loom-cli/.loom/event-log.md

# Event log

**Appended, newest last, never revised.** *A later entry supersedes an earlier one
by saying so.*

*Entries tagged `osprey` were all considered in a single sphere of understanding.*

---

## 2026-09-07 — what this tool is `osprey`

**Decided:** *`loom-cli` is a fetcher and a comparator.* **It fetches a document
you depend on and tells you whether the publisher's copy has moved.** *It reports
and never repairs.*

**Believed to advance:** *every act in the loom model is a file in somebody's
repository — publishing is writing one, adopting is fetching a URL, homing a gap
is an `mv`.* **Almost nothing needs a program**, so the program should be the
part that cannot be done by hand: an HTTP request, repeated.

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that reporting is enough.* **If every
report is followed by the same manual act, we have moved the work rather than
removed it**, and the missing command will be obvious.

## 2026-09-07 — the design lives here and not in a spec `osprey`

**Decided:** *this log is the artifact of `osprey`.* **No specification document
is written, and the specimen that opened the round is discarded.**

**Believed to advance:** *every entry here carries a belief that could be shown
wrong, so a reader can see which parts are load-bearing and which were guesses.*
**A spec flattens all of it to equal confidence** — *which is how the specimen
managed to be wrong, with a straight face, within a day of being written.*

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that a reader can build from a log.* **It
is ordered by time and not by topic**, so somebody arriving reads chronologically
and holds the corrections in their head. *Fine at fifteen entries and not at
eighty. When a newcomer cannot build from it without a guide, the guide is the
next thing to write — and not before.*

## 2026-09-07 — freshness is a conditional request `osprey`

**Decided:** *the tool records the publisher's `ETag`, verbatim and opaque, and
sends it back as `If-None-Match`.* **It never computes a hash of anything.**

**Believed to advance:** *`externals` requires it, and we now have the empirical
reason as well as the stated one.* **On gitea a raw file's `ETag` is its git blob
hash; on GitHub it is not.** *A design that compares a local hash to a remote
`ETag` works on exactly one host by coincidence.*

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that `ETag` is stable enough to lock on.*
**A proxy, a CDN, or a host that regenerates the header per request would produce
a change report where nothing changed.** *Untested against anything but gitea and
GitHub.*

## 2026-09-07 — supersedes nothing: the path is for a person `osprey`

**Decided:** *the origin URL is recorded in the lock, not derived from the stored
path.*

**Believed to advance:** *the path `\.loom/externals/<host>/<path>.md` does not
round-trip.* **Measured:** *the document we hold as
`git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/externals/externals.md` is served from
`/loom/externals/raw/branch/main/.loom/published/externals.md`* — **the stored
path has dropped the route, the branch, and `.loom/published/`.**

*The third is not routing.* **`publication.md` makes `.loom/published/` the whole
contract**, and a tree that erases it cannot say whether a copy came from
somebody's published surface or from a file they may rename at will.

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that people will still read the path as a
location.* **If anybody writes code that parses it back into a URL, the path
should stop looking like one.**

## 2026-09-07 — the lock, and what it holds `osprey`

**Decided:** *one record per adopted document in `.loom/externals/.locks`: the
**resolved** origin URL, and the `ETag` it came with.*

**Believed to advance:** *the specimen said there would be no lock file, on the
strength of the `ETag`-as-blob-hash claim.* **That claim failed twice**, so the
file exists and is named for what it is. *It was briefly called `.etags`, from
when we believed there would be one field.*

**Resolved, and not the short form.** *Measured: gitea `303`s
`/loom/externals/raw/externals.md` to `/raw/branch/main/…`* — **so a lock holding a
short URL is locked to whatever the default branch is at the time you ask**, and a
branch rename reports as a change in the document.

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

## 2026-09-07 — unlocked is a state `osprey`

**Decided:** *a document with no lock is reported as unlocked.* **`check` never
adopts whatever the remote is currently serving as the lock.**

**Believed to advance:** *adopting it would assert the local copy is the one being
served, which is the thing you were about to check.* **It is the hash assumption
in a different coat, and it fails silently in the one case that matters — a copy
somebody edited.**

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that anybody will run `pull` again to fix
it.* **If unlocked documents simply accumulate, the report is noise and something
has to lock them.**

## 2026-09-07 — `404` is unresolved, and that is no longer provisional `osprey`

**Decided:** *`check` reports a `404` as unresolvable — the document was withdrawn
or we have lost access — and names both readings without picking one.*

**Believed to advance:** *over HTTP they are the same response, because a host
that distinguished them would leak the existence of things you may not see.*

**This entry exists because the status of the behaviour changed and the code did
not.** *It began as a local workaround recorded in a `.gaps.md` against
`externals`, which listed `410` and not `404`.* **`externals` has since added the
`404` row, so the gap is closed and the facet is deleted at this reconciliation.**

> **The workaround is not retired. It is now the specified behaviour.** *Unchanged
> in the code and entirely changed in status — and this log is the only place that
> says so.* **Somebody inheriting this will find the behaviour and go looking for
> the gap that justified it, and find nothing.**

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that reporting both readings is useful.*
**If in practice it is always one of them, the report is a ritual** — *and that is
worth knowing.*

## 2026-09-07 — declined: `check` does not resolve the `404` over ssh `osprey`

**Considered:** *the two readings **are** distinguishable over ssh — permission
denied against repository not found — and `externals` now says so.* **Demonstrated
here by accident:** *`loom/settled` returned `404` over HTTP while an ssh clone of
it succeeded.*

**Not done, because:** *it needs a key, a non-default port, and a second
transport* — **and it would be fixing rather than reporting**, which is the rule
this design held all round.

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that a person will do it.* **The ssh
disambiguation is one command and it is in the document; if nobody ever runs it,
the ambiguity was never actionable and reporting it was theatre.**

## 2026-09-07 — declined: `init` `osprey`

**Considered and rejected**, not deferred.

**Because:** *its temptation is to scaffold, and four empty directories assert four
things nobody has decided.* **A file that carries no delta should not exist.**

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that starting is easy without it.* **If
people repeatedly fail to start**, *the useful version creates one file and asks
one question* — **and creating the tree is still not the feature.**

## 2026-09-07 — declined: worktree, clone; and where a round lives `osprey`

**Decided:** *the cart lives on the default branch; the work is isolated on a
branch named for the cart.*

**Believed to advance:** *a cart is a venue and the work is an artifact.* **`cart`
says three states are visible in a listing, and a branch makes all three
invisible** — *a venue only visible if you know which branch to check out is not a
venue.* **Both dailies land on the default branch, one commit per exchange.**

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

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

## 2026-09-07 — `publish` is renamed `reachable`, and it earned its place `osprey`

**Decided:** *the command is `loom reachable <path>` — one anonymous request
against a document in `.loom/published/`.*

**Believed to advance:** *the old name said the tool performs publication, which
is the one thing the model says it never does.* **It performs a fetch with a
different subject**, which keeps it inside a fetcher and a comparator.

**It was nearly cut for being a third kind of thing. Then it was validated three
times in one afternoon**, against loom's own repositories:

```
loom/settled              404 anon   the page written to fix "settled is private"
jeffry/homelab-cluster    404 anon   and bedrock's public starting page named it
                                     as the better answer
loom/.loom                200 anon   fetchable — but not where a reader lands
```

**All three are now fixed.** *The third was not a `reachable` failure and is
recorded as the tool's boundary:* **`reachable` answers *can anybody fetch this*
and does not answer *will anybody find it*.** *The second is not testable by a
fetcher and a comparator, and trying is the first step in the tool becoming
something else.*

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that publication failures are common enough
to need a command.* **Three for three is a small sample from one publisher in one
week.**

## 2026-09-07 — the `ETag`/blob coincidence is a migration aid `osprey`

**Recorded so it is not rediscovered as a good idea.**

*With eight adopted documents and no locks, `check` was run by hand by hashing the
local copies and comparing to remote `ETag`s* — **the exact thing the convention
forbids** — **and it worked**, because on gitea the two coincide. *It found
exactly one drifted document, correctly.*

**It is worth doing once, on gitea, to lock what was fetched by hand before the
tool existed. It is not a mechanism.**

> **The coincidence has now been found twice and rejected twice.** *The next person
> to notice it will think they have found the good idea again.*

## 2026-09-07 — annotate to ask; write in your own file to assert `osprey`

**Decided:** *responses between two presences are correspondence — each writes in
their own file — and annotation is reserved for asking or challenging.*

**Believed to advance:** *the freeze is not "you cannot edit", it is "you cannot
edit without resolving what was said".* **An annotation creates an obligation**,
which makes it the blocking form and correspondence the non-blocking one.

*And the cost is practical: **dissolving a multi-pass file is expensive**, so the
cost of annotating rises with the length of the thing annotated.* **Annotate
early, or accept the cost when the question is worth blocking on.**

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *this rule is in neither `cart` nor
`annotating`.* **It is our reading of their text, and `cart` is loom's** — *they
may say we have it wrong.*

## 2026-09-07 — why this tool exists, in one story `osprey`

**Gitea's ssh is on port `2222`.** *I did not know that. I tried to clone, got
`Permission denied (publickey)`, and spent three tool calls and a guess chasing it
as an authentication problem before finding the port.*

**The fact was published.** *`jeffry/homelab-cluster`, in `.loom/published/gitea.md`,
says:*

> **A clone URL without the port will not work**, and the failure looks like an
> authentication problem rather than a wrong port.

**It named my failure before I had it, and I could not read it** — *the repository
was not fetchable by anybody who is not its owner.*

**This happened inside the round that was designing the fix**, *and it failed for
the reason that round had just spent two passes identifying.* **A document that is
correct, published, and unreachable is worth exactly as much as one that was never
written.**

**Believed to advance:** *nothing in this log is a stronger reason for the tool to
exist.* **`reachable` is why the document can be fetched. `pull` and `check` are
why it is still true when you read it.**

**Belief that could be shown wrong:** *that the tool would have helped.* **I would
have had to already depend on that document to have pulled it** — *and the thing I
needed was the one I did not know I was missing.* **A fetcher does not solve
discovery, and this story is partly a discovery problem wearing a freshness
problem's clothes.**