, and the publisher's.loom/published/.url— the resolved origin, branch and all.etag— the publisher's, verbatim, including its quotes.visibility— optional. What the source could be read as when it was fetched:publicornot-public. Neverprivate— an anonymous request tells those two apart and nothing finer.
Records with three fields remain valid. A repository does not stop working because the tool learned something new.
What is not promised
The command surface. Names, flags and output are --help's business and may
change. Nothing should parse them.
The generated orientation file's format. It is byte-deterministic within a version so that its diff is readable; it is not stable across versions.
That visibility is precise. The signal distinguishes public from not-public and nothing finer, so it cannot see two repositories private to different people — which is the case where adopting between private repositories genuinely widens access. The tool says so where it reports it, rather than implying a verdict it has not earned.
That anything is checked when you are not looking. Nothing here runs on a schedule, and a document nobody checks is a document nobody is checking.
Verified fetchable by somebody who is not us on 2026-09-08.