Compass ships three kinds of component that touch the network. The dashboard server (compass/skills/compass/server.py, whose code is the compass_runtime package beside it) reads local coding-agent session stores (transcripts, task files, SQLite databases) and serves them over HTTP. When the usage feature is on, the server also makes the quota poll described in Usage quota reads (the quota fetcher); it carries no session data. The model lane is the one path that can send session content off this machine. A call a reader's action starts (a focused refresh for a goal line, a press for a reading, or the open of a finished session or a press for a session summary) runs without a prior question and shows a one-time, non-blocking notice naming what is sent and where, with its off switch beside it: Pause model calls for a reading or a goal line, Turn off summaries for a summary. Turning on the Live monitor starts a Haiku check about once a minute for as long as the session is viewed, and shows its own notice. Unasked drift checks stay off by default, and --no-observer-model refuses every model call. Observer model calls states its bounds; Light harness usage states the notice rule. The opt-in UI's Space fonts are packaged into its page, so loading either interface makes no request to a font provider. Four small forwarders ship beside it, each wired into a harness's own configuration by the user or by the plugin: notify_hook.py POSTs a Claude Notification payload to the dashboard, event_hook.py posts command-hook lifecycle events for Claude and Codex, agy_hook.py posts Antigravity's hook events, and statusline_hook.py posts Antigravity's status-line state. All four share one transport, so the loopback check, the proxy suppression and the redirect refusal have a single implementation.

Two JavaScript adapters run inside their hosts: opencode_plugin.js observes parent permission callbacks and pi_extension.js observes extension UI prompts. They read at most 65,536 bytes from this port's ordinary state file, reject non-regular files, and send allowlisted envelopes with the current harness capability only to IPv4 loopback. They do not follow redirects, use proxy settings, log native contents, or answer prompts. Each has a bounded serial queue and an HTTP deadline (OpenCode 250 ms; Pi 500 ms), and returns from the callback without waiting for delivery. The OpenCode and Pi procedures state their coverage and loss boundaries. Their transport is JavaScript inside the host, not the Python forwarders' helper.

One of them could do harm if it were registered in the wrong place. Antigravity's PreToolUse hook may return a decision that allows, denies or re-prompts a tool call, and there is no harmless output at that position: an empty object there reads as a DENY, so a reporting hook would block the user's work rather than pass it through. The safety property is that agy_hook.py is never registered at PreToolUse. Where it is registered, after a tool call and after an invocation, it prints exactly {} and nothing else on every path including every failure path, and a test asserts that for malformed, empty and valid input alike. Irreversible actions below carries the same rule for the hook that matches destructive shapes.

The third kind is one stdio MCP server, mcp_server.py, described under The ask lane below. It is not a forwarder and shares none of the four's transport: a harness spawns it, it speaks JSON-RPC on stdin and stdout, and it reaches the dashboard on loopback under the same three guards.

The posture rests on two invariants:

1. Localhost unless the operator says otherwise. The server binds 127.0.0.1, and every forwarder and the MCP server refuse to reach anywhere but loopback, ignore proxy environment variables, and do not follow redirects. --host is the one way that first clause moves, it is an explicit argument nothing sets for you, and what it costs is under Known and accepted. Four kinds of outbound request are implemented, and they are named apart rather than counted together because they are not the same exposure. The quota poll carries a vendor token out and quota numbers back, and no session content whatever. The pull request and merge request CI read, described in Pull request CI reads below, starts your own gh when you press Analyze and sends GitHub a repository and a pull request number (or a pushed branch's name, where that bound it), or your own glab and sends a GitLab host you have signed in to a project and a merge request number; it carries no session text. A harness invocation, described in Light harness usage below, can carry session-derived text: it is the one pathway by which the operator's own words may leave this machine. A nudge to an endpoint the operator supplies, described in Off-machine nudges below, carries two counts and nothing that names a session. The observer model and reader-requested readings implement the harness invocation pathway behind their own enablement and consent. Nudges stay off until an endpoint is configured. --no-usage stops the quota poll, --no-harness-usage refuses model calls, --no-ci-read stops the pull request read and --no-reach disables nudges, each for its own path and no other. What launches and what sends tables every switch against the test that fails when it leaks. Nothing else Compass does reaches the network. One further pathway is written down and reaches no network on Compass's own account: the hand-off request in Hand-off requests below writes one line to a socket on this machine, and what travels afterwards travels on the receiving session's own connection, which is why it is named here rather than counted above.

2. Read-only against harness stores. They are opened read-only and never written. Seventeen endpoints mutate, and seven of them only in memory: POST /api/notify updates needs-input state, and POST /api/usage stores a quota figure a harness published to its own status-line command. POST /api/events/<harness> also mutates in memory only, behind the capability described under Known and accepted, and so do POST /api/ask, POST /api/answer and POST /api/ask/withdraw, which register a question a session asked, record the option the reader chose, and drop a question whose asker has stopped waiting for it, all three described under The ask lane. So does POST /api/lane, which records that a dashboard tab has a working notification lane in it: one timestamp for the whole board, never written to disk, and a body that names a session is refused rather than stripped. Delivery records below is where that refusal is stated. The long poll that delivers an answer, GET /api/ask/<id>, drops that question from memory once it has, which is the delivery completing rather than a change a caller asked for. Ten write to disk. POST /api/dismiss writes the sessions you marked handled, POST /api/annotate writes the goal you typed or explicitly adopted and the expected outcome lines you typed against a session, including a line you added from a later direction you gave and the settlement of those directions, and POST /api/reading writes a model's reading of that session back into the same annotation entry. A press that produces nothing still writes, because the reason and the spend count are recorded too. These three routes write Compass's own state under ~/.compass and never a harness store, so the read-only rule above stands unchanged. What the first holds and how to clear it is in Dismissals; the other two share one file, compass-annotations.json, bounded by a session count and a revision count rather than by age, and by a 16 MiB read limit that every write trims to, dropping the least recently written entries and never the one being written. A store file that exists and cannot be read whole is never written over: every save answers untrusted until it can be, because a write would keep only what this build could read, and the board says the file could not be read rather than showing every session as one nobody typed against. A session whose own entry this build cannot read is kept as it was, and a save, adoption or discard of it answers unreadable. Every write holds an OS lock on the selected annotation filename plus .lock beside the file across its read, its check and its rename (flock on POSIX, msvcrt.locking on Windows), so two dashboards sharing one Compass home cannot write an older copy over a newer save or reuse a revision number: a write that named a revision the other dashboard has moved past is refused as stale, and a plain goal save appends after it. A write that waits ten seconds for the lock writes nothing and answers unwritable, and so does one whose lock file exists or can be made but cannot be opened or locked by this user, such as a lock file left mode 000 or owned by another account. Only a filesystem that reports it cannot lock at all (ENOLCK or EOPNOTSUPP) falls back to the one dashboard's in-process lock: its saves still write, the dashboard logs once that another dashboard sharing the home may overwrite them, and on that filesystem the guarantee above holds within one dashboard only. It is redacted on the way in like every other prompt-derived string, written owner-only through a temp file and a rename -- the file synced before the rename and the directory synced after it, so that rename is trusted only once both are on disk; where the directory cannot be synced, as on Windows, the bytes are durable and only the rename is not, and the save is not reported as failed -- and turned off entirely by --no-annotations. It is the only store holding prose you composed rather than anything a harness published, and since 2026-09-10 it also holds a reading: a model's account of that session against those words. A reading carries one model-authored string, detail under a cited departure or unfinished-work result, and it goes through the same redact-before-clip scrub the two prose fields do, on the way in and again on the way out, because any local process can rewrite the file. Everything else a reading holds is a value the code selected from a closed set or composed from counts it measured.

   Delegated owner acceptance, 2026-10-05: a local rewrite of detail is scrubbed and escaped, but the prose verdict backstop used at production is not reapplied when loading the file. A rewritten detail can therefore say the work succeeded beside a valid departure token. A blanket success-word check would also reject legitimate quotations of the agent's claims. Repeating a prose check cannot authenticate a file the same local process can rewrite in full. This remains an accepted local-process limit; redaction, citation checks and escaping still apply. No claim of tamper detection or authenticated model output follows from them.

   A line added from an entry can also hold its verified request time and SHA256 fingerprints of its parent, source identity and full request-record digest, and reviewed line, under the request-age ruling. These bindings add no source words. Loading invalid metadata removes its age without deleting the line, and current parent facts must verify it before it changes a verdict. The page receives only verified times and source handles, bound to the current revision. Typed and legacy lines retain unknown request age. The fingerprints check continuity, not authenticity against a local process that can change both the store and the source.

   Two consequences of storing it here rather than in session history, both accepted rather than discovered. --forget deletes the session-history, session-end and summary stores and deletes nothing a reader typed and no reading of it, so a reader who wants a model-authored reading gone clears that session's annotation, which deletes the reading with the words that produced it. The one thing that command does take out of this file is the discard records described below, which hold no text at all. And there is no fourteen-day expiry: a reading is evicted when its annotation is, oldest-save-first at the session count above. The fourth disk writer, POST /api/tripwire, saves, rearms or removes workflow stage conditions in Compass's own store; Saved workflow stage conditions owns its bounds. The fifth, POST /api/reading/cancel, marks the running analysis cancelled, rewrites its recovery marker under the state directory, and kills its CLI's process group; the cancelled outcome it causes is written by the analysis's own job, into the same annotation entry POST /api/reading writes. The sixth, POST /api/correction/copied, records the digest of a correction you copied, never its text, in compass-copied-corrections.json; Analyze drift, Cancel and copied corrections owns its bounds. The seventh, POST /api/summary/delete, deletes one stored summary, and reading one writes too: a focused GET /api/project-context records its last access time, named with the other writing GET below. The eighth, POST /api/summary, and the ninth, POST /api/summary/cancel, start or stop a server-owned summary job, and the first also stores Turn off summaries or Turn summaries on. The first writes the separate summary store incrementally after each part. Both write identifier-only progress markers in state_dir/summary-jobs/ before any charge; startup reports a dead job as interrupted with its finished parts and never resumes it. Delete summary stops a running summary before a later reply can publish. Discard everything does the same for the discarded session, under the reason discarded, and then deletes that session's stored summary; it removes no other session's. A publication lock at state_dir/summary-jobs.lock serializes admission, save, cancel, deletion and grant changes across dashboards. The independent summary_permission row and summary_spends receipt/timestamp rows live in the permission SQLite file; neither reads or charges Analyze's spends or spend_jobs tables. A receipt is the random job id and attempt number, never a session id or source text, and is retained for 30 days for restart accounting; the rolling cap reads only the newest 24 hours. All three summary POST routes are loopback-only, enforce Host/Origin and fetch-site checks, and refuse document navigation before parsing a body or touching a store. The tenth, POST /api/goal/find, sends one session's own prompts to the model on a press and writes nothing to disk but the rolling-cap ledger row and, the first time, the goal notice in the permission file. It is guarded as POST /api/reading is: loopback-only, Host/Origin and fetch-site checks, a document navigation refused before the body is read, and a body that must assert press and observer_model. Find goal owns what it sends and what it keeps. The eleventh, POST /api/settings, saves the reading limits set on the Settings screen (how large an Analyze drift prompt may be, how many of a session's messages and checks a press keeps and lists, and how much of its transcripts the press scans for checks) in compass-settings.json, owner-only, holding integers and nothing a session or a reader wrote. It is loopback-only, enforces Host/Origin and fetch-site checks, refuses a document navigation, and checks every value against its bounds before it writes any. A larger limit changes how much of a session the next press sends, never where it goes or who it goes to, which the press's own disclosure still names. The separate summary store, compass-summaries.json under the same home, holds model-written summaries keyed by harness and session, without a saved intent. Discard everything removes the discarded session's entry and no other (owner's ruling, 2026-10-21; it reversed the earlier rule that the summary store survives). Its versioned closed schema admits the producer's summary (lede, blocks, spans, fingerprints, citations, withheld markers, cut counts, gaps, coverage and spend), made-at time, model stamp, last access time and word-free source comparison metadata. Unknown schemas, torn files and files above the 64 MiB aggregate read cap are unavailable, never partially read or overwritten by a save. Every stored string is redacted before bounding on the way in and again on the way out. Writers hold a process lock and the store filename plus .lock across read, eviction and owner-only temp-file rename; unavailable filesystem locks refuse the write. The bound allows 64 summaries at 512 KiB each (32 MiB), plus 32 MiB for comparison metadata and envelopes. Eviction drops the least recently read or written summaries, never the summary being saved, and cannot touch the annotation store. Delete summary removes one session; no marker of the deletion is stored, so the next open of that finished session summarizes it again and sends its text once more, unless summaries are turned off or model calls are paused. --forget deletes the whole store, even when unreadable and even when the filesystem lock is unsupported or unusable; only a lock another holder keeps past ten seconds refuses it. --no-annotations does not govern it. Deletion is loopback-only, same-origin and refused for document navigation before the body or store is read. A local process with no fetch metadata can delete a summary; it cannot use this route to remove saved intent. Session summary calls owns model-call bounds; the store contract owns its schema and API. One forwarder writes too: statusline_hook.py's deduplication memo under the same directory, which holds a normalized state name and a timestamp and nothing about the session's content. Two POSTs store nothing of their own and are named here for what they return rather than for the count above: POST /api/direction hands back the whole text of one later direction you gave, which the page asks for on its own, with no press, for every open direction (up to 64) when it draws the question that quotes them, so you read the words before you choose what to do with them, and POST /api/correction hands back Steer back's correction, which is the goal and outcome lines you saved, each line's state and the times of the entries it rests on, and since 2026-10-04 the first sentence of an agent message whose claim the record contradicts or does not show, or, since 2026-10-20, at which a departure is cited, the title the activity list already publishes. Each runs a collection to read the session, and that collection may rewrite semantic-work-history.json as any collection does. Analyze drift, Cancel and copied corrections owns the bounds of both. One GET reads wider than the rest, and is named here for that reason rather than for the count above. GET /api/annotations serves the prose you composed, for every session you have annotated, including sessions no longer on the board. That is a wider scope than /api/data ever had, which serves only what is live. It also serves what the unasked lane raised against those words, read from the departure store in the same pass, so the Intent log can show a raise on a session the board no longer carries. Each raised row adds eleven fields, and they are named here rather than summarised as one sentence: the harness and session id, when the check ran, the constraint it concerned, the clause QUOTED FROM YOUR WORDS, the model's own sentence about it, the evidence labels it cited, the annotation revision and the moment it read, the producer's own account of what it read, and one sentence this build derives about what a later check found. Two of those are prose about a departed session and one of them is yours. It is same-origin only, refuses a cross-site navigation, answers 503 under --no-annotations, and reads the annotation store and the departure store rather than session history. Discarding a session's annotation withdraws from both: it deletes every revision and blanks the quotations from the departure rows those revisions were read against, keeping only that a check ran, so words discarded that way are gone from this response and from both of those stores on disk. Both of those and not every store: session history keeps its own fourteen-day copy of the goal and each outcome line, the discard path does not touch it, and --forget is what removes that copy. The record's own sentence names it, so a reader meets that fact where the act happened rather than only here. What stays in the annotation store in their place is a discard record, and it holds four things and no fifth: the harness, the session id, the moment of the act, and the number of the last revision that went. No goal, no outcome line, no reading, no withheld reason and no press count -- the parser drops every other field of a record unread, so a file rewritten by any local process to hang text off one reads back with none. It is what lets a surface say a discard happened without restating what was discarded, and it is the only thing in this file --forget removes. The two stores are written one after the other and the second write can fail on its own, in which case the annotation is gone and the quotations are not; the reply carries that answer as withdrew and the board prints a sentence saying the raises still quote those words, rather than the one saying nothing does. That is the clear field of a POST /api/annotate body, sent by the discard everything control under the two boxes on the session page, and it is not the clear control beside each box: that one empties the box, and the save after it writes a revision with an empty string while every earlier revision, and every raise quoting one, stays. Nothing else removes a departure row's words. It is not on the refresh loop: the words leave the server when the Intent log is opened, and the route's own docstring records that reasoning. The POST-route inventory in the test suite cannot see a GET, so this paragraph is the accounting for it.

   Two GETs write as well, which is why they are named here rather than left to the count above. GET /api/project-context with a session that matches one row reads that session's stored summary, and at most once an hour per summary that read records the summary's last access time, which eviction orders by. It writes nothing else: the same entry with a later accessed_at, under the summary store's process lock and compass-summaries.json.lock, by rewriting the whole file, up to 64 MiB, through the owner-only temporary file and rename every save uses. That rewrite applies the same size bound, so it can evict other summaries but never the one read, and it never touches the annotation store. Under a non-default --host bind, a peer that can reach the port can cause that hourly rewrite; it cannot choose what is written. GET /api/observe is a trigger rather than a poll: it derives one session's goal, stage and open block and records the answer as a sidecar under ~/.compass/observer/, again Compass's own state and never a harness store. Its two components are the harness key and the session id, and both must match [A-Za-z0-9._-]{1,128} before either reaches a path. records.safe_text bounds a string and strips control characters, and passes a separator straight through, so the grammar is what keeps the write inside that directory rather than the join. The file holds prompt-derived text, so it is written the way the state file and the dismissal store are: a temp file created owner-only and renamed into place, with a failed write reported as a failure rather than raised at the request. Published text records what that redaction covers. What the route reads is covered by Project reads below: the transcript, and the same two kinds of frontmatter a stage strip reads, under the same guards and the same --no-spacedock switch. The git probe runs inside a repository the user chose rather than a harness store. Git writes nothing there on the probe's behalf, and Compass runs no program of its own; a filter driver the operator has configured globally, git-lfs being the common one, can still be invoked by a committed attribute and may then write where it likes, which the git-reads section below states in full. The focus command writes nothing anywhere, reads nothing back, and touches no harness store; POST /api/focus is the one POST route that mutates nothing at all. The server also keeps its own history of what it observed under ~/.compass, written as it observes rather than in answer to a request, and never a harness store, so the read-only rule stands unchanged.

Anything that weakens either invariant is a security bug: a bind reaching an address the operator did not ask for, a request admitted that the bind's own Host gate should have refused, file reads outside the documented store paths and the project-read contract below (however the path was derived), writes to harness stores, running any program inside a user's repository other than the probe described in Repository git reads (the end-of-session probe) and the two identity commands described in Pull request CI reads (at an Analyze press, and where a recorded CI poll needs binding), running a program to reach a session's terminal other than the focus command described in Reaching a session's terminal (the focus command), or the hook client reaching a non-loopback destination. Those three exceptions are a whitelist of three scoped clauses and not a general permission to execute: written generally the sentence would make documented security bugs of three paths Compass already ships, the native notifier's osascript, --daemon's respawn of the server, and the quota fetcher's Keychain read.

POST /api/goal/find reads the prompts a reader typed in one Claude Code or Codex session and answers a goal, or nothing. It runs only on a press of Find goal, one call per press, and a second press while one runs is refused with 409 rather than charged again.

• It sends the session's own person-authored prompts and nothing else: not an agent message, not tool output, not a correction Compass wrote and the reader copied. Each prompt is masked by named form and folded as a chosen goal is, then at most 40 of them (the first five and the latest) and 24,000 characters go in one message, with the rules and a boundary no prompt can close.
• The receiver is the route Analyze names for that harness. A press names the provider and, for Claude Code, the model the page drew, and a mismatch answers 409 before any call.
• Every refusal that can be known without the model comes before the prompts are read: the startup off switch, the stored pause, a spent day, a lured request. The charge is taken at the model seam, the same reservation Analyze pays, so a press that runs counts against the same rolling cap whether or not it finds a goal. A press with no prompts, or with the CLI missing, sends nothing and is not charged.
• A goal is shown only if it passes three mechanical rules: the model quotes the prompt words it comes from, each quote is verbatim (whitespace aside) in the prompt it names as Compass sent it, and the model calls the goal clear, asked in end-state wording matching a reading's. A paraphrase, a quote under the wrong prompt number, a goal too long for the Goal field and a reply of the wrong shape are dropped.
• The answer is held as words in the Goal field and is stored nowhere. Nothing is written into the session, and nothing is saved until the reader presses Save intent.
• The accepted limit: the third rule is the model's own judgement, carried in the same call, so a goal a later analysis would call too vague can still be shown. The quotes are what the reader checks it against.

Scope names the kinds of outbound request. This section is the other direction of the same ledger: each way Compass reaches off the machine or starts a program, the switch that stops it, and the test that fails if it runs anyway. A path with no such test says "none" and why, rather than leaving the cell blank.

The switches are separate, and a run that wants a path closed has to name it. --no-harness-usage is an alias of --no-observer-model and stops model calls only. It does not stop the vendor quota poll, which stops under --no-usage, or the reach nudge, which stops under --no-reach. A run with all three still serves its loopback port and still starts the local programs in the second table. Anything written as "no outbound connection under --no-harness-usage" is wrong, and the rows below are why.

Tests are named module.Class.method, under compass/skills/compass/tests/. test_launch_and_send_pins.TheLaunchAndSendTableNamesRealTestsTest fails when a name here no longer resolves, so a renamed pin cannot leave this table citing nothing.

Tool output is included by default in a reader-pressed Claude Code reading when Compass can name its destination: a check's command, result, last 180 characters of output, written paths, the repository and number of a pull request it created, and the names of skills it used, and, for each other command, its masked line and exit status (and its tail, when the session's own vendor reads it). Tool output in a Claude Code reading owns the content bounds. --allow-tool-output and COMPASS_ALLOW_TOOL_OUTPUT=1 are accepted and do nothing for one release; they will be removed in a later release. They write no grant and need no forwarding on respawn. test_lifecycle.EveryOptOutReachesTheWindowsChildTest.test_compatibility_flags_and_environment_change_nothing binds this compatibility behavior. Pause model calls and --no-observer-model stop the calls.

The page ships one example session, an anonymized Claude Code session with a stored reading, so a new reader can see what the Session page shows. It is static data bundled in the page and drawn over a second shell with an in-memory server: it opens no connection, reads no session store, runs no model and writes nothing, and its own fetch refuses every write with a 403. A press that would edit, save, allow or run is held in the page before it reaches a handler. The transcript behind it is committed under sample-session/, an exception to the policy against committed transcripts that the owner made for this one session. It was anonymized by a script, checked for every original value, and reviewed by readers who held only the anonymized file; the mapping that holds the originals is never committed and .gitignore refuses a mapping file kept in sample-session/. The design record owns the decisions.

Every pin above runs against Compass's own code, with the call that would leave patched or watched. That is the right tool for "this path is gated", and it cannot see what happens past the gate. It does not see the Claude Code or Codex CLI once Compass has started one, which opens its own connections. It does not see a connection made by a dependency below the patched call, and it attributes nothing to a process.

A live capture would add that: a process and socket trace of one real journey on a running build, once each for the default run, monitor only, no model, a declined press and a launch-granted run, with the clipboard read back and the session transcript diffed before and after. It would show whether the connections a run opens match the tables above. It has not run. It needs an observer restricted to the dashboard's own process tree that loses no events (one-second sampling missed all twenty short connections in a control run, and packet capture and DTrace were refused by the machine), and a funded allowance for real Claude Code turns. It will run when both exist, by hand and not in CI, and its result replaces this paragraph.

One feature reads paths that are not under a store root. When a session declares itself a Spacedock first officer, or in Pi and Codex has a supported boot result in its transcript, Compass reads YAML frontmatter, and only frontmatter, from two kinds of file, so it can show where each entity sits on its workflow's stage spine:

1. one workflow README.md, for the ordered stage list and which stages are initial or terminal;
2. the entity files in that workflow's entity-state directory, for each entity's current status.

That is the whole of it. No other project file is opened, and the only directory listed is the entity-state directory itself, through one non-recursive scandir. Nothing is ever walked.

Neither path is guessed. The first officer's own spacedock status --boot output, already recorded in its transcript, names the workflow directory and the entity-state directory as absolute paths. Compass uses those values and nothing else. Before any file is opened, all of the following must hold, and a path failing any one is skipped silently:

• the directory value is absolute, contains no NUL, and encodes for this filesystem. A lone surrogate survives JSON decoding, and the checks below it raise UnicodeEncodeError rather than OSError, so an unencodable path would escape every handler here;
• the path is canonicalised with realpath, and the README must still resolve inside the workflow directory (commonpath containment), so a swapped entry cannot redirect the read;
• every file opened is a regular file and not a symlink. This is checked with lstat, opened with O_NOFOLLOW where the platform has it, and confirmed with an fstat (st_dev, st_ino) match against the stat the cache key was built from, so a parent-directory swap between the two cannot seed the cache from a different file. Windows has no O_NOFOLLOW, so there the guarantee rests on the lstat classification alone and a racing reparse-point swap could still be followed. That is the same unclosable class as the FILE_SHARE_DELETE window described in the skill body;
• the README frontmatter declares commissioned-by: spacedock@, which is Spacedock's own workflow discriminator.

The entity-state directory is deliberately not required to sit inside the workflow directory. A split-root workflow legitimately keeps its state elsewhere, and that path carries the same authority as the workflow path, having come from the same tool result. A per-file discriminator stands in for containment instead: an entity file counts only if its name is a well-formed slug (^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]$, which also excludes _archive/ and any report left beside the state) and its status names a stage the README declared.

Hard caps: at most 64 KiB read from a README and 8 KiB from an entity file, 400 frontmatter lines scanned, 32 stage names taken, 120 characters of the README's title, 96 entity files read per workflow (newest first), 12 entities rendered per workflow, and 8 workflows per session. Display entity reads are cached on (realpath, st_mtime_ns, st_size); the README cache also checks device, inode and change time. Neither caches a file modified in the last two seconds, because a same-size rewrite inside one timestamp tick would leave every part of that key unchanged. Stage conditions read current entity frontmatter within the same caps on each collection, independently of the display cache. Entity files older than the freshness window are not opened; future file stamps cannot become stage-condition evidence.

Only derived scalars reach /api/data: stage names (each validated against Spacedock's ^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]$ grammar), entity slugs, cycle markers, and the README frontmatter's title scalar, shown as the workflow's goal line in the session view. That title is the one piece of project-authored text on the surface, and it is there because a stage spine says where the work is without saying what it is for; it is capped at 120 characters and passes through the same control-character and bidi stripping every untrusted string does. No other file text, no frontmatter body and no filesystem path is ever published, and the page HTML-escapes every value. Pass --no-spacedock to switch the feature off. The read surface is then exactly the documented store paths.

compass-tripwires.json under Compass's state directory holds at most 64 stage conditions. A versioned SHA-256 digest of the canonical definition and state directory pair identifies a workflow; new condition fields expose no paths or copied file bodies. The bounded store uses atomic replacement and owner-only temporary files. Corruption refuses mutation and evaluation rather than discarding intent. POST /api/tripwire accepts only a known action, opaque workflow id, declared stage and expected revision, under the loopback origin gate and a 1 KiB body cap.

A latch reaches disk before a notification attempt. Failed latch writes retain pending evidence in memory and make no attempt; restarting loses that pending evidence. A saved latch is never replayed after restart, including when the process stopped before attempting the notification. Simultaneous dashboard processes retain the existing last-writer-wins limitation; the latch is not a cross-process exactly-once guarantee. --no-tripwires disables all condition-store reads and writes. --no-spacedock leaves saved intent readable but suspended. See the stage-condition contract for baselines and delivery wording.

Two features run a program inside a directory the user chose, both git, both in git_status.py. Compass already records each session's working directory; when a session ends, the server runs one bounded git command there, so the board can show that a session stopped with work still in the tree. The second, below the probe's own contract, reads a project's check scripts as a commit held them.

The end-of-session probe is exactly this command, or there is no probe. The identity read in Pull request CI reads runs two other fixed commands and never this probe:

git -c core.fsmonitor= -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null -c status.showUntrackedFiles=normal --no-optional-locks status --porcelain

status.showUntrackedFiles=normal keeps non-ignored untracked entries visible. Measured 2026-09-08: one untracked file was suppressed by status.showUntrackedFiles=no through local config, GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL and GIT_CONFIG_COUNT. This key override closes all three routes; other operator configuration, including ignore and filter rules, remains in effect. Clean means no porcelain entries under these rules, not discovery of ignored content.

Two things about how it is spawned are part of the boundary rather than details of it.

The executable is resolved, not looked up by the child. git above is the name the contract prints; what runs is an absolute path resolved once against a PATH the probe controls. Measured 2026-09-07: with the bare name, any empty or relative element ahead of the first element holding a real git supplied the binary instead, and it resolved from the session's own directory, which is the one directory whose contents must not be trusted to supply a program. The rule is order rather than position: a leading ., a leading empty element, an interior empty element and an interior . all hijacked, and trailing forms did not.

Every non-absolute PATH element is dropped, and the resolution refuses a relative answer as well. Both ends, not either: the first version of this dropped a named pair, the empty element and ., which reads like the whole property and was not. Measured 2026-09-07, a bare relbin survived that filter, and then the two directories parted company: the resolver validated a git under the dashboard's own working directory while the child resolved the same relative string against the directory being probed, which is session-supplied. It published seven changed entries for a directory that is not a repository at all. So the filter now drops anything a resolver would resolve against a working directory, and the resolution returns nothing for an answer that is not absolute even if it is ever handed a PATH from somewhere other than that filter. A PATH left with no absolute element publishes no reading at all rather than falling back to the ambient one.

The child's environment is scrubbed of GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE. Either one points git at a different repository entirely. Measured the same day: a probe of a clean repository published a dirty reading belonging to another one, and a directory that is not a repository at all published it too, so the check that the path is a directory does not help.

The mechanism is subprocess execution rather than a file open. That is what separates this feature from every other read Compass performs, and the three safety flags are load-bearing. The first two were measured 2026-08-28 at git 2.55.0 across four fresh repositories, one probe each, from an identical racy-clean state; the third was measured 2026-09-07 at git 2.55.0 with git-lfs 3.8.0:

• Without --no-optional-locks, the probe writes .git/index. The write is git resolving a racy stat, not a per-invocation habit, and a repository a live session is editing is the normal case for it rather than a corner case.
• Without -c core.fsmonitor=, a core.fsmonitor script configured in the repository is executed under Compass's identity. A repository can carry that setting in from wherever it was cloned.
• Without -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null, a filter driver installs its own hooks inside the repository. Hashing a tracked path whose committed attributes name a driver invokes it, and git-lfs then asks git where hooks belong and writes there: four files at mode 0755, named post-checkout, post-commit, post-merge and pre-push. .git/index was untouched in that arm, so neither other flag sees it, and this one closes it by answering with a path git cannot write.

Each flag disarms a hazard the others do not, so none may be dropped. There is no fallback to a plain git status.

The third flag suppresses the hook installation and neither the invocation nor what the driver does once running. Two separate residuals, and the first is reachable by a clone.

A committed attribute alone reaches the operator's own driver. Measured 2026-09-07: a fresh git clone of a repository whose only unusual artifact is a committed .gitattributes saying *.bin filter=lfs, with git config --local --get-regexp '^filter\.' returning nothing at all, ran git-lfs filter-process on one probe and gained .git/lfs/objects/d5/3e/d53eda7a… inside the repository. The flag was present. The driver was never carried by the clone: it comes from the global config that git lfs install writes, which most machines with git-lfs already have. So this is clone-portable, and the write is driver-caused rather than git writing on the probe's behalf.

An arbitrary, attacker-chosen driver command needs .git/config. A repository with *.x filter=pwn committed and filter.pwn.clean set in its own .git/config had that command executed by one probe, with the flag present. That half is not clone-portable, and there the comparison with core.fsmonitor holds: both need the inspected repository's own config to name a program. The comparison does not extend to the git-lfs case above, where committed content plus a ubiquitous global install is the whole precondition. The two are kept apart here because blurring them is what made the first version of this section wrong.

The trigger is a tracked path matching a filter attribute whose content git must hash, and it does not require a modified file. A tree git itself reports clean invoked the driver on each of three consecutive probes, because the racy-clean state that makes git hash the path is exactly what --no-optional-locks declines to clear. So this recurs rather than happening once. What genuinely reaches nothing is a repository with no matching tracked path: the attribute on its own, with nothing it applies to, installed and ran nothing, measured.

No flag closes it, and this was looked for rather than assumed. --attr-source and GIT_ATTR_SOURCE pointed at the empty tree do suppress the driver, and on a real git-lfs repository they then report a merely-touched pointer file as modified, so the answer stops being true. Clearing the driver with -c filter.lfs.clean= -c filter.lfs.process= makes git fail the command outright, which publishes nothing. diff-files, diff-index and ls-files -m each invoke the driver anyway, and the first two also call a touched LFS file modified. status --porcelain has to hash the path to answer at all, and hashing is what runs the driver, so this is stated rather than fixed.

/dev/null as a hooks path is measured on darwin. It names a location git can find no hook under on any supported platform, and tests/test_git_status.py skips rather than passes where the mechanism cannot be armed, so the Linux and Windows arms are unmeasured rather than verified.

git status discovers repository metadata by walking upward from the directory it runs in. The probe passes the session's own working directory as cwd and passes nothing that bounds the walk. With an ordinary .git directory and no working-tree redirection, it answers about the containing repository. That walk has two outcomes, and only one of them is what a reader wants.

The common outcome is the right one, and it is why the feature is useful at all. A session working in repo/src/components gets repo's reading, which is the answer to whether that session left work behind. Measured 2026-09-07 against this tree: a probe at a dirty repository's root and a probe three levels inside it published an identical dirty=True, changed=3, while a directory with no repository above it published null.

The wrong outcome is a $HOME that is itself a repository. A session working somewhere under such a $HOME, in no project repository of its own, gets $HOME's reading, and its row then reports a dirty tree that has nothing to do with that session. Anyone who keeps dotfiles as a repository checked out at $HOME can reach this. It is not reachable on the machine these measurements were taken on, where git -C "$HOME" rev-parse --show-toplevel finds no repository at all, and that is a fact about one machine rather than a property of the design.

Decided 2026-09-07, and recorded rather than fixed. Three measurements settled it, and the first is the one to read before proposing anything here:

• The confinement this was originally filed with does not work. GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES set to the probed directory changed nothing in either arm: the probe three levels inside the repository still published the parent's dirty=True, changed=3, identical to the same probe with no ceiling set. Only a ceiling at the probed directory's parent changes the outcome, and that publishes null for any session not sitting exactly at a repository root. So this is not a fix that was weighed and declined on cost. It was measured not to do the thing it was proposed to do.
• Confining the walk costs a reading people rely on. Of 48 recorded session directories still present on the machine measured, 30 sat at a repository root, 10 inside a repository below its root, and 8 in no repository at all. A parent ceiling would blank one in four of the repository-backed ones, and null means no reading available, so such a row could not even say why.
• The targeted alternative reopens DEC-3. Refusing only when the resolved repository root is $HOME keeps the subdirectory case and closes the dotfiles case, but learning that root needs a second git command, and this section's first bound is that the end-of-session probe is exactly the one command above or there is no probe.

So the trade was a common correct reading against a hazard nobody here can currently reach, and the ruling keeps the reading. What it costs a reader is written down rather than left to be discovered: a git reading names a session's directory, but the repository git discovers may be an unrelated ancestor such as $HOME.

Local metadata can also select a different working tree. Git can read core.worktree from the discovered .git/config and compare another directory's contents against that repository's index. Measured 2026-09-08: a clean source pointing at a directory with nine untracked entries returned dirty=True, changed=9; removing the setting restored clean/zero. This is accepted local-config trust, distinct from inherited GIT_WORK_TREE, which the probe scrubs. A .git file selects metadata elsewhere; it does not by itself establish that the remote directory's contents were measured. In the gitfile control, changing files beside the target metadata left the reading clean, while an untracked file beside the gitfile made it dirty. Metadata selection and working-tree redirection are separate mechanisms. The probe retains its one-command design and does not confine either one.

What the probe publishes, per session, is two fields and nothing else:

{dirty: bool | None, changed: int | None}

Both fields are nullable, and null means no reading available: never attempted (including refused), attempted without a usable result, or retired after resumed work. It makes no clean-tree inference. The probe fires on session_ended, and most harnesses do not emit that event today, so most rows carry null. changed counts porcelain entries rather than files: git collapses an untracked directory into a single entry, so a new directory holding three files is one entry, not three.

What is never read:

• File contents, of any file, at any point.
• Diffs and blobs. Nothing asks what changed inside a file, only that something did.
• Branch and upstream state of any kind. The branch name, its tracking branch, and how far ahead or behind it sits are all outside this feature.

Porcelain output names paths. Those pathnames are matching hints and are never echoed to /api/data, the same rule and the same wording this document applies to cwd.

The cadence is one-shot, on the session_ended edge. Never a poll, never on demand, and never on a turn stop: the completion stamp written when a turn stops is a different edge, and probing there would put one subprocess in the user's repository per turn for the life of the session.

The cadence is not a bound on how many probes run at once, and that took a second gate. One edge per session at most once each still allowed 240 live probes per harness and 960 across the four event sources, because the event budget refills for the whole of a probe's ten seconds, and each one is a real git status in a real repository. So a session already being probed is refused a second probe, and the process holds at most 32 in flight across every harness.

The two gates cost different things, and only one of them costs a stale reading. A session refused because its own probe is already running keeps the reading that probe produces, which can be up to ten seconds old and stays until another session end arrives. A session refused by the ceiling publishes no reading at all: no first probe ran for it, and releasing a slot re-dispatches nothing. There is no automatic recovery without another eligible end event. Measured with the ceiling set to 2 and four distinct ends: after every in-flight probe drained and collection ran, the two probed sessions read dirty=True, changed=5, both refused ones read null, and the dispatch count stayed at 2. Redelivering session_ended for a refused key in the same process dispatched a third probe and supplied its reading. The decision to retain refusal is recorded in N-9's rejected list.

The off switch is --no-git. The probe is on by default and that flag turns it off. It mirrors --no-spacedock at every one of that flag's sites, including the branch that forwards flags to a respawned daemon, so a restart cannot re-enable a probe the user disabled. With the probe off no git command runs at all, and both fields stay null.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: a git command other than the one above, any of its fixed options dropped, a read of file contents or diffs or branch state, a pathname reaching a response, a probe on any edge but session end, a probe while the feature is off, an executable taken from anywhere but the resolved absolute path, a reading published about any repository but the one git discovers from the directory it names, subject to the metadata and working-tree selection described above, or any write inside the user's repository that Compass's own argv could have prevented.

Two of those clauses are narrower than they read, and both narrowings are the residuals above rather than relaxations. A filter driver the inspected repository configured for itself may write where it likes, and no argv Compass can pass stops it; what the argv must prevent, and now does, is git writing on the probe's behalf. And the reading clause says repository rather than directory on purpose: git's discovery normally selects the containing repository, which is the correct answer for a session in a subdirectory and the wrong one for a session under a $HOME that is a repository. That selection also trusts local metadata: a gitfile can select external metadata, and core.worktree can redirect the contents compared against the discovered index. The boundary does not promise that those contents lie beneath the session directory or the discovered metadata.

A Claude Code session that ran pnpm typecheck or make lint is read as having run a check when the project's own package.json, Makefile or justfile says that script is a known test or lint runner. The agent can write those files, so Compass reads them from git as a commit held them, not from the work tree alone. This is a second command family in git_status.py, not the probe, and the probe's own contract above is unchanged.

Four read-only subcommands, each behind -c core.fsmonitor= -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null --no-optional-locks, through the same resolved executable and scrubbed environment as the probe:

• rev-parse --show-toplevel, in the session's directory;
• rev-list -1 --first-parent --before=<ISO date in UTC> HEAD, in the toplevel;
• ls-tree -l -z <commit> -- <names>, naming at most the seven declaring files;
• cat-file blob <id>, for each regular file of at most 256 KiB that the listing returned.

Every argument is a constant, an object id the module checked as hex, or a name that matched a closed pattern, and the environment sets GIT_NO_REPLACE_OBJECTS=1, so a replace ref cannot swap a blob for the bytes the work tree now holds. None reads the index, runs a filter or an fsmonitor, or writes. Measured 2026-10-27: --before=<digits> is not a timestamp (git matched a commit newer than the bound), which is why the date is written out. One five second deadline covers all four, and a failure means no declarations, never a guess.

What bounds the content: only the toplevel of the work tree the session began in; a link or special file in the commit's tree is refused by its mode, and one in the work tree by lstat before any open, which is non-blocking and refuses a link, so a FIFO cannot block the read; the work-tree file must equal the commit's blob for the declaration in question, one script, target or recipe at a time, so a session that rewrote a script's body leaves that script a command while an unrelated later edit, a dependency bump, leaves the others alone (a package.json keeps its scripts through a change to its dependencies, version or other publishing fields, and loses them all through a change to tool configuration such as jest or eslintConfig; a Makefile or justfile loses every declaration through any change outside its recipes, such as an assignment, export or .IGNORE), and a cached read is checked against the work tree again before it is used; a recorded write by a write tool withdraws that kind of file even if the session restored it. make reads the first of GNUmakefile, makefile and Makefile, and so does this read. A file over the cap, with more than 5,000 lines, with a line over 4,096 characters, with more than 500 scripts, that does not parse, or that is a Makefile using include, conditionals, define, .ONESHELL or a custom SHELL adds nothing, and --diagnose lists it by path and a closed reason. The commit is the newest first-parent commit of HEAD no newer than the transcript's first record, since Compass does not record the commit a session began on. Workflow run: steps are not read.

Nothing read from these files leaves the machine. The script bodies are never published, shown or sent; what is published is the session's own command line, masked and clipped as any check's is, which the vendor rule of the command ruling already covers. --no-git stops the read, and the scripts read as commands again. The residuals are the probe's: a repository can carry configuration of its own, and an edit made by a shell command and put back before the session ended is the one change neither the recorded write nor the comparison sees. One more is accepted. The base commit is the newest one whose commit date is no later than the session's first record, so a backdated GIT_COMMITTER_DATE can make a script the session wrote look committed. That needs a deliberate act on the reader's machine, and a session that wants a false pass can already type a runner from the closed list, so no skew check between author and committer dates is made: a rebase makes the same skew honestly. The ruling and the one before it hold the rest.

A reader can list commands that are checks for a project, in one file in the Compass home, compass-project-checks.json. It is a plain file read to a 64 KiB cap, the way the other stores are, and nothing is run to read it. The agent can write files in a repository, and a listing makes a command count as evidence, so a .compass folder inside a repository is never read. A recorded write by the session to a file of that name withdraws the listing for that session, and the page says so. So does a shell command that names the file and is not only a read of it: a redirect, a cp, a tee, or an interpreter's code, including code sent to it through a heredoc, a here-string or a pipe. A cat, grep, head or wc of it does not, nor does a pure viewer such as jq, and neither does running a listed script. A listed script follows the same rule. What this does not see is a write that builds the path indirectly, through a script or a variable. A listed script named by a relative path counts only from the project's root and only when the session did not write it. An entry that is a shell builtin, cannot fail, only reads, writes files or is not one plain command never counts, so a listing cannot turn echo ok into a pass. Nothing read from the file leaves the machine; the session's own command line is published as any check's is. The rulings, the listing and what counts as a write, hold the rest.

One feature asks the operating system to put a window in front of the operator. Compass already knows where each session runs; when the reader clicks through to a session that is waiting on them, the server runs one bounded command that raises that session's terminal, so the hunt across tabs ends in one move.

The command is a literal argv per named case, or there is no focus. A session matching no named case is not focused, and the reader is told that rather than shown a control that does nothing.

Each argv is constant except for its target fields, and every one of those is substituted into a fixed position rather than concatenated. No shell, no interpolation, and nothing from a request body reaches any position. The tmux case carries three such fields, not one, and the grammars section below states each one separately. Every command runs with stdin closed and under a timeout. A failure is reported to the reader as a focus that did not happen, and never retried.

No working directory is set. The command does not run inside the user's repository, which is what keeps Scope's repository-execution sentence meaningful rather than sidestepped.

Two arrangements are candidates today, because identification was measured for exactly two: a session in a bare macOS Terminal.app tab, and a session in a tmux pane. The identifier differs by harness even within one arrangement. A Codex hook keeps the controlling terminal and reads it directly; a Claude hook does not, because its stdin is the payload pipe, so the device has to be read one level up off the harness process. In a pane neither works and tmux's own client device is what finds the window.

One arrangement is now a named case and the other is not, and the difference is what was run. The socket-raise capture recorded that switch-client on a named socket moved the client it was told to, with a negative control that held still recorded first. So the tmux socket case is named, and it is what ships. The Apple Event case is not. The probe ran its arms and the one that decides it, a daemon whose launching window has been quit, came back inconclusive: it moved a tab but its two responsible-identity fields were null, so the record cannot say who issued the raise. Until that is answered no Apple Event case may be named, and the paragraph below is why the bar is set there.

This is the part most easily read too generously. The identification capture measured which identifier finds a terminal. It did not raise one. The capture says so in its own words: the lookup counts a tab and never activates one. So a raise command becomes a named case only once it has been run and recorded, one case per platform, per multiplexer and per harness where they differ, the way Usage quota reads requires a vendor's endpoint to be named before it ships. A section listing commands nobody has run would repeat the failure of documenting bounds the code will not accept.

A tmux raise is two commands in two mechanisms, and the section admits that rather than hiding it. Selecting the pane is socket IPC to the tmux server; bringing the window that hosts the client to the front is an Apple Event to the emulator. They fail independently, and the first is worth shipping without the second: a selected pane in a client the operator then switches to by hand is the whole value on a machine where the terminal is already visible. What the section forbids is reporting the second as done when only the first ran.

The two mechanisms carry very different permission costs, and the difference is measured. The socket path needs no operating-system permission at all. The Apple Event path is checked against the Automation privacy permission, which macOS attributes to the responsible process rather than the caller. Measured on the running daemon: after a double fork, a setsid, and three days re-parented to launchd, its responsible process is still the Terminal window that launched it. So the sixteen successful osascript calls recorded in the identification capture are that application automating itself while its launcher is alive, which is an exemption rather than a grant.

The launcher outliving the daemon is not the shipping case; the daemon exists to outlive it. What happens then is unmeasured, and the failure it risks is silent: an unbundled, ad-hoc-signed interpreter carries no usage description, so a refused Apple Event returns an error the operator never sees and cannot grant from the Automation pane. No Apple Event case may be named until that arm has been run, and the socket case is not blocked behind it.

Linux and Windows are unmeasured, and the capture records them that way. Earlier desk research suggested Wayland may not permit a background process to raise a window at all, and that Windows Terminal has no documented way to focus a tab. That is research rather than measurement and this document does not rely on it: both are simply not named cases, and either becomes one the same way the macOS cases do, by being run and recorded.

Not a named case means no target is recorded there, and that is enforced where the target is stored rather than left to the raise to discover. The device grammar below anchors /dev/ and admits no separator after it, so it refuses /dev/pts/N, which is the client device of every terminal emulator, every ssh session and every mux-inside-mux client on Linux and the BSDs. A run that recorded targets there would publish a focusable control for the ordinary Linux case and spend two subprocesses answering false every time it was clicked, which is precisely what "A session matching no named case is not focused, and the reader is told that rather than shown a control that does nothing" forbids. So recording is gated on the platform the case was measured on, and focusable is false on every other one. iTerm2 is unmeasured for the plainest reason, that it is not installed on the machine that took the capture.

The target is a record shaped by its named case, not a single string, and each field carries its own grammar. The first draft of this document required every target to match ^[A-Za-z0-9._-]{1,128}$, the grammar GET /api/observe applies to a harness key and a session id. That was wrong in a way that mattered: a tmux pane id is %3, and % is not in that class. The one case needing no operating-system permission could not have shipped under it, and re-adding the % in the argv builder is exactly the concatenation the previous section forbids.

So the grammars are per field, and each is as narrow as its field allows:

Every field is substituted into a fixed argv position and never concatenated, and a field failing its grammar is not a raise.

Each grammar refuses a leading dash in its own first character class rather than in a sentence beside it, and that wording is the lesson of a reproduced command-injection defect. An earlier version shipped ^[A-Za-z0-9._-]{1,64}$, whose class contains a dash with nothing anchoring position 0, and review reproduced a poisoned transcript filename turning a copied command into one that disables a harness's permission checks. The first draft of this table repeated the same shape twice, and it was caught only by running the patterns against the values the table claimed they refused. A raise puts that class of value in an argv position rather than on a clipboard, so a prose promise that the grammar does not keep is worse here than nowhere.

The device grammar anchors the literal /dev/ prefix rather than allowing a path and checking it afterwards, so traversal is refused by the shape rather than by a later resolve: no member of the class after the prefix is a separator, and a leading dot is refused, which is what excludes /dev/...

Where a platform path builds a script rather than an argv, the field passes through the same escaping the native notifier applies, and its grammar still runs first. That is an escaping precedent and not a permission one, and the difference decides what may be claimed. notifications.notify_mac runs display notification, a StandardAdditions command with no tell application block, so it is never checked against the Automation privacy permission. A macOS focus case would be the first Automation-checked call in this codebase, not the second, and nothing about the notifier working says a raise will.

The record is derived from a session Compass observed, and reaches the runtime through an authenticated event rather than through the focus request. That is the honest statement, and it is narrower than the first draft's "never taken from a request body": on the only measured path the identity arrives in a hook POST to /api/events/<harness>, which is a request body, from a process Compass does not control. What bounds it is the capability on that route, which holds a forger to the same operating-system user. The focus request itself names a session and never a target.

Two measured facts make this a bound rather than an implementation note.

The device is not known to hold still. The identification capture's verdict field is named identifier_shape_held_still and claims exactly that: two devices mask to the same shape, so the capture establishes that the readings agree and deliberately leaves unmade the claim that the device itself stayed put. The case where it demonstrably moves is tmux, where detaching and reattaching from another tab moves the client device inside one session. So a target is resolved at the moment of the raise and never cached across a session's life.

A device does not identify one window. macOS recycles the device, and the capture caught it: in one arm three Terminal tabs matched a single device with one of them busy, because finished tabs still held a device macOS had handed out again. A lookup returning more than one live candidate is ambiguous, and an ambiguous lookup does not raise. Picking one would be the same failure as the naive readings below, arrived at from the other direction.

A session with more than one attached client is refused. This is the third decline rule and the one no lookup prevents: a target can be correctly resolved, unambiguous, and the only live candidate, and raising it still takes the view away from every other client attached to that session. On a real machine that is another person, or another agent. The rule is therefore about who else is watching rather than about whether the target was found, which is why it sits beside the ambiguity bound and not inside it.

Refusing is the operator's ruling of 2026-09-06, taken over the alternative of raising anyway and disclosing it on the control. The reasoning recorded with it: a reader often cannot know who else is attached, and a disclosure they clicked past is not consent from the person whose view moved. The cost is that the shared-session case is not served at all, and the section says so rather than leaving a reader to discover it.

The rule is decided on one command and enforced by the next, and the gap between them is named rather than narrowed. list-clients answers, the count is decided, and switch-client is spawned about six milliseconds later: measured at a 6.1 ms median and a 7.4 ms maximum over ten runs, that being server-side client spawn rather than the 0.05 ms of Python between them. A client attaching inside that window is raised anyway. tmux offers no conditional switch, and closing the gap would mean a fourth command (a server-side if-shell -F '#{session_attached}'), which the "a command other than one of the named cases" clause forbids outright. So the bound is stated the way the core.fsmonitor hazard and the Apple Event arm each are, and the violation clause below measures what the lookup reported rather than a state of the world this feature cannot hold still. The worst outcome in that window is another attached client's view moving; nothing is escalated, disclosed or written.

Nothing is typed into a terminal. No keystroke, no text, no newline, by any path. The ask lane's direction invariant is unchanged by this feature, and any implementation reaching for send-keys contradicts it outright.

No harness store is written. No file inside the user's repository is read or written. No native permission prompt is answered, and no agent session's state is altered: the conversation is untouched, no turn is started or stopped, and nothing is typed.

What a socket raise does change is the multiplexer session, and an earlier draft of this document denied it. It read "the window moves, the session does not", which is false of the only mechanism this feature ships. tmux switch-client resolves the pane to its window and moves the tmux session's current window; every client attached to that session displays the change. The socket-raise capture measured it in both positive arms, and reproduced it outside them by steering one client and watching the other follow. The sentence is corrected rather than softened, because the bound below rests on the mechanism being described accurately.

The raise reads nothing back: its standard output is discarded unread, so no pane content, no window title and no pathname enters Compass.

The two lookups that precede it do read, and saying so is the point. The shared-session rule and the ambiguity rule cannot be enforced without asking tmux which session a pane belongs to and which clients are attached to it, so a section forbidding all reading would forbid its own bounds. What those two commands return is bounded, held to the same grammars as any other field before it reaches an argv position, used only to build the next command, and then dropped: none of it is stored, published, logged or echoed to the reader. An earlier draft of this section said output was discarded rather than parsed without qualification, which was false of the mechanism the same document mandates.

The tmux socket case is three commands on the socket the session reported, in this order, or there is no focus:

tmux -L <socket> display-message -p -t <pane> '#{pid} #{session_name}'
tmux -L <socket> list-clients -t <session> -F '#{client_tty}'
tmux -L <socket> switch-client -c <client tty> -t <pane>

The first names the session and the server, and an earlier draft claimed less carefully that it "proves the pane still exists". It proves that a pane with that id exists in whatever server holds that socket name now, which is not the same pane. A pane id is an ordinal on one tmux server, not a name. Kill the server, start another on the same socket name, and %3 is somebody else's pane in somebody else's session: reproduced on tmux 3.7c, where the second generation re-issued %0 upward and a raise on the stale target moved an attached client onto an unrelated window and reported success. That is the misdirected raise Known and accepted names, arrived at without any lookup failing. So the pid the server reports is compared against the pid that reported the pane, and a mismatch is a decline. It costs no extra command, and it is also what makes a socket name that resolves on a different server of the same user (the hook and the daemon need not share a TMUX_TMPDIR) a decline rather than a raise on that server's pane.

The second is what the two decline rules are decided on: no client attached is nobody to raise for, and more than one is the shared session this document refuses. It is counted by lines, not by values. list-clients prints one line per attached client, and a control-mode client (a tmux -C attach, which is what another agent driving the same session looks like) reports an empty #{client_tty}. A reader that dropped empty lines would count two attached clients as one and raise, which is the shared-session case this document refuses outright. A client the device grammar cannot name is then a separate decline, decided after the count, so such a client is refused rather than invisible. Only the third moves anything.

This section does not claim the command executes nothing but itself, and the reason is recorded rather than assumed. The git probe's contract used to carry the stronger claim, that it "neither writes there nor executes anything the repository supplies", and DEC-11 retracted it because a reproduction falsified both halves: hashing a tracked path whose committed attributes named a filter driver installed four hooks inside the repository and ran the driver, through a path the probe's two flags were never written against. A third flag now closes the write; the invocation is stated as a residual, because no flag closes it. The general lesson is the one this feature most needs. A bounded command can still cause a program to run through a path its bounds never contemplated.

So the honest statement is narrower. A multiplexer and a window manager are programs the operator configured, and what they do when asked to raise a window is theirs. That is the same trust already extended by running them, and it is the core.fsmonitor hazard in smaller form. Naming it is what keeps this section from inheriting an optimism that has already been shown to be wrong once.

The operator's own action, and nothing else. The route is a POST carrying a per-run capability, so a document navigation cannot take this path and a local process without the token cannot either.

The capability is minted for this feature and delivered to the page, and saying so is the point. The first draft said the route carries "the per-run capability POST /api/events/<harness> uses", and that was unsatisfiable by the caller the same sentence names: nothing under compass_runtime/web/ knows about tokens, the page makes two fetch calls and one EventSource with no header among them, and the per-run tokens live only in the state file at mode 0600. It was also the wrong token. The per-harness capabilities are derived per harness, so the token that would focus a Claude session is byte-identical to the one POST /api/events/claude accepts, which is the power to forge that harness's lifecycle state. Handing the browser that token to raise a window would be a strictly worse trade than the raise is worth.

So focus gets its own consumer key, and it is delivered by injecting it into the served document where the page bytes are handed to the server rather than by baking it into an asset. That seam matters: the page's bytes are verified against react.integrity.json at load, and a token in an asset would break that check and make them non-deterministic. Injecting after the load leaves the verified bytes untouched.

Both halves of that matter and neither is decoration. A GET would repeat a gap this repository has already been bitten by: an attacker page that gets the browser to open a Compass URL in a tab reads nothing back, and the "a cross-origin document cannot be read" reasoning does not cover the side effect. On the quota fetch that side effect was a credential read. Here it would be a window appearing on the operator's desk.

What the capability separates, stated exactly, because the first draft claimed more than it buys. Loopback is not a per-user boundary, and the token rides in the served document: any other account on the machine can GET / and lift it, so against that account this route stands where /api/dismiss does. What the capability actually separates is a page from a document navigation and from a local process that never fetched the board. The absence of per-user isolation is a documented exposure of the whole server rather than something this feature introduces or repairs, and Known and accepted below says so in the same words.

A rate ceiling and an in-flight gate, so a repeated or looped request cannot repeat the raise. The route's check order is deliberately not the one POST /api/events/<harness> uses, and the difference is the security property rather than an inconsistency. That route answers an unsupported harness with a 404 before consulting the capability, because a harness name is public. A session id is not. So here the capability is checked first, then the ceiling, and the session is looked up last: to a caller without the token a live session and one that never existed are byte-identical 403s, and the route is not an oracle for which sessions the board holds. The focus route emits no 404 on any path: an unsupported session is the same 200 {"focused": false} as any other unfocusable one, and the feature being off is a 503 rather than a 404 because it is a run-wide fact that leaks nothing about any session, where a 404 would read as a build too old to have the route.

The ceiling is claimed after the body is read rather than before it. The body read is blocking and carries no socket timeout, so claiming a process-wide one-slot gate ahead of it let a peer that sent a length and then nothing hold focus shut for as long as it kept the socket open. Nothing in the body distinguishes one session from another, so reading it first adds no oracle, and the gate still precedes the raise, which is what "cannot repeat the raise" asks for.

The response is a single boolean saying whether a focus happened: true only when the raise command itself exited zero, and false alike for a raise that was attempted and failed and for one that was never attempted at all, so a declined lookup and an unknown session are indistinguishable from a failed command. No target identifier, no pathname and no window title is echoed. Nothing is written to disk by this feature, and nothing leaves the machine.

--no-focus, and one other flag turns it off as a side effect. The capability comes from the observation coordinator, which does not exist under --no-events, so that flag disables focus too. A reader of this line would not otherwise have that fact, and a feature with an undocumented second off switch is one nobody can reason about.

The flag disables the feature for a run, and it mirrors --no-git at every one of that flag's sites, including the branch that forwards flags to a respawned daemon, so a restart cannot re-enable a focus command the operator disabled. With the feature off no command runs at all and the control does not render.

The Claude Code CLI that Compass starts for a reading, a summary or the Live monitor is told not to persist a session, but it keeps its own local state under ~/.claude, which Compass neither writes nor prunes and has not measured. A press passes redacted session text through it once. The Live monitor passes the recent window through it about once a minute for as long as the switch is on and the session is viewed, so the same exposure repeats at that cadence. It is accepted rather than solved, because the CLI's own storage is outside what Compass controls, and the switch, Pause model calls and the 20-minute question are what bound how long it repeats. The Live monitor owns the rest.

A row's attribution is unverified, as the ask lane's already is. A forged registration cannot make a window appear, because the target comes from a collector rather than from a request, but a reader who clicks is trusting a row Compass measured rather than one a session proved.

Raising a window is the first thing Compass does that it cannot undo and that is visible outside Compass. A raise that lands on the wrong window puts a keyboard in front of a session the operator did not mean to reach. The identification capture measured how that happens: for a session with no controlling terminal at all, both obvious readings report a terminal, and it belongs to somebody else. So a lookup that cannot identify a terminal must decline rather than fall back, and "the first ancestor with a tty" and "an emulator variable is set" are both named here as refused readings.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: a command other than one of the named cases, a field reaching an argv position without passing its own grammar, any field beginning with a dash, a target field concatenated into an argument rather than substituted into a fixed position, an Apple Event case named before its arm has been run, a raise reported as done when only the socket half of it ran, a keystroke sent into any terminal by any path, output read back or published, a working directory set on the command, a focus triggered by anything but an authorized operator action, a focus while the feature is off, a respawned daemon that re-enables it, a target resolved once and reused rather than resolved at the raise, a raise on a lookup that returned no terminal or more than one live candidate, a raise on a lookup that reported more than one attached client, or any read or write inside the user's repository.

The quota feature sends credentials but no session content. When the usage feature is on, the server polls each supported vendor's usage endpoint so the dashboard can show quota windows: how much of the 5-hour and weekly limits is used and when they reset, or for a vendor that meters spend rather than requests, how much of the monthly billing period's allowance is used and when the cycle ends.

What is sent: the vendor's own OAuth access token, read from where the harness keeps it (the macOS Keychain, or the harness's credential file on other platforms), carried in the request's authorization header. Nothing else. No transcript content, no prompts, no paths, no project names, no machine identifiers. What comes back is quota numbers: window utilization, reset times, and per-limit entries. Session data never appears in either direction.

The endpoints, named exactly:

1. Anthropic (Claude Code, and any harness signed in with the same Claude subscription): GET https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage with the anthropic-beta: oauth-2025-04-20 header.
2. Cursor: POST https://api2.cursor.sh/aiserver.v1.DashboardService/GetCurrentPeriodUsage with an empty JSON body and two headers, the bearer authorization and Content-Type: application/json. This is the RPC the Cursor CLI itself calls for its own /usage command, against the backend the CLI's config records. The credential is the session token in the macOS Keychain under the service name cursor-access-token. Read this next part before trusting the name: Cursor stores the identical value under cursor-refresh-token, so unlike Claude's quota-scoped token this one can also mint new sessions. Compass sends it as a bearer token and never exchanges it, and the never-refreshed rule below is what keeps that true. macOS only, because that is the only platform where the token's location has been verified; elsewhere Cursor is absent from the band rather than read from a guessed path.
3. Codex: no endpoint. Codex writes rate-limit snapshots into its own session files, and Compass reads them from disk like every other store.
4. Copilot: no endpoint. Copilot records its own per-request AI Unit consumption in a local session store, and Compass reads that from disk. Its remaining entitlement is not published locally and is not fetched.

No other vendor is polled. A new vendor's endpoint must be named here before it ships. These endpoints are not documented for third-party use: a vendor can change, break, or block them at any time, and a failed poll means an empty tile, never a retry storm.

Token handling is read-only, one way, and never expands:

• The token is never refreshed. Refreshing from outside the harness can race the harness for its own session. A token the harness would refresh by itself, or one a vendor refuses, switches that vendor's usage display off and says which of the two happened; the remedy always belongs to the harness. This rule is what bounds the Cursor credential noted above: a value that could mint sessions is only ever presented as a bearer token, so the extra capability is never exercised.
• The token is never written to disk, never logged, and never served. /api/data and every other loopback endpoint must not carry it, in any form.
• Reading the token adds no write access anywhere. Harness stores stay read-only.

Consent and the off switch: the feature is on until the reader turns it off, and the line saying so is on screen whenever it can act. Wherever the quota windows are drawn, on Session operations below the session groups and in the Console rail, one line says the quota is read with the Claude Code and Cursor logins on this machine and that no session content is sent, beside a Turn off button. Turned off, the line says so and offers Turn on. --no-usage disables the feature for a run regardless of the stored setting. With the feature off, Compass's network surface is exactly the three loopback-bound kinds of component described above, and nothing is fetched.

Amended 2026-10-27 (owner): on until turned off. The page now adds usage=1 to every request unless the stored answer is declined, so an unanswered page, an unrecognisable stored value and storage the browser will not read all fetch. The four-sentence question that used to stand before the first fetch is gone; the one line above replaces it. Nothing else in this section moved: what is sent, the endpoints, the token handling, the five-minute floor, the server's refusal of the parameter on a document navigation, and --no-usage are unchanged. The paragraph below records the rule this replaced.

Answered, not assumed, a change of 2026-09-04, replaced 2026-10-27 by the amendment above. The mechanism is the usage=1 parameter: the server fires the fetch for no request that omits it, and the page adds it only while the stored answer is granted. So an unanswered disclosure reads no credential and makes no request, and neither does a declined one, and an unrecognisable stored value counts as unanswered. The server enforces its own half rather than trusting the page: it ignores the parameter on a document navigation, so a cross-site link that opens /api/data?usage=1 in a tab is served the body and arms nothing. That check is what makes the sentence above a property of the system and not only of the page's URL builder. This paragraph previously described the banner as shipped when the page had no banner, no configure control and no stored setting at all: the next-UI promotion had dropped them, the page consequently sent the parameter never, and nothing failed because nothing bound this paragraph to the page. The promise was true only because the feature never acted. Restoring the surface and making the page ask, in that order, repaired it. frontend/src/capacity/UsageConsent.test.tsx and frontend/src/api/bootstrap.test.ts bind the builder and the mount, and test_quota.NoFetchWithoutConsentTest binds the server's refusal, so neither half can go missing again without a red test.

Polling posture: responses are cached, and at most one request per vendor is made every five minutes. No polling happens while no dashboard page is connected. --diagnose never triggers a fetch; its output stays a report of local paths only.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: a request carrying anything beyond the token, a token reaching a log or a loopback response, a refresh attempt, an unlisted endpoint, or a fetch with the feature off.

Not every harness needs that request. One publishes its own quota to a user-configured command: Antigravity pipes a state payload, including a quota object, to whatever its status-line setting names, and a user who points that at POST /api/usage gets the same display with no credential read and no outbound request at all. That payload also carries an account email and a transcript path, so the receipt is never stored or served as it arrived: only the derived window percentages and reset times are kept, built into a fresh record field by field. --no-usage stops this too: the quota fields are dropped before storage, so nothing is retained and nothing reaches the band, and the request still succeeds so a status line never sees an error. The dashboard's own switch is narrower, and deliberately so. It governs the outbound fetch and the display, which is all it can govern for a harness that publishes its quota locally: with it off, a pushed receipt is still kept and still served on the loopback port, exactly as a disk-read tile (Codex, Copilot) is. Withdrawing retention for a run is what --no-usage is for.

Compass was built to sit outside harness usage: it watched, and it spent nothing. DEC-14 changed that on 2026-09-04, because several of the answers the dashboard most wants to give cannot be derived from a transcript by rule (whether a quiet session died or finished, what happened while the operator was away, what a session's actual goal is rather than its opening instruction), and each of those shipped withholding its answer instead. Compass may now ask a harness a bounded question and consume a little of the operator's own capacity doing it.

The observer model is the first implementation of this pathway, deriving a session's goal line, and the reading lane is the second, reading a session against the words the reader saved against it. The Claude Code reading producer is the third: built behind its own gate, which the owner's acceptance opened on 2026-10-02 without a passing check. Each has its own entry below naming what it sends, what it asks, and what it caps. Future harness callers need their own entry.

What makes this different from every other boundary in this document: it is the only one that sends the operator's own words off this machine. The quota poll carries a token and numbers. A harness invocation carries session-derived text, which is why invariant 1 names it separately rather than widening the quota exception to cover it. The consent below is not the quota fetch's: a call a reader's action starts runs only on that action, and an unasked check runs only under --unasked-readings and DEC-18's preconditions. Every kind of call announces itself the first time it runs. Pause model calls stops readings, goal summaries and session summaries; Turn off summaries stops session summaries alone. --no-observer-model refuses all of them for the run, where --no-usage is a startup flag alone.

The bounds, all of which hold together:

• Opt-out, with a notice, for a call a reader's action starts. Ruled 2026-10-19 by the owner (DEC-28); this replaces the former "Opt-in, and off until answered" bound for reader-started calls.
  • What it covers: every model call a reader's action starts, and nothing else. That is a session summary (made when a finished session is opened, or on Update summary), a reader-requested Analyze drift (its consent step goes), Claude Code tool output on such a reading (included by default), and a Codex goal summary (on by default). Such a call runs without a prior question.
  • What it does not cover: unasked drift checks. No reader action starts them, so they stay off by default behind --unasked-readings and DEC-18's preconditions. Codex also requires an explicit grant for the current destination; Claude Code uses the owner's acceptance without a separate grant.
  • The notice. The first call of each kind on this machine shows a non-blocking notice naming what is sent (the words, and tool output where it is included) and to which provider and destination, with a one-press off switch beside it. A changed destination or a wider content tier shows the notice again, naming the new destination, rather than a blocking Allow. It is disclosed this way, and not left silent like the quota fetch, for a stronger reason: this one spends their capacity rather than reading a number.
  • The master switch. Pause model calls stops Analyze drift, goal summaries and session summaries until Resume model calls. Compass stops sending session text to Claude Code or Codex, so it uses none of your tokens, and stays paused until you resume. An answer of off already stored is kept across upgrades. A running summary stops at its next part and a spawned call is cancelled. Turn off summaries affects session summaries alone. While paused, that control stays visible and disabled with "Model calls are paused" beside it. Pause and Resume never change the stored summaries answer; resuming restores the switch exactly as the reader left it. --no-observer-model still refuses every model call. --allow-tool-output and --observer-model are accepted no-ops for one release.
• Goal summaries are on by default. The browser still sends observer_model=1 on the focused refresh that the reader starts; a document navigation never authorizes a call. Quota consent does not authorize sending transcripts. This parameter is not per-user authentication: a local process can imitate it. The per-session in-flight gate and prompt and time bounds limit that exposure. Pause model calls stops goal summaries too. No per-run event capability is implemented on this route. Goal calls are not charged to the 100-attempt rolling cap below and have no rolling cap of their own: what bounds them is one call in flight per session, the refresh guards, and a focused refresh reaching only its session and up to three active child sessions.
• The operator's own harness, never a Compass credential. Compass invokes the harness the operator has already installed and signed in, non-interactively. It holds no API key, reads no new secret, and adds no endpoint to the list in Usage quota reads. Nothing about token handling changes, because there is no new token. A future feature that wanted to call a vendor API directly would be a different decision needing its own endpoint entry there.
• Redacted before it leaves, and bounded after. What is sent is prompt-derived text, so it goes through records.redact_secrets first and the bound second, the same order and for the same reason Published text gives. A key pasted into a prompt must not be handed to a subprocess any more than it may be published to the page.
• One bounded question. The generated prompt has a byte cap and the subprocess has a timeout. Codex is invoked ephemerally with user configuration and rules ignored, in a read-only sandbox. Explicit CLI overrides disable shell execution, hooks, plugins, apps, subagents, browser and computer tools, image generation, web search, and automatic project/skill instructions. These flags are not a proof of an empty tool set across Codex versions. The installed CLI and its provider remain a trust boundary; live tool suppression and provider retention are not verified by the dashboard's tests. Claude Code has no read-only sandbox to invoke, so its reading call is bounded by CLI flags alone; its own entry lists them.
• Visible spend. Model metadata records whether a call ran or was refused. Provider token usage is not measured by this prototype; it must not present a zero cost as if it had measured one.
• Off switch. --no-observer-model disables calls for a run regardless of consent and overrides the default-on goal summaries and session summaries. --observer-model is an accepted no-op for one release. --no-harness-usage is an alias for that rollback. The explicit off state survives daemon respawn. The off switch refuses the unasked lane as well: with it set, --unasked-readings attaches no lane, starts no reading, and the page reports the lane off.

A violation of any of those is a security bug: an invocation with the setting off, an invocation with the Codex grant unanswered for an unasked check, a reader-started call whose first run of its kind shows no notice, an invocation carrying unredacted text, a credential read that this section does not name, tool access beyond the documented CLI boundary, or an unbounded or untimed call.

What is accepted rather than solved: the invoked harness is another program with its own logging and its own retention, and what it does with a prompt is outside Compass's control. That is the same trust the operator already extends to that harness by running it, but it is a real transfer and it is stated here rather than implied.

The first Analyze drift press runs and shows a non-blocking notice naming the provider, destination and content sent, including the agent's words and tool output where included. No prior Allow is needed. A notice is recorded per kind and provider on this machine; a new destination, a wider content tier or a tool-output destination the last notice did not name shows it again, and a narrower press to the same destination does not. Goal summaries use the same notice mechanism and are on by default on a focused refresh carrying observer_model=1.

The answer and notices live under COMPASS_HOME (by default ~/.compass) in compass-reading-permission.sqlite3, shared by tabs and respawned daemons. Pause model calls and --forget store an explicit off, block readings, goal summaries and session summaries, and clear their notices, so after --forget they stay paused until Resume model calls. Resuming shows the notice again on the next call. An off saved by an older build stays off after upgrade; an old Allow reads as on, including an older build's Allow given after its own off, which left that off's other rows in place. --no-observer-model refuses every model call for the run.

The same SQLite store holds the independent summary answer and ledger described under Session summary calls, that reading answer, notice rows (kind, provider, destination, content tier, tool-output destination and time), model-attempt timestamps and, for 30 days, the random id of the job each attempt was charged to, never session ids or content. A transaction reserves one of 100 reader-requested attempts in a rolling twenty-four hours before the model starts. Eligibility checks and a known missing CLI spend nothing; a failed or timed-out attempt keeps its reservation because the provider may already have spent capacity. Concurrent processes share the transaction bound. A denied or corrupt store fails closed. The page reports the cap, once it is spent, and the earliest time another attempt can be admitted. Turning permission off, back on, or forgetting it does not erase unexpired spend timestamps or refill the budget.

The store is created owner-only; SQLite is required for this permission path. Every reader-started model call (Analyze drift, goal summaries and session summaries) records its notice there, so without sqlite3 or a writable state directory each is refused as store-unavailable. Deleting the file manually can reset its budget, as can any other modification by the owning local user. The cap bounds requests through the HTTP route, not a hostile owner editing their own files.

Legacy explicit Allows remain per provider, bound to the disclosed destination and content tier. An explicit Allow covers every session routed to that provider. They govern Codex unasked checks, which require a stored words-only Allow covering today's destination. The Drift card's "Allow Codex to run unasked checks" toggle deliberately writes or revokes it through a separate unasked_grant body on POST /api/reading. It requires the startup flag, a current provider and destination, a loopback non-navigation press, and refuses while paused (409 with model-calls-paused, the pause kept) or under --no-observer-model (503). It adds no route. Revocation deletes coverage without pausing requested readings. Analyze, an older page's allow: true, and Resume never write it. Pause followed by Resume clears it. Claude Code unasked checks use the owner's acceptance and need no separate stored grant. The board's providers, words, rebind and tool_output retain their explicit-coverage meaning; reader-started calls use the off switch and notices instead.

The destination is resolved again at a reading job's reservation. If it moved after the press, the job refuses destination-changed before spending or sending. The CLI reads its own settings again at launch, so a change between reservation and launch is not caught. A changed destination between presses runs with a new notice. An explicit allow: true press still binds the destination it names: a stale destination answers 409 destination-changed, and an absent words_destination answers 400 page-outdated without recording an Allow.

An unnamed destination is "": two endpoints Compass cannot name are indistinguishable, so their move cannot trigger a new notice. This includes every Windows destination and every Codex base URL under OPENAI_BASE_URL or OPENAI_API_BASE. An unnamed legacy Allow keeps covering every endpoint it cannot name, including every destination on Windows. Tool output is not sent where its destination is unnamed. Pause model calls and --forget revoke all providers; schema triggers also clear notices, other provider answers and grants when an older build writes its legacy off. The 100-attempt cap is shared between providers and reports daily-cap when spent.

Which provider a press reaches is decided before the press, by reading_route.resolve, from the session's harness and this machine. The page shows that route's disclosure, naming the receiver, its vendor and whose capacity is spent. The route resolves the provider again from the payload's harness. If the provider the page named is no longer the one that would run, it answers 409 and writes no consent and reserves nothing; if no provider can read the session, it answers 503 with the reason. One model runs per press. If its CLI is missing at launch, or the call fails, no other provider is tried.

A press names the revision its page drew. The route checks it against the annotation store read from disk under the store's lock, not this process's copy, before the route, any Allow write and the job, and checks the entry it hands the job again the same way. A save another dashboard on the same home made in between, or one landing between the check and the job, answers 409 revision-changed, so the model never reads words the page did not show.

Goal summaries are on by default unless model calls are paused or --no-observer-model is supplied. observer.CodexGoalModel sends a generated prompt to the installed Codex CLI, which uses its own authentication to reach OpenAI. reading.CodexReadingModel is the second caller and goes through the same observer.codex_exec, so the two share one set of sandbox flags rather than two that could drift. These are the paths that can send session content off the machine. A reading of a Claude Code session is made by Claude Code when claude is on the server's PATH, and by Codex when it is not: Codex then spends the operator's Codex capacity and sends that session's evidence to OpenAI, and the disclosure before the press says which. A reader-requested reading requires the remembered answer and rolling budget above; an unasked reading requires --unasked-readings. --no-observer-model always wins over both. The Live monitor is a third reader-started path, to Claude Code and on to Haiku only; The Live monitor states what it sends and every way it stops.

Two requests can reach the model. A focused /api/project-context refresh can summarize the focused session and up to three active children whose assignment is unavailable. POST /api/reading reads one annotated session against the words typed against it, and it sends those words as well as the session's evidence, which is why it carries a disclosure of its own rather than reusing the observer's. The evidence includes the reader's own messages in the session's record, and since 2026-10-01 each is sent whole rather than as its first sentence where the prompt has room (the newest first, within half the prompt; the rest go by their first sentence): collapsed to one line, redacted by records.safe_text, and cut at 1,000 characters (project_context.READER_WORDS_CAP_CHARS, held again by the ledger's reading.LEDGER_WORDS_CAP_CHARS), inside the press's prompt bound (below). That sends more of what the reader typed than the first sentence did, including any private prose in a later sentence that redaction does not recognize. The owner accepted that, because a first sentence dropped the point of a measured correction (the amendment). A goal adopted from one of those messages is sent as that message's whole field too, from the same half, in place of the goal box's 1,000 characters; the goal stored and shown stays the excerpt (the amendment). The owner, approving the Analyze drift plan, amended the source lookup on 2026-10-04. A reader's press can find that adopted source outside the recent transcript tail: a forward scan reads at most the newest 64 MiB plus the opening 32 MiB under one two-second clock, and retains at most 4,096 user-message facts. Only the adopted source can replace the Goal; the other facts do not enter the reading's evidence ledger. The runtime caches the redacted, 1,000-character fields in memory for at most eight transcripts on its default arm, keyed by path, harness, session, size and modification time. A reader's press uses the uncached arm that masks raw separators first. Neither arm writes or publishes the words. The adopted-goal lookup does not run for a typed goal or an unasked reading. The same owner amendment also lets a Claude Code or Codex press recover words for listed person messages in the reading window, through its observed stop, from the latest 32 MiB of the parent transcript. That uncached lookup verifies each fact id and timestamp and refuses conflicting raw-content fingerprints or a file changed since collection. A missing or unverifiable source keeps its listed title. It adds no fact id, stores no words and does not run for an unasked reading. The history and listing bounds still hold; this is not a whole-transcript evidence ledger. Other harnesses keep their existing in-tail words. Since 2026-10-21 the reader's own messages include two Claude Code records that carry no user turn: a message the reader sent while the agent worked, and the reader's answer to the agent's multiple-choice question (the amendment). Both are sent as any other reader message is: whole, redacted by records.safe_text, at most 1,000 characters, inside the press's prompt bound, and never stored or published. An answer is its question's one-word header (the agent's label), the answer and any note the reader attached. The question's text and every option's preview, which are the agent's words, are not read as the reader's. This sends more of what the reader typed than before, and sends the answer a reader chose from the agent's options, which is why it is said here; the disclosure's "your messages" is unchanged because the kind of thing sent is. A pasted image in such a message is never read, only its text. The queue these messages arrive through also holds background-task notifications, and only a record whose origin.kind is human is taken. A Claude Code press also reads the focused session's person and agent messages back to the reading's window start instead of from the 400,000-byte tail (2026-10-13, project_context.press_message_events, the amendment). The read is backward and memory-only, under the same allowance as the adopted-source lookup: the newest 64 MiB under one two-second clock, a stamp check that refuses a file changed since the press began, and a stop after sixteen timestamped records in a row older than the window. It keeps the newest settings.analyze_record_events messages and checks (the project page keeps 100), and the closing agent message of up to twelve earlier turns with the reader's message after each, a bounded handful held in memory (2026-10-13, the amendment). A message whose text is over 256 Ki characters is not read and counts as an unread region. The prompt reserves an eighth of its bound (reading.ANCHOR_SHARE_DIVISOR) for those closings ahead of the newest agent messages, and no entry of another kind is displaced. It adds no content class. The messages it finds are the person and agent messages a reading already sends, redacted and capped the same way, for_page still strips both words fields, and nothing is stored or retained after the press. Ordinary collection and every other harness keep the tail, and CONTENT_VERSION is unchanged. The field holding the whole message (reader_words) is held in memory for the reading and is neither stored nor published: the history stores' field allowlists do not name it, and /api/project-context drops it (project_context.for_page), so the page still shows the first sentence and /api/data never carried it. One bounded copy is the exception, by the owner's ruling of 2026-10-01: the focused project context's prompt_choices offers up to five of the reader's own messages for adoption as the goal, each the field clipped to the goal's 1,000 characters, and the rest of the field past that cap is not published (Prompt-derived text, below). The owner raised that bound from 240 on 2026-10-27, so a prompt chosen as the goal is offered whole (the amendment). What the model writes back is a different matter. A reading's detail is the model's own sentence under a cited departure or unfinished-work result, and it is stored with the reading and published on the page, as it was before; the model can now paraphrase or quote a later sentence of a message there, which it could not when it saw only the first. The one copy of the field on disk is an abstention packet's frozen facts, which stay local under ~/.compass with the rest of that packet's prompt text (below).

Amended 2026-10-04 by the owner, approving the Analyze drift plan: "Not reached at this stop" retains a cited unfinished-work explanation at non-final scope. It uses the existing detail field and its scrub and bound; it adds no transcript carrier, source class or model destination. Final readings and claims cannot carry it. The correction copies a fixed unfinished-work sentence, never this model prose. The shape contract owns what the result may say.

The original whole-message path had one redaction limit the first sentence did not. The message was collapsed to one line before it is redacted, so a credential the reader's text broke across a line break becomes two runs. The part before the break is masked only when it is still long enough to match its shape on its own, and the part after it has no prefix to match and is never masked, the same shape-matching residual Published text describes for a control character. Measured on the documented AWS example key and on a GitHub token shape, each split partway through: neither half was masked. Before this change the part after the break was on a later line and never reached a model; it reached the provider. Amended 2026-10-04 by the owner: the reader-requested window lookup now masks raw prose before folding whitespace, including before rendering command arguments. Default callers retain the original path. A message's words are also shared out of the prompt budget rather than taking it: every entry is chosen by its first sentence exactly as before, and the newest messages replace their first sentence with their words only inside half the prompt bound (reading.WORDS_SHARE_DIVISOR), counted in UTF-8 bytes. A message whose words do not fit is sent as its first sentence.

Since 2026-10-03 the agent's own messages are a further class of content a reading sends, by the owner's ruling that what the agent says is evidence (the amendment). On a Claude Code session each top-level assistant text message in the bounded transcript tail is an entry of its own; sidechain and meta records, thinking and tool call blocks, and the CLI's own <synthetic> records are not. Its first sentence is the entry's title, and the whole message, masked as raw prose before it is collapsed to one line, then redacted by records.safe_text and cut at 1,000 characters (project_context.AGENT_WORDS_CAP_CHARS), replaces the title inside a quarter of the prompt bound (reading.AGENT_WORDS_SHARE_DIVISOR), newest first, after the reader's own messages have had their half. Amended 2026-10-04 by the owner: additional selected agent excerpts may use room left after those passes, without dropping an entry or exceeding the prompt bound. Complete bounded records measure the full masked, folded length; a cropped prompt row labels its actual excerpt length and that total. Neither count is inferred for a legacy record. These counts stay in memory and are stripped from page responses with the words. Amended 2026-10-28 by the owner: a press's bounds are the reader's, set on the Settings screen and stored in compass-settings.json (settings). The prompt bound is settings.analyze_prompt_bytes, 512 KiB by default and at most, never under the 16 KiB it was; the messages and checks a press keeps are settings.analyze_record_events, 2,000 by default and never under the project page's 100; the checks and written files it lists are settings.analyze_listed_checks, 1,000 by default and never under the page's 12; and the transcript bytes it scans for them, the session's and its subagents', are settings.analyze_scan_megabytes, 512 MiB by default, never under the board's 8 MiB and never over 1 GiB, because the scan holds what it read in memory until the press ends, about five times the bytes it scanned. The scan reads the same files the board's does (the subagent rule of DEC-23), only further back; on the 18-hour session it read 282 subagent transcripts the board's bound left unread, which is where every builder ran its tests. Measured on an 18-hour session, the old bounds kept 103 of 187 messages and sent each of the agent's messages as one line, and the reading could not tell; the defaults kept all of them. Larger bounds send more of the same content classes to the same destination, so CONTENT_VERSION is unchanged, and every other caller (the unasked lane, goal and session summaries, the project page) keeps its own bound.

That change stayed within the existing content classes, so it left reading_policy.CONTENT_VERSION at 2.

Amended 2026-10-05 by the owner through delegated adversarial acceptance (the amendment): the agent's newest message that its own transcript record marks as ending its turn (message.stop_reason equal to end_turn; text alone, a quiet session or a later timestamp does not establish it) goes whole in place of its 1,000-character excerpt, but only when its complete quoted row fits the agent's quarter of the prompt (4,096 bytes under the old 16 KiB bound, far more under the reader's prompt size), at most 16,384 characters, and the room the reader's words left. It is chosen among the rows the prompt already selected, so no entry, citation number or older or later record is added, and it is read from the same file version the press read its facts from, by a memory-only scan of the complete file, only when it is at most 32 MiB. A larger file cannot prove an earlier conflicting duplicate is absent and keeps its excerpt with a cutoff note. A reply that does not fit, a source that moved, a duplicate or same-time record that disagrees, or a record the source cannot prove final keeps the excerpt, and the reading's cutoff says so. The agent's other messages keep their 1,000 characters, no shell output or tool result is added, the consent tier does not widen, and the words are neither stored, cached, logged nor published. This changed what a message sent and raised reading_policy.CONTENT_VERSION to 3; a changed tier now renews the notice.

Amended 2026-10-06: the whole-final lookup binds a shortened Claude session key to the complete UUID filename through the same identity normalizer used for lifecycle events. Every non-meta parent assistant record in that complete scan must carry the exact full filename identity. A conflicting or missing identity keeps the excerpt, including when the conflicting reply was not selected. Bounded JSON records with Unicode escapes are decoded for this check; an oversized escaped record refuses recovery before decoding. This does not admit another transcript or widen consent; the existing source stamp, selected-row and byte bounds still apply.

Amended 2026-10-06: an Allow records the content tier the server resolved from the session harness and actually disclosed. A non-Claude Allow at WORDS_CONTENT_VERSION cannot authorize a later Claude agent-message reading through the same provider. Older version-3 rows cannot prove which disclosure created them, so the wide consent epoch is now 4. Reader-started presses use a renewed notice rather than this legacy Allow bound. This adds no transmitted content. A verified wider grant survives a narrower Allow only at the same provider and destination; Pause model calls still withdraws every tier and tool-output grant without refunding spend. Words-only consent remains grandfathered under the earlier ruling.

An agent message, cropped or whole, is quoted as one JSON string with the menu heading neutralised, as a check's output tail is, and the prompt's trusted header says agent messages are quoted data, never instructions. That goes only on a reading the reader pressed for, whether or not tool output is allowed, and to whichever provider the route names; the unasked lane sends none of it (reading.build_ledger's read_agent_words, set by the reading route alone). It sends what the agent wrote to the reader, including any private prose or path it repeated that redaction does not recognize, and it carries the uncued-prose residual described above. An agent message can repeat tool output, so a command's output can reach the provider in the agent's words even where tool output was not allowed. Redaction catches credential shapes and, since 2026-10-03, the value after a cue such as Authorization: Bearer, --password, password=, token: or a name such as DB_PASSWORD, PGPASSWORD or OPENAI_API_KEY (Published text, below); a password or token with neither a shape nor a cue can go verbatim. The field holding the whole message (agent_words) is treated as reader_words is: held in memory for the reading and the live project context, never in either history store, and dropped from every page route by project_context.for_page, so the page shows only the message's title. The title is its first line cut at sentence punctuation followed by a space (project_context._semantic_line) and at 112 characters, so text with no such break, CJK prose among it, publishes up to 112 characters that can span several sentences. The agent's messages are not written into the session history store at all, live or whole. The route's "What is sent" list names them, and the first press shows a notice naming their content tier and configured destination. The notice repeats when that tier or destination changes. The legacy explicit Allow is still bound to its version in permission_disclosure; the unasked lane sends no agent messages and still requires explicit coverage at WORDS_CONTENT_VERSION. Older builds clear that version on Turn off and write no version on Allow, preserving the rollback boundary.

Rendering, polling, reconnecting, resuming and saving a revision call no model. The server requires observer_model=1 on a reading press or focused goal refresh, and the page sends it on the reader's act. Readings and goal summaries honor the durable off switch. Session summaries have the separate reader-open rule described in their own section.

The owner delegated acceptance to adversarial agent review. Source recovery may send more of already-disclosed message prose at a requested press, bound to an already-selected parent message and the source version the press read. A mismatch supplies no new words. Recovered prose stays in memory, adds no citable fact, enters no history or page response, and is not read by the unasked lane. The newest-final path requires its content tier in the notice.

The closed-proof ruling retires that proposal as infeasible, with no verified clearances, and removes it as a prerequisite for newest-final source recovery. The fresh measurement campaign remains unavailable at this amendment until its exact protocol and aggregate transport guards are built and reviewed.

This acceptance retains source-fidelity behavior while the expanded-input accuracy gate remains failed and unqualified. Sanitizing, quoting, provenance checks and CI do not establish truth or improve model accuracy. A local process may rewrite stored assessment prose: sanitization and escaping do not authenticate it. The instruction-text guard can reject legitimate quoted text and is a mitigation, not a signature.

Usage is reported in its actual unit. Engineering launch, wall-time and captured-output limits do not bound tokens or remaining subscription usage. A CLI dollar-budget flag is not a conversion to weekly quota. Analyze reservations, qualification allowances and engineering calls remain separate ledgers; calling work a review does not replenish an exhausted or failed study. Only loopback peers can authorize a model call, and cross-origin Fetch Metadata is refused. The response publishes the disclosure and byte cap. The backend does not treat usage=1 as authorization to send transcript content. Goal summaries honor the notice and durable off switch. Console sends observer_model=1 on an explicit focused refresh; no browser consent card is required. The notice names Codex and its configured destination, and Pause model calls or --no-observer-model stops the call. Passive refreshes never carry the request.

Transcript message content is redacted before extraction can clip credential shapes. The complete generated prompt, including workflow stage, then goes through records.redact_secrets again before UTF-8 clipping to 16,384 bytes (16 KiB). This caps the prompt Compass hands to Codex, not the CLI's added protocol or system instructions. Redaction recognizes credential shapes; it does not remove arbitrary private prose. One call per session may be in flight, including concurrent HTTP refreshes, and a reading takes the same one-in-flight gate per session; both slots are released on failure. A goal summary has a 60-second timeout and a reading, pressed or unasked, on either provider, a 180-second one. Every model call, the goal lane's, the unasked lane's and a pressed reading's, runs through supervise.run: the CLI leads a process group of its own (a kill-on-close Job Object on Windows, the child held suspended until it is inside the job), a timeout kills its process group rather than only the direct child, and the daemon's own group is never signalled. The limit on POSIX: a helper that leaves the group, by setsid or setpgid, is not reached; a Job Object has no such exit. The group is signalled only while its leader is unreaped, so its id cannot have been reused by another process, and the call returns only after the child is reaped, so its temporary files are removed after, never under, a live writer. When neither waitid nor kqueue can watch the exit, the call polls, which reaps the leader, so helpers still in its group after a normal exit are not swept; a timeout, a shutdown or a Cancel still kills the group, because each kills before the reap. That has been seen only under forced errors, and a test pins it. On that path a helper still writing after the leader's exit is not reached at all, whether it was already writing under the bound or starts afterwards: the poll that sees the exit is the reap, the caller then removes the file, and the helper's writes to the removed file are bounded by nothing but the disk until the helper exits. Seeing the exit without reaping needs a third watcher, which is the fix the owner ruled documented rather than built. On the watched POSIX path, the runner keeps the leader unreaped while it kills the group and waits for every member to stop, then reaps the leader. It observes group ids and process states through the native /bin/ps -axo pgid=,stat=; it reads no command lines, arguments or environment, and publishes or stores none of the snapshot. Zombies cannot write and count as stopped. The probe runs with only LC_ALL=C in its environment, never a shell or a PATH-selected executable. An unavailable probe, an unreadable snapshot or a group still running at the deadline refuses the call as unstopped, even if the leader exited. On Windows, the runner terminates the Job Object and waits until the kernel's ActiveProcesses count reaches zero before releasing it. Observation and leader reap share the existing five-second bound. A stalled POSIX probe spawn cannot hold the caller beyond it: the probe runs on a daemon thread, and a spawn that finishes after the bound is killed and reaped by that thread. An OS call that never returns can leave that thread pending until the daemon exits. The first failed or timed-out probe ends that call's cleanup, so a call cannot accumulate concurrent probe workers. The native probe was measured on macOS; Linux's native probe and Windows's job query are checked by their platform tests. A POSIX host without this native ps command's fields refuses the call rather than assuming its helpers stopped.

A call's output file is bounded on disk as well as on read: the runner checks its size every 0.01 s while the CLI runs, and once more after its group or Job Object has no live writer. The unwatchable POSIX fallback above still cannot make that guarantee. Past 1 MiB it kills the CLI's group or Job Object as a Cancel does. A reading records a spent oversized attempt; the goal lane falls back as on any failed call and records nothing. The file can exceed 1 MiB by what the CLI writes in one 0.01 s slice, which is bounded by disk speed rather than by the limit, and a write already in flight can finish after the kill: an unpaused writer on an APFS SSD was measured at 41 to 89 MiB before the kill, which landed 11 to 15 ms after the bound was passed (286 to 600 MiB at the earlier 0.1 s slice). The file is removed after the bounded cleanup. A kill whose group has not stopped within five seconds ends the call anyway and is recorded as its own withheld reason, which says the process may still be running. Because a child in its own group no longer receives the terminal's signals, SIGTERM, SIGHUP and SIGQUIT all unwind through the daemon's cleanup, which shuts the runner (a spawn after that point is refused, and a reading not yet sent is refused before it is charged) and kills every supervised group. A SIGHUP or SIGQUIT the server was started ignoring, as nohup ignores SIGHUP, stays ignored; SIGTERM always stops it. A goal call returns at most observer_goal_cap_chars * 4 bytes for a 200-character goal line; a reading returns at most annotation_text_cap_chars * 8 bytes, 1,920 at the shipped value. A failed call falls back to local analysis. No raw model stdout or stderr is served or logged.

An absent or relative shutil.which("codex") result is refused. An absolute installed executable is still trusted code; replacing it as the owning user is outside this boundary.

reading.ClaudeReadingModel calls observer.claude_exec, one bounded claude --print call through the Claude Code CLI the operator has already signed in to. It reaches Anthropic on the operator's own authentication and spends their Claude Code capacity. It is gated, and the owner's acceptance opened the gate on 2026-10-02. annotations.CLAUDE_ABSTENTION_CHECK is accepted, never passed: every scored qualification run failed, from the first to the third continuation, and the acceptance record lists each with its verdict (DEC-21). reading_route selects it for a Claude Code session when an absolute claude is on PATH, and for another harness's session only when codex is not. The unasked lane resolves with Claude Code first on a harness that has no producer of its own (owner, 2026-10-20), and sends through reading_policy.GuardedModel. Goal summaries never invoke it. Outside the runtime, only the qualification scorer and the drift replay check's owner-authorized Analyze tier build one, both through the scorer's verified, pinned copy of the CLI, and a test holds that list. Set back to not-run, the gate is read before the CLI is looked for, so no route, fallback or forged request can invoke it.

The argv, every flag checked against claude --help on 2.1.280, run without a shell:

• --print, with the prompt on stdin and never as an argument.
• --safe-mode: no CLAUDE.md, skills, plugins, hooks, MCP servers, custom commands or agents. This also keeps Compass's own hooks from posting the call to the board as a session.
• --restricted: no code-running built-in tools and no WebFetch, and user, project and local settings files are ignored.
• Both leave admin-managed (policy) settings in force, as claude --help says, so a managed hook or other managed setting still applies. --strict-mcp-config below does cover managed MCP servers.
• --tools "": the built-in tool set is empty.
• --strict-mcp-config --mcp-config '{"mcpServers":{}}': no MCP server from anywhere.
• --disable-slash-commands, --no-chrome, and --no-session-persistence, so no session is saved to disk.
• --permission-mode dontAsk --permission-prompts none: anything that would prompt is denied, and nobody is asked. bypassPermissions and the --dangerously-* flags never appear.
• --output-format text, --model with the explicitly selected admitted model, and --effort high. The model admission amendment owns the selection.
• --system-prompt with one fixed sentence, observer.CLAUDE_READING_SYSTEM_PROMPT, in place of Claude Code's default system prompt (owner ruling, 2026-09-27). Checked on 2.1.283. --append-system-prompt, which would keep the default, never appears.

--bare is not used, because it refuses OAuth sign-in. --json-schema is not used either.

The owner replaced the single Sonnet 5 pin with a Sonnet 5 admission floor. The default request is claude-sonnet-5-5; --claude-reading-model selects another explicit ID. A refused model never falls back to another model or provider. Selecting claude-sonnet-5 explicitly requests the baseline when the account does not admit the default; that selection may also be refused.

The versioned policy admits Sonnet and Opus generation 5 or later, with bounded positive integer version components and an optional valid eight-digit snapshot date. Its generation/minor/family rank gives Sonnet tier 1 and Opus tier 2. This is an owner admission policy, not a measured ordering of accuracy. Haiku has no admitted tier; a larger Haiku version number does not establish that it meets the Sonnet floor. Floating aliases, unknown families, lower generations and malformed IDs are refused before launch. A canonical ID whose model is unavailable fails normally; naming it does not prove that an account has access.

A stored Allow binds the provider, receiver and disclosed content version, not a model ID. Changing an admitted selection does not renew that Allow; every actual press still names and binds its selected model before it can send.

The selected ID is named in the before-press disclosure and reaches the same restricted call and its stamp. Tagged replay plans bind the selected model, effort, policy and command-envelope digest, and each stored read retains that binding. Changing it requires a new matching dry plan; a tag containing another or unbound model cannot be extended. Qualification results bind their selected model too. Historical qualification or replay results do not qualify another selection. The text-only CLI reply supplies no resolved model receipt, so the served snapshot is unknown rather than inferred from the requested ID.

The process runs with the daemon's environment minus the markers of any Claude Code session the daemon was started from (observer.claude_environment: CLAUDECODE, CLAUDE_CODE_*SESSION*, CLAUDE_CODE_MESSAGING_*, CLAUDE_PID, CLAUDE_EFFORT, CLAUDE_CODE_ENTRYPOINT and CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS), the set the CLI drops itself when it starts a fresh session. Authentication and provider variables are kept, so configuration in the daemon's environment, such as ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL or CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK and CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX, decides which endpoint and which account receive the reading.

What reaches Anthropic besides the reading prompt was measured on 2.1.283, 2026-09-27, by running the real CLI against a local stub with every outbound connection off this machine blocked by the OS (score_abstention.py --probe-argv, below):

• Not sent: Claude Code's default system prompt, about 13,000 characters of agent instructions, and with it anything read from CLAUDE.md, memory or skills. No tool is offered: the request's tool list is empty.
• Sent anyway, with no flag that removes it:
  • in the system prompt, a billing header line naming the CLI version and one line saying the caller is built on the Claude Agent SDK;
  • a separate system message giving the working directory, whether it is a git repository, the platform, the shell, the OS version, the model's name and ID, a sentence stating the model's knowledge cutoff, a token-budget line (<total_tokens>) and today's date;
  • metadata.user_id, which holds a device identifier the CLI keeps per machine (per config directory), the account UUID and a session id;
  • the headers User-Agent: claude-cli/<version>, X-Claude-Code-Session-Id, and X-Stainless-OS, -Arch, -Runtime and -Runtime-Version, which name the OS, the CPU architecture and the Node runtime's version.
• Sent only under OAuth sign-in (a Claude account rather than an API key): a context block in the user turn reading "The user's email address is ..." with the signed-in account's email address, and the account UUID in metadata.user_id, which is empty under an API key. The CLI reads the email from its cached account and no flag removes it. The owner accepted this on 2026-09-27 on condition that it is said before the press, and the Claude Code disclosure names it (reading_route._base_disclosure). Amended 2026-10-01 (owner, Q1): the press it is said before is the one that sends. Idle, the disclosure is one click away in a popover under "What is sent to ", and a press there sends nothing; the press that would send opens a consent step that shows the whole disclosure, as the server's parts, before "Allow and analyze". Amended 2026-10-02 (owner): the disclosure is a short list, one item a line, and keeps each fact this section and Observer model calls require: what is sent, where it goes as configured (the company off this machine, the endpoint named in its place, or that Compass cannot name it), the CLI and sign-in it goes through and whose capacity it spends, these account details on a Claude Code route, tool output only after it is allowed, and the caveat (the amendment). Superseded in part by DEC-28: there is no consent step and no "Allow and analyze" before the first press. The disclosure, these account details included, stays one click away under "What is sent to " before any press, the first press of each kind shows the notice naming what was sent and where, and tool output is included by default rather than after it is allowed.

--exclude-dynamic-system-prompt-sections does not help: the CLI ignores it under --system-prompt.

The prompt itself can still name paths. Under the tool-output ruling a check's command line and its redacted output tail are sent as the session recorded them, and a reader's own messages and, since 2026-10-03, the agent's own messages are sent whole up to 1,000 characters each where the prompt has room (Observer model calls), except its newest recorded final reply, which since 2026-10-05 goes in full up to 16,384 characters, redacted, so a home path or user name the session typed or printed reaches Anthropic that way.

Because the working directory is sent, the process runs in a fresh owner-only (0700) empty directory made outside the state directory, whose path carries the account's home and so the user name (observer.reading_workdir_root). On macOS and Linux it is made in the system temp directory unless that path sits under the account's home, or has a path component containing the user name (names under three characters must be a whole component), as a TMPDIR set by direnv, a Nix shell or a ~/tmp convention does. Both tests ignore case, and "under home" asks the filesystem whether any parent is the home, because on a case-insensitive volume /Users/ALICE is the home and the CLI names its canonical spelling (review N1). It then falls back to /tmp, and when that fails the same test the reading is refused before anything runs. A missing password-database entry, a root home of /, or an unwritable directory also refuses. The qualification prepares both the private cwd and output file before charging a call, so these local refusals consume none of its allowance. On Windows the system temp directory is inside the user's profile and no fallback is tried, so the user name is still sent there.

The reading runs with CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1, forced even when the operator set it to 0. Measured under a no-egress sandbox on 2.1.283, the CLI otherwise looked up six other hosts on each call (telemetry and feature flags, carrying the device and account identifiers), and with it set it looked up none. Nothing in this repository proves that from a real network, and the probe below can only say what reached its stub.

Stdout goes to an owner-only temp file under the state directory, never a pipe, and at most annotation_text_cap_chars * 8 bytes of it are read. The file's 1 MiB bound allows one 0.01 s slice of writes and a write already in flight at the kill, as Observer model calls describes, with the measured overshoot. Since 2026-10-20 stderr goes to a second owner-only temp file beside it, under its own file-size bound, so a failed call can name its cause: after a nonzero exit at most the first 8 KiB of each stream is matched against a fixed list and only the closed label survives (login-required, rate-limited and the others observer._claude_failure_reason names, or the timeout category). The reader sees Compass's own sentence for that label, such as "Claude Code said it is not logged in"; no word of the CLI's output is stored, served or logged, and an unmatched failure says only that Claude Code returned an error. The timeout is the reading's 180 seconds, as on the Codex lane. The directory and both files are removed on every path Compass itself runs to the end of, including a timeout or an OS error, and only once the CLI and anything it started have been killed and reaped. A hard kill of Compass (SIGKILL, a power loss) runs no cleanup and can leave both files behind, owner-only; the next start removes any such file in state_dir older than a day, which no live call reaches, so a second instance's call in flight keeps its own. An absent or relative shutil.which("claude") spends nothing and creates nothing. The prompt is the reading prompt Codex receives: redacted, then bounded by the reader's prompt size (512 KiB by default). The same remembered answer, now per provider, and the same rolling cap apply.

These flags are CLI restrictions, not an OS sandbox. There is no Claude Code equivalent of Codex --sandbox read-only. The installed CLI still owns its authentication, caches and logs, and --no-session-persistence does not govern those. That the flags suppress every tool at run time is not verified by this repository's tests; the one measurement, the stub probe above on 2.1.283, saw an empty tool list. The pinned model id answered on the owner's account in every scored qualification run; whether another account may use it is unmeasured.

Ruled 2026-09-24 by DEC-23. The record and its route to a model are both built: project_context.claude_tool_reports reads it into the observed record, and reading.build_ledger admits it by default to a reader-pressed reading for a named destination, disclosed in the notice. With no named destination it drops it, and the unasked lane keeps only a failed result (the amendment). The named read is listed under Irreversible actions.

The delegated launch summary added on 2026-10-04 reads the same bounded parent and admitted child records. It publishes counts and launch, completion and activity times, with no command, task description or notification output. Those fields are held in memory and published on the session row; they do not enter session history. Launch facts are excluded from every Analyze ledger, including one carrying tool output. Terminal task notifications pair only within the originating admitted stream, and their text is never published or stored.

Two more kinds join it by the owner's ruling of 2026-10-23 (the amendment): a pull request Claude Code recorded as created, and a skill it launched. A pull request is read from the structured gitOperation.pr on a shell call's result alone, and published as its repository, number, a URL rebuilt from those two and the time, only when the URL is https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/pull/<number> with a matching number and the action is created. A skill is read from a Skill call whose result did not error, and published as its name alone, in a closed character set of at most 80 characters. Neither reads a command, an output tail or a skill's arguments. Like a check, each reaches a prompt only under the same grant for a named destination, and the unasked lane never receives them: it takes a failed check or command and nothing else.

Commands join it by the owner's rulings of 2026-10-27 (DEC-29 and DEC-31). A foreground shell command that is neither a closed-list check nor on the read-only list is published as a command: its line, masked and clipped as a check line is, and its exit status where the call's status speaks for it. gh pr checks and gh run view --exit-status are published as CI reads. gh pr checks records a failure only on exit 1 with checks reported, and no result on exit 8 (pending), 2, 4 or a pull request with no checks. Output that is one gh error message (a request that failed, a login prompt, no checks reported) records none, but a failing run keeps its failure whatever a line among its tab-separated check rows says. gh run view --exit-status exits 0 for a run still in progress, so only its failure counts. A CI read counts only when it reads the session's own repository, which is the origin of the folder the session began in, and, where it names a pull request or a branch, one the session is bound to by your goal's URL, a recorded pull request link or created pull request, or a pushed branch of that repository. A poll that names a repository (--repo, -R, a GH_REPO= prefix, or a URL) is held to the session folder's origin wherever the call ran. One that names none counts only when the call ran in the session folder or a checkout of the same remote, so a cd into another clone does not count (command cd and builtin cd move the directory as cd does), and a directory the shell decides (a variable, a command substitution, a conditional cd, or an eval, source, . or a variable's value run earlier in the call) binds nothing. gh pr checks --web only opens a browser, so it reads nothing and is not published as a CI read. A poll set up by GH_HOST, GH_ENTERPRISE_TOKEN or an exported GH_REPO in the same call binds nothing; a variable exported in an earlier call is not seen. Any other poll, and every poll in a folder with no origin on github.com or when --no-git is set, is published as a plain command with its exit status and counts for nothing, and its output goes only to the session's own vendor. A command that cannot fail (echo, printf, true, :, export, unset, set, eval, tee, exit 0, return 0, by any spelling such as a path or command true) is never published, and one whose status a later || true or ; exit 0 forces is published with no result and withdrawn from every verdict and level. The last stage of a | speaks for itself, as a check does: a pass is that stage's own pass, and a failure counts only for a call of one segment. The stages before it record no result, and tee is never published because it cannot fail. A tier 3 failure blocks the live estimate's floor only until a later check or command passes. A call whose result carries Claude Code's structured git record publishes that record only, never its command line. A quoted word the masking cannot read word by word, such as the script of a bash -c call that did not parse, is published as …, so half of a value is never shown. The same rules decide the last 180 characters of output the press reads. The vendor of the session decides what leaves the machine: a Claude Code session read through Claude Code may be sent every command's masked line and redacted tail, since that vendor already received them. The Live monitor's Haiku check is the exception: it is sent a command's line and its result words only, never a tail. Another vendor (Codex reading a Claude Code session) is sent each command's line and status, and tails for checks and CI reads only: a tail whose call also holds a command is withheld whole, because it is the whole call's output. The notice names it in one sentence. The residual: redaction is by named form and shape and is best effort, so a credential in a form it does not name can reach the provider, and across vendors the command line is the one place that can. The history store receives no command. The unasked lane receives a failed command only, on Claude Code, and never a pass.

The content class is what a Claude Code transcript recorded about the checks a session ran and the files it wrote. Since 2026-09-28 that includes the session's subagents, read from their own transcripts under the session's directory. One check-evidence scan spends at most the configured 8 MiB byte allowance across the parent first and all admitted children, charged by actual binary content bytes returned, including malformed or discarded lines. Live children follow newest modification time and stable relative path; a frozen check reads children by stable relative path after a bounded parent cutoff search. A parent cutoff it cannot establish within that same allowance refuses the frozen check read. Each subagent entry is labelled worker_kind: "subagent" (the amendment). A clipped parent Agent result without its earlier call withholds a passing check when that child cannot be read completely; it does not count as a verified named child. A check is a shell command segment whose runner is on the ruling's closed list, or a project script (a package.json script, make target or just recipe) whose own body is a closed-list runner or a && chain of them and whose name carries a check verb, read as the commit the session began on held it; and a program file counts only when test or tests stands alone as a word in its name. This check allowance does not bound the separate activity, identity or user-message reads made during a full frozen admission or validation. Its publication bounds: the check's own segment, never the rest of the shell line, with a substituted command shown as $(…), a brace expansion and the word after it shown as …, no redirection, here-string word or heredoc delimiter published in it, and a trailing comment dropped, after credential redaction and masking of the forms redaction cannot recognise, clipped to 120 characters. A heredoc body is never listed or read as literal commands. Command substitutions in an unquoted body do execute, however, and age a prior pass unless their own commands meet the closed read-only rules. A quoted delimiter keeps its body literal. Behind bash -c, sh -c, zsh -c or bash -lc, it is the inner segment alone, never the wrapper. A call with an unterminated quote is a syntax error and is read as not run, so nothing of its text is published; the last 180 characters of output, with Claude Code's own trailer lines dropped from its end and redaction run over the whole read window before the clip; and a written path relative to the session's working directory, the folder it began in. A written path is a file-write tool's path or, since 2026-09-27, a check's own redirect target, published only when it falls inside that directory and through the same redaction; a target outside it, one the shell decides at run time ($VAR, a substitution, ~), one under a directory a cd left unknown, and one holding any value the call's masking hides, is counted and never published (the amendment). No file content is read as a field, and no Edit or Write result body is read. At most 12 entries are listed and the rest are counted. The published entry carries the check segment, the result, where the result came from and, as result_at, when it arrived, and never the output itself. The output tail is read again at the press (project_context.claude_check_press), keyed by the call, and carried into that one prompt, and held in memory for the local search of the text a harness verdict quotes (below), which sends, stores and publishes nothing: Compass never writes it onto the fact, a row, the page or history. A departure's explanation is model prose, and the model may quote a line of the tail in it; that explanation is stored with the reading and shown on the page with credential-shape redaction and, since 2026-10-27, the values the session's commands masked removed from it, so a shapeless source line or assertion diff can still appear there. Only a masked value that can be a credential is removed from the explanation: an environment literal (true, false, production, main, test), an auth scheme word (Bearer, Basic), a bare number and a lowercase-letters-only word stay, because CI=true and -u 1000 would otherwise erase ordinary words from a sentence the reader reads. The accepted loss is a lowercase-letters-only password quoted in an explanation; the check line and the output tail still mask it. A press carries up to 4,096 masked values and 131,072 characters of them and, past either, keeps the newest; when it has dropped any, the stored explanation is replaced by a fixed sentence saying it was withheld, rather than published unscrubbed. The server holds the masked values of the last two scrubs in a small in-memory cache for the life of the process, and writes them nowhere. A line that lists a command of the shell (not a check) shows the script given to python -c, node -e, -p, --eval or --print, bun with the same flags, deno eval, ruby -e, perl -e or -E and php -r as one ellipsis, also behind a wrapper such as docker exec, timeout or uv run, since a literal credential inside code has no form a mask can find; a check line keeps its own rule. A value at the end of a sentence or inside brackets or quotes is removed, while one inside a longer word, path or domain is not. The class lives in the observed record only, as its own fact type, kept out of the semantic history store and out of every session row field, and it is named in history.PROMPT_DERIVED_CARRIERS.

Masking is by named form, word by word, and covers these forms and no others: a NAME=value assignment; the value after --password, --token, --api-key, --secret, --auth, -p or -P, joined by = or in the next word, except that a pytest check shows -p no:<plugin> (or -pno:<plugin>) for an identifier and masks any other word after -p (a word spelled no:<identifier> is shown whatever it is, and credential shapes are still redacted by shape; the output-tail scrub keeps the plain -p mask); an Authorization: or X-Api-Key: header value anywhere; and, only where a header is expected (the word after -H, --header or --proxy-header, a header joined to its flag, or an extraheader= key), a Proxy-Authorization:, Cookie: or Set-Cookie: value or one whose name holds token, key, secret, password, passwd or credential (X-Vault-Token:, Private-Token:, DD-API-KEY:, Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key:), including a header name standing alone with its value in the words after it, so grep -n 'Authorization:' log masks nothing; for curl, wget, http, https and xh only, the password of -u, --user or --proxy-user (also inside a cluster of short flags such as curl -sSu, and -a for the http clients; the user name stays, and only a word with a colon is masked, so git push -u, docker run -u 1000:1000 and tar -su read as typed); the value of --cookie; the value of a dotted config key whose last part is extraheader, password, passwd, token, secret, apikey or api-key (http.extraheader=, and the key GitHub Actions writes, http.https://github.com/.extraheader=), while a flag such as --max-tokens=4096 or --password-file=/x is not a key; the word after -a, -a<value>, --pass or --pass= for redis-cli only; the token word of vault login; the value of aws configure set for a name holding secret, token, password, passwd or key, read past --profile and the other flags that take a value; the value after --secret-string, --passphrase, --pass, --pwd or --credentials, joined by = or in the next word; the value of --from-literal in kubectl's key=value pair (the key stays); the value after --value for aws ssm put-parameter only; npm's _authToken, _auth and _password lines, as //registry/:_authToken=value or after npm config set; the value after --body or -b for gh secret only, so a pull request body stays readable; the value after -w for the ldap* tools and after -N for ssh-keygen; an openssl pass: prefix, on an openssl line or after -pass, -passin or -passout (-passin pass:value), while env: and file: sources name no value; the token word of cargo login; and the password in user:password@, up to the last @ in the word, so one holding /, @ or whitespace is masked whole. A program is found behind rtk, sudo, env, uv run, pnpm exec and the like, and behind docker, podman or kubectl exec. The words are the ones the program receives: quotes removed, $'…' escapes decoded and backslash-newline continuations joined before masking and redaction run, so a value is masked whole however it was quoted, and an escaped key such as $'\x41KIA…' reaches redaction as the key it is. Redirections, a named descriptor such as {fd}> included, are set apart first, so a flag and its value are masked as a pair even with a redirection between them, and a NUL decoded from $'…' ends the argument as it does for the program. A value after any other flag is published as typed unless it has a credential shape.

The output tail is covered by credential-shape redaction, and by one more step: each named value masked anywhere in the call, assignments, wrapper arguments and executed substitutions included, and each piece of it of four characters or more, is removed before redaction and the 180-character clip. This covers the literal value and its shell re-quoting, including an apostrophe split by xtrace, since an echoed command (set -x, a runner printing its arguments) repeats it. Matching respects filename and identifier boundaries: a password test does not rewrite test_a.py, contest or src/test. Credential shapes the tail itself can print are redacted as well, since 2026-10-27: a gcloud ya29. access token, the value of an AWS "SecretString", the password of a netrc entry (behind machine or default), a PASSPHRASE assignment, and the signature of a pre-signed URL (X-Amz-Signature=, sig=, signature= and the like, inside a query string only). Ordinary runner output, paths and commit ids are left as they are. A netrc entry is taken when login follows its machine or default, or when the value of a loginless one has a digit or a capital, and a signature only when its value has a digit, a base64 or percent character, or both letter cases, so "password reset", "machine learning password manager" and sig=overview are left alone. A shapeless value no named form masked, a masked piece shorter than four characters, or an arbitrary encoding of a value can still reach the prompt through the tail.

The destination rule: it goes to the reading producer that reads the session, or the fallback route reading_route.resolve selects and discloses before the press. Tool output is included by default for a named destination, and the non-blocking reading notice names it. No separate grant is required; tool-output-consent-required is no longer a refusal. Explicit off blocks the press and the reservation. The unasked lane receives the failed results of a Claude Code session's checks and commands and no other tool output, and no output tail from a shell call that also held a run that passed, ran more than one thing, or whose output is not one failed check's own (the amendment, the mixed-call rule).

• The legacy tool_output_permission table remains keyed by provider and destination, so an older build can still read its explicit grants. Old word-only answers remain distinct from those grants. An explicit Allow carrying a stale tool-output destination still answers 409 destination-changed before writing or spending. Pause model calls and --forget clear all grants and notices. A plain reader press needs no grant lookup.
• --allow-tool-output and COMPASS_ALLOW_TOOL_OUTPUT=1 are accepted no-ops for this release and will be removed in a later release. Startup writes no grant, changes no disclosure and prints no grant diagnostic. The Windows respawn no longer forwards this no-op flag.
• reading_route.destination names the destination as configured, or names nothing. For Claude Code: Anthropic; Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI under CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK or CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX; or the host and port of ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, never its path, query or user information. It reads the daemon's environment, the managed settings file and its drop-in folder (/Library/Application Support/ClaudeCode/managed-settings.json and managed-settings.d/ on macOS, /etc/claude-code/ on Linux) and the cached remote settings (~/.claude/remote-settings.json, or under CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR). Those paths were measured in the live 2.1.281 binary on 2026-09-24. For Codex: OpenAI.
• It names nothing, and tool output is not sent, where: two provider switches are on, or one it does not know; a switch holds a value that is neither on nor off; a base URL sits beside a cloud switch, or any ANTHROPIC_*_BASE_URL other than ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is set; two sources set one endpoint variable differently; a settings file cannot be read or parsed; CLAUDE_CODE_MANAGED_SETTINGS_PATH is set; CLAUDE_CODE_CUSTOM_OAUTH_URL is set in any source, because an approved custom OAuth host replaces the first-party API host; ANTHROPIC_UNIX_SOCKET is set, because every request then goes to a local socket whose far end forwards under another machine's settings; ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL holds anything the CLI's WHATWG URL parser could read as another host than Python's urlsplit does (consent F1, ui5). That is a backslash, any whitespace or control character (leading and trailing included), any non-ASCII character, a host with a percent-escape or a character outside letters, digits, ., - and _, an empty label, a host ending in a number that is not a plain dotted quad, or a host with a credential's shape. Measured on Claude Code 2.1.287, http://127.0.0.1:4597\@127.0.0.1:4598 sent every request to 4597, where urlsplit reads 4598, so naming 4598 would have bound the Allow to a host the words never reached, and a key after a backslash would have been published and stored as the host; neither HOME and USER nor the password-file entry gives a home and a user to look under; a macOS managed-preferences profile (/Library/Managed Preferences/com.anthropic.claudecode.plist, or its per-user copy) exists, because the build does not read it; or the machine is Windows, whose policy lives in the registry and under C:\Program Files\ClaudeCode, neither of which is read. On the Codex route, which reads a Claude Code session on this build, it names nothing where OPENAI_BASE_URL or OPENAI_API_BASE is set, whether or not Codex honours them under --ignore-user-config, which is not measured; where /etc/codex/managed_config.toml or /etc/codex/config.toml exists, or a com.openai.codex managed-preferences profile, each measured in the live 0.156.1 binary; and on Windows.
• A proxy variable does not change the destination named: it carries the call, and the vendor that answers it is the same (owner, 2026-09-24). A CLAUDE_CODE_USE_* switch that is not a provider switch but is on (CLAUDE_CODE_USE_POWERSHELL_TOOL is one) also names nothing today. That fails closed, costs the reader tool output, and is left as it is.
• A pass that a later command may have changed files after, in the same call or a later one, does not let a reading say the output is consistent, and its reason says so.
• A passing check never makes an outcome line consistent when the line is about what the agent tells the reader (reports, explains, says, lets you know). A check cannot show that, so the resolver withdraws the verdict unless one of the agent's own messages is among what it rests on (the amendment, narrowed on 2026-10-03).
• The agent's own messages may quote what a check printed, so tool output can reach the provider in the agent's words even where this grant was never given (Observer model calls).
• Where the destination cannot be named, the reading still runs on the reader's words, and its cutoff sentence says the checks were not sent and why.
• The disclosure's To: item says what destination says, on every harness and not only for tool output: the vendor off this machine, the cloud, or the base URL's host in its place (a host is never said to be off this machine, since it may be a local gateway), and where nothing can be named, that Compass cannot name where the CLI's settings send it. It never names the vendor then, so an Allow is never given for a receiver the words do not reach (verifier C1, 2026-10-02), and the Allow is bound to what it named, so it never carries over to a receiver named later (owner, 2026-10-02). On Windows this is every route.

It is quoted into the prompt as untrusted data, never into an instruction Compass writes: each check is one numbered row whose result words are Compass's own, and its output tail is one JSON-quoted field on that row with line breaks and the menu heading neutralised. A reply that obeys an instruction in that output is held to the same shape rules as any other. The unasked lane receives it for a failed result alone. The live drift estimate (DEC-26) reads the check results and written paths on this machine, never the output tail, and publishes a derived level on the focused session's project context only: never on a row, in history, in the reading route's context or in any off-machine payload. It starts no model and writes nothing, and its only processes are the read-only committed-file git read of a project's check scripts and, for a recorded CI poll, the two identity git commands, which --no-git stops. Whether the reader turned it on is kept in the browser and never sent.

What it cannot remove: a reported success is what the tool said, not an inspection of the work, and a reading labels it that way. Two settings sources are not read and so cannot be named or refused: Codex's cloud-delivered managed configuration, and any Claude Code remote setting not yet cached on this machine. A managed setting that moves the endpoint through either reaches the destination it names, not the one the disclosure named. The output tail is whatever the runner printed. A traceback, an assertion diff or a printed setting can carry source lines, file content or a secret that has no recognisable shape, and output gets credential-shape redaction only, because the command-line masks do not apply to it. It leaves the machine under the destination rule above. The command field is the check's own segment. Any other command on the same line is a separate command fact, which Tool output in a Claude Code reading owns.

Ruled 2026-09-24 by DEC-24. The background job, Cancel and the copied-correction route are built; each other part arrives with the layer named beside it, and the route counts in Scope move in those layers, not here.

The labels. "Check for drift" became "Analyze drift", and "Allow and check" became "Allow and analyze". When idle the disclosure sits one click away under "Analyze drift", in a popover whose summary reads "What is sent to " until it is allowed (owner, 2026-10-01, Q1), and that press either opens the consent step first or runs under an Allow already given after this same disclosure; in the consent step it is shown whole, as the server's parts, before "Allow and analyze". The permission and rolling budget above are otherwise unchanged, except that an allow given before the disclosure named tool output does not cover it (Tool output in a Claude Code reading). Keep never counts as the allow (owner, 2026-09-27): where the disclosure has not been allowed, it reads "Keep my intent", settles through POST /api/annotate with no allow and no tool_output, and leaves "Allow and analyze", with its disclosure, as the press that sends. Superseded by DEC-28 for the consent step and the tool-output allow: the first press runs and shows the notice, and a stored off still refuses every press until Resume model calls.

Keeping your intent and adding a later direction. "Leave it" settles every later direction the question quoted, as the settle_through field of a POST /api/annotate body, which reads nothing and starts no analysis: "Analyze drift" is its own press. Over an unsaved draft it adopts the draft and records the settlement in one store write, and a refused adoption settles nothing. It names the intent revision on screen when it is pressed, so words saved since the page was drawn are refused rather than settled over, and a refusal leaves the quoted words in place.

"Add as a line" reads, then writes. The read, POST /api/direction, names a session and one fact id and returns that message's whole text, which the page already holds from drawing the question, where the published record holds only its first sentence, clipped. That is wider than any published field, so it is stated exactly. It returns the text of one message, masked by named form as a check line is (a NAME=value, the word after --password, --token or -p, an Authorization: or X-Api-Key: value (the wider header names, Cookie: and password: among them, are read only on a command line, where a header flag says one is expected, so "the Set-Cookie: header" and "Fix the password: handling" keep their words), a user:password@host quoted or not, and a credential shape wrapped by a line break on both sides of the break, with a zero-width space, soft hyphen and the other invisible characters that can hide a flag removed first, while the joiners that spell words and emoji are kept), then redacted by shape like every published string, with line breaks and control characters as spaces, bounded at 2,000 characters with a flag saying whether it was clipped (a message the record reader already cut at that bound counts as clipped), and a flag saying whether the store would take it as a line (at most 240 characters). It returns nothing for a message that is not a person's message in that session's own record, one not later than the words it would join, or one beyond the bounded source search. Every refusal is an HTTP 200 body. not_found covers an unverified source or a request not later than the intent, including unknown sessions; out_of_reach says the search ended before reaching the record's start; changed says the session wrote to its record during each of three whole scans, and the press can be repeated. The budget token describes search coverage, not whether the requested direction exists. Session identities remain the same loopback data already published by /api/data; unknown sessions have no separate HTTP status. The long-session lookup owns its 64 MiB and two-second limits and the bounded ambiguity guarantee. Prose shapes outside those named forms come back as typed: a password written into a sentence, token: value, a JSON field and a ?token= query are not masked, and only a value with a credential's own shape is redacted there. The text is read again from the bounded native transcript source, found by observer.resolve_transcript from the session's harness and id, and never from a path a client names. It is served to the same callers as /api/data: loopback only, same-origin, and refused to a document navigation and to a same-site or cross-site fetch, as POST /api/reading is, and it answers 503 under --no-annotations. It writes nothing, stores nothing, reaches no model and sends nothing off the machine, and the text never enters session history: no published field carries it and the history prompt-text allowlist is unchanged. A local process running as you gains nothing it could not read from the transcript file itself. Another account on the machine can reach this route as it can reach /api/data (Known and accepted), and for that account it is wider: the whole text of any verified later direction within a session's bounded source search, each fact id listed by GET /api/project-context, where that route gives only the first sentence. A loop over those ids reads every one of them, so the ids bound nothing. A Claude Code slash command is the one message the record names by more than its first sentence: the record and this route both give the command as typed, its name and arguments on one line rather than the tags they arrived in, under the same redaction and bounds, and a harness control such as /clear is in neither. Its arguments go nowhere an ordinary message's words do not. Why it is no narrower: the reader edits a long direction down to one line of their own, so the page must show more than fits, and a summary in its place would be the one thing DEC-24 item 4 forbids saving.

The second is the add_direction field of a POST /api/annotate body, with the reader's edited text. The server checks the fact again exactly as the first request did, so the only claim it mints is that the line was added from that entry. The text is saved under the typed-line rules: at most 240 characters and one line, refused rather than clipped. A full list of six is refused unless the body names the line to replace, so a reader's own line is written away only when they chose it, and every request names the revision it was drafted against. The line, the settlement through that direction's time and, over an unsaved draft, the adopted goal go in one store write. Keep names its revision too, on both routes, and a stale one settles nothing; Keep never adopts over a saved goal holding other words, and a settlement never moves back over one already given. The revision check holds across dashboards too: every store write takes the store's lock file, as the annotation store section above describes, and the check reads the revision from disk under it.

The background job. An admitted press answers 202 with a job the server owns, before the model is called, and the reading runs on a thread of its own under the supervised runner above. The job's id, its phase, the three step names and when it started are published board-wide under reading_jobs in the payload, to any loopback client, as the board itself is; the process handle never is. A second press answers 409 in-flight with the running job and starts nothing. A slot the unasked lane holds answers the same 409 with no job. The permission and budget are read again at the model seam inside the job, so a budget another tab filled, or an answer withdrawn, after the press was admitted ends the job with nothing written or spent. Before the reservation, a marker under reading-jobs/ in the state directory names the job (its id, the harness and session id, the pid, the start time, and no content), owner-only; a marker that cannot be written stops the job with nothing spent. The outcome is stored under the job's id, and a spent attempt keeps its marker until the store holds it; a store that refused the outcome leaves the marker saying so, and the next start records the attempt with that sentence, or with the stop's or the unconfirmed kill's own sentence when that was the refused outcome. A job the shutdown ends is recorded as a spent interrupted attempt, unless its kill could not be confirmed, which keeps the "may still be running" sentence. The stop's line is the reservation: the charge commits under the lock the shutdown takes, so a shutdown before the commit charges nothing and records the unspent "Compass was stopping" sentence. A marker the next dashboard start finds, whose pid no state file of a running dashboard on this state directory names (its own pid counts as an earlier run), is recorded from the job ledger: spent when the budget store holds a charge for that job's id or cannot answer, and unspent ("stopping", or "cancelled-unsent" when the marker says cancelled) when it holds none. A recovery pass holds an OS lock on reading-jobs.lock beside that directory (flock on POSIX, msvcrt.locking on Windows), each marker is claimed by a rename before it is recorded, and an entry that already holds the job's id counts nothing, so one job is one attempt however many dashboards recover it. The lock is there because the rename is atomic on POSIX and not exclusive on Windows. A claimed marker that cannot be read is left in place for the next start, and only a malformed one is deleted.

The Cancel route. POST /api/reading/cancel names the running job's id and kills that job's process group, or its Job Object on Windows, through the handle the supervised runner gives the job; nothing on that path can reach the daemon's own group. It releases the one-in-flight slot after the child is reaped and its temporary files are removed, records a "cancelled" withheld reason as a spent attempt, and discards a reply that arrives after it. A cancel that lands before anything is reserved records an unspent attempt instead. One deviation is accepted: a kill that cannot be confirmed within 5 seconds records the "may still be running" sentence and frees the slot anyway, as the timeout and shutdown paths do, because a slot held forever would refuse every later press until a restart. A forged cancel needs the job id, which the push publishes to any loopback client, and like every route that can authorize a model call it is refused to a non-loopback peer and cross-site. It discards a reading the reader started and records it as a cancelled, spent attempt, as though the reader chose it, and it reaches no process but the reading's own. No job, another job's id and an unknown session answer one 409 not-running body, so the route says nothing about which sessions exist. It writes no consent and reserves nothing.

The copied-correction route. POST /api/correction/copied names a session and the exact text the reader copied, at most 5,900 characters, and the server records its digest: a SHA-256 of the text after one normalisation, applied to both sides, which is what Claude Code 2.1.283 was measured doing to a paste: CRLF and CR become LF, a tab becomes four spaces, and whitespace is trimmed at both ends. It also records a second digest of the same text with every run of whitespace folded to one space, so a paste whose only edit was whitespace still matches; a changed word, or a space inside a word, does not. The store holds the digests, the moment of the copy and where the session's transcript ended at that moment (its inode and size), and, once a message is recognised, that message's fact id and time. It never holds the text. It is compass-copied-corrections.json beside the annotation store, owner-only through a temp file and a rename, under an OS lock on the .lock file beside it. It is bounded at eight digests per session still waiting for their message and 32 recognised messages per session, the oldest of each dropped. Dropping the oldest waiting digest drops only a copy whose message never arrived: a message already recognised keeps its mark until 32 later recognised messages in that session push it out, and then it reads as the reader's own words again. --forget deletes the file, and --no-annotations turns it off. A digest still waiting answers without storing anything, so registering one twice earns no second match. Only Claude Code sessions are read for a match. A user message written after the point the transcript had reached when the text was copied, whose digest computed from its raw text before any redaction or clipping matches exactly (or by the whitespace-folded digest), is Compass-assisted, whatever either clock says. Claude Code wraps a paste in its own pasted_content tags, which are taken off before either digest is computed; words typed around the paste are not, so they make a different message. The transcript is read from that point to its end, at most its newest 64 MiB plus its opening 32 MiB, matching the Intent source reads, under the same unchanged digest and first-paste rules; the semantic history store reads a source to, so a paste the bounded tail never held is still recognised. Each digest binds the first such message, and nothing before it, and a recognised message stays recognised after the tail moves past it. An assisted message is derived rather than person-authored evidence, is never adopted as the goal, does not open the evidence window of typed words, cannot be opened by POST /api/direction, is not an unsettled later direction, and is never shown as the stated goal, the assignment or an exact direction. Reader edits inside a copied correction are exempt from the later-direction floor: an edit made in Compass's box before copying is inside the digest, while an edit after pasting, a backspace that wipes the paste included, makes a different message that is the reader's own. The route is guarded as POST /api/direction is: loopback only, same-origin, refused to a document navigation and to a same-site or cross-site fetch, and 503 under --no-annotations. Every accepted registration answers the same {"ok": true}, whether the session exists, whether its harness is read and whether that text was copied before, so the route says nothing about which sessions exist. Two things remain. Each probe of a real Claude Code session stores a digest and takes one of its eight waiting slots, pushing out the oldest copy still waiting. And a store that cannot be written answers 503 only when a write was attempted, which happens only for a real Claude Code session. The Copy button in Steer back's box calls this route with the box's exact text, after the clipboard took it and never before. The residual is a local process: any process that can reach the loopback route can record a digest. Each digest it records can mark one later message whose text matches exactly as Compass-assisted, once, up to the per-session bound. A marked message is not person-authored evidence and not an unsettled later direction, so a process that records the exact text of a short direction in advance can keep that direction from raising the later-direction question and from blocking "None or low".

Steer back's correction. POST /api/correction names a session and nothing else, and answers a correction the server composes without a model from that session's published row and observed record: the goal and outcome lines the reader saved, each line's state re-derived from a stored reading of those exact words, and the time of each entry a line or sentence rests on. It never reads a fact's summary, a command, tool output or a message's text, so none of them can reach the correction, with one exception since 2026-10-04: for a claim of the agent's that a stored reading found the record contradicts or does not show, it quotes that one agent message's published title, its first sentence of at most 112 characters, which the activity list already shows, and never the message's words. The owner amendment of 2026-10-04 omits titles of two words or fewer and bare URLs; the correction uses a generic evidence request in their place (the amendment). A reader who copies such a correction and edits it before sending it pastes the quoted claim back into the session; edited past recognition, it arrives as the reader's own words, as any edited correction does. A second exception since the owner's ruling of 2026-10-20: each surviving departure, a contradicted claim's included, carries the stored reading's own explanation, the one bounded detail sentence a model wrote, on its own line labelled "Why Compass reads this as drift:", so it reads as Compass's reading and never as the reader's words (the amendment). It is passed again through the redaction and bound every stored reading string takes (240 characters and a closing ellipsis where cut), also behind each hyphen or underscore inside a token, because the shape filter misses a key joined to "x-", and neutralised so that a paste cannot become a command or a new instruction block: every invisible format character (Unicode category Cf, the byte-order mark, word joiners, bidi controls and the tag characters among them, but not the zero-width joiner and non-joiner) and every variation selector is dropped, control characters and line separators become spaces, a leading structural opener (/, !, >, |, a heading #, a list or ordered-list marker, a ~~~ or backtick fence) is removed before anything is swapped, and then a backtick, an angle bracket and a word-initial @ are each replaced by one look-alike character. It remains model prose: a reader who pastes it hands the agent a sentence a model wrote about its session, and one who edits the correction past recognition sends that sentence as their own words. A third exception since the owner's second ruling of 2026-10-20: a departed goal or outcome line cited at one of the agent's messages quotes that message's published title, the same first sentence of at most 112 characters, passed through exactly the redaction and neutralising the explanation takes, so the agent can find the moment (the amendment). A fourth exception since 2026-10-28: a departure that cites a CI check the press read names it, as , where CI check "<name>" failed on the pull request (or passed), after the line's time. The name comes from the stored reading's ci record, not from the session, and is the closed-character-set name that record keeps (ci_read.check_name), at most 80 characters, passed through the same neutralising as a quoted title, and set inside the room a quote already has, so the 5,900-character cap does not move. It is repository-controlled text, so read the correction before pasting it, as "Pull request CI reads" says. A command, a path and tool output are still never quoted. Each entry travels as its time, drawn in the zone the page sends (utc_offset_minutes, refused unless a whole offset within 16 hours of UTC, and the server's own clock when absent), and a placeholder holding its fact id, which the page draws as nothing. A reply's lines are at most 2,760 characters, each of at most eight explanations has 277 more and each of at most seven quotes 132 more, so a reply is at most 5,900 characters and is never truncated: lines over their 2,760 drop the consistent ones and then answer a refusal sentence. It stores nothing of its own: it reads, and the collection it runs to read the session may rewrite the semantic history store, as POST /api/direction's does. It is guarded as POST /api/direction is, reads Claude Code sessions only, and answers one body for an unknown session, another harness, and a session with nothing to steer from alike. The reader edits the text in the page and copies it; Compass never sends it into the session.

The Not accurate token. A reader may mark a reading not accurate, through the not_accurate arm of POST /api/annotate, which takes a bool and the reading's read_at and stores the literal token true beside the reading it names, and nothing else: no reason and no text. Setting or clearing a mark updates the entry's written time, as every write to the store does, because that time orders eviction at the store cap; so the time of the last mark can be read back until the entry is next written. A mark naming any other reading is refused, and a new reading clears it. The token is stored with the annotation entry and removed with it, and, like the words and readings in that file, it is not reached by --forget. It is published on the session row as annotation_not_accurate for the page and derived reading guards: it is never sent to a model, never counted, never in session history or the unasked lane, and never entered into abstention marks. Any local process that can reach the loopback route can set or clear it, as it can the words themselves. The owner, approving the Analyze drift plan on 2026-10-04, amended DEC-24 item 10: a marked reading no longer contributes to its analysis level or Steer back composition. This changes use of the token, not its stored shape or exposure; independent recorded facts still count. Clearing the mark restores the reading.

Reading coverage, owner amendment of 2026-10-04. A pressed reading may store and publish an optional coverage mapping beside its existing assessment: whether the bounded transcript tail was truncated (boolean or unknown), its earliest time (or unknown), counts of unlisted passes or writes and checks with no prompt room, the counts of other commands that ran and of those that were read-only (both or neither; session-wide from a scan that read the whole transcript, or a lower bound marked by a boolean when the scan began late, cut from the tail, pushed to a later horizon by an unread subagent transcript, or missing a named subagent's transcript; an older reading has neither and says the count was not recorded), and a closed adopted-source state. The state is typed, whole, excerpt, unroomed or unknown; it holds no source words. The file identity used to bind the measurement to fact collection stays in memory and is not part of that mapping. Missing legacy coverage stays unknown. The metadata is never sent to a model, copied into session history or used to alter a verdict. It permits no additional transcript text to be stored or published (the ruling). For a Claude Code press that read back (2026-10-13), the two message measurements describe what the project cap kept rather than the 400,000-byte tail: the boolean is true when the read stopped before the window start, left an unread region inside it, or the read or the cap dropped an in-window message of the session, and the time is where the record is whole from. The keys, types and exposure are unchanged.

The ruling is the contract. When you press Analyze on a session whose goal names a GitHub pull request by its https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/pull/N URL, or whose Claude Code transcript records a pr-link or a pushed branch for the repository the session folder's own origin names, Compass starts your gh to read that pull request's checks. A goal that names a GitLab merge request by its https://HOST/GROUP/.../PROJECT/-/merge_requests/N URL starts your glab instead, under the bounds listed below; no transcript record binds a merge request. The records are read from the transcript's tail, bounded in bytes and rows: a pr-link row's prRepository and prNumber, and a result's toolUseResult.gitOperation.push (branch); never the command or its output. It sends GitHub the repository and the number, or, where a pushed branch is what bound it, the repository and that branch's name, and nothing else of the session's text. The repository, the number and the branch are identifiers taken from the session's records, not session text, and they leave the machine with your own login. A second gh call asks which checks the repository requires, and the checks that come back go to the reading model with the rest of the entries, so the model's own notice covers them.

What runs: gh pr view for the head commit before the checks and again after them, so a head that moved in between matches nothing, and gh pr checks twice, with --repo github.com/OWNER/REPO always explicit. A pull request read within 30 seconds of the last is not read again. Nothing runs without a press: not the Live monitor, the live estimate, a summary, the unasked lane or --diagnose.

The launch keeps these bounds, each pinned by test_ci_read, and by test_ci_read_gitlab for GitLab:

• The binary is an absolute path resolved against a PATH with every relative element removed, as the git probe does it, and a missing gh is said beside the reading.
• It runs in an empty directory Compass made for it and removes afterwards, with stdin closed.
• GH_*, GITLAB_* and GL_* are removed from its environment, so no override redirects the host, repository, account or configuration, and GH_PROMPT_DISABLED and GH_NO_UPDATE_NOTIFIER are set. The login it uses is the one stored for your account. A GITHUB_TOKEN in the environment is kept.
• The owner, repository and number are checked against a closed pattern before anything starts, and a pushed branch against another, so nothing in a transcript can become an option.
• A hard timeout of 20 seconds kills the process group, and output is capped at 256 KiB. The GitLab read also has one deadline of 60 seconds over all of its calls (up to twelve), checked before each call, and a call is given no more than the time left, so a slow server cannot hold a press for the sum of twelve timeouts. Past it the read ends as timeout and settles nothing.
• Its output is read as JSON whatever the exit code, since gh exits 8 while a check is pending and 1 while one has failed, then checked against a closed schema. Anything else is one closed error token. Its stderr is read only to choose that token and is then dropped.
• GitLab is read through glab api, a fixed GET of the merge request and then of its pipeline's jobs (a hundred a page, ten pages at most, anything past that is unreadable and never a pass), and the merge request again at the end for the head. The project path is a closed pattern, percent-encoded, and the numbers are integers. GLAB_*, OAUTH_TOKEN and REMOTE_ALIAS go with GITLAB_* and GL_*, so GITLAB_TOKEN, which applies to any host a command names, never reaches the child: a reader who signs in to glab by that variable alone reads nothing, and one signed in with glab auth login reads normally. Before anything is launched Compass reads the host names under hosts: in glab's own configuration file (glab-cli/config.yml in XDG_CONFIG_HOME when set, otherwise %APPDATA% on Windows or ~/.config elsewhere), keeps no value from it, and reads only a host that matches one exactly, over https, as a dotted name that is never an IP literal and carries no port. A host whose block sets api_protocol to anything but https, api_host to another address, or skip_tls_verify to anything but a bare false (a comment, a tag or a value on the next line counts as not false) is not read either (those three values are read from the block, and no token), and neither is one whose block holds a quoted key spelling one of them as well as a line this reader cannot place a key in (a tab, a flow mapping or sequence, a complex key, a tag, a block scalar), and an anchor, alias or merge key anywhere under hosts: leaves no host read. GLAB_CONFIG_DIR is not followed: the file is read from XDG_CONFIG_HOME when set, otherwise %APPDATA% on Windows or ~/.config elsewhere, so a configuration that lives only under a folder that variable names reads as host-not-configured (HOW_TO_USE.md gives the way out). A pipeline counts only when it ran the merge request's head, which is the session's commit; a merged-results pipeline settles nothing. A goal URL that names any other host starts no glab and says so beside the reading. Only a goal URL binds a merge request: what Claude Code writes for one is not measured (the capture note). GitLab has no required-checks list, so a job allowed to fail counts as neither a pass nor a failure, a manual job counts as pending unless it may be skipped, and a pipeline whose own status disagrees with its jobs (a trigger job's child failed) is listed as a check named pipeline.
• To place the session, Compass runs git rev-parse HEAD and git config --get remote.origin.url in the session folder, with the status probe's flags and the same scrubbed PATH. When the pull request GitHub names is merged and its head is not that commit, an Analyze press runs one more, git merge-base --is-ancestor <merge commit> <HEAD> with the same flags, to ask whether the folder's history already holds the merge; both arguments are 40-hex ids checked before it starts, and only exit 0 counts the checks. GitHub is asked for the pull request's state and merge commit beside its head, in the same gh pr view, and is sent nothing more. It keeps the commit and the host and repository the remote names. Any user or token in the URL, and the URL itself, are dropped by the parse and never returned. --no-git stops both commands, pinned by test_ci_read.ThePressTimeIdentityReadsTheFolder.test_no_git_launches_nothing and, for a session that holds a CI poll, test_command_tiers.ACiPollReadsTheSessionFoldersRepository.test_no_git_launches_nothing_for_a_session_holding_a_poll. They run inside an admitted Analyze press, and also at collection and in the Live monitor's estimate when a recorded gh pr checks or gh run view --exit-status poll needs binding to the session's repository (see below). There they run only in the session folder and in a directory such a poll ran in, and never at the end of a session. A folder's reading is kept in memory and reused while the stat (time, size and inode) of its .git/HEAD and .git/config is unchanged, so a session that holds a poll starts no git on a later collection or estimate; nothing is written to disk.
• Compass keeps each check's name, bucket and completion time, the head commit and counts. A name is writable by whoever writes the workflows, so it takes a closed character set and a clip, and it reaches the model quoted. A description, a link or a log is never read.

The record is stored with the reading (ci beside criteria), labelled with the time it was read, and read back only through a closed validator. Pending is never a pass. A skipped check counts as neither a pass nor a failure. A cancelled check is not a pass. No completed check is no result, and GitHub's required checks are preferred where it names any. CI counts only when the pull request's head is the commit the session folder is on, and a session that edited a workflow file or .gitlab-ci.yml carries a caution the model reads while it still settles.

The read starts only once the press has decided to read, after every refusal that precedes the model call, so a press that is withheld launches nothing, and a Cancel ends a gh or glab call that is already running. A session with no recorded folder (a harness that records none, or a transcript that cannot be found) has no commit the pull request's head could equal, so nothing is launched and the card says so. Where GitHub names required checks and the card counts only those, it also says how many other checks it left out. A github.com remote spelled as ssh.github.com is github.com. One spelled as an ssh alias, github.com-<suffix>, binds a pull request only when a pr-link record or the goal's URL names the same repository on github.com, because resolving the alias would start another process. A check's name is repository-controlled text, so a contributor to the pull request chooses it. It is shown in the correction you review and copy, so read it before pasting it into an agent.

The off switches are --no-ci-read and a switch on the page, stored as one marker file in Compass's state directory. The flag wins over the page. --no-observer-model, Pause model calls and the rolling cap refuse the press before anything starts, because the read runs inside the admitted job. --no-git, a session folder that is not a repository and a missing git leave the read without a session commit, which could never match the pull request's head, so nothing is launched and the card says the commit could not be read. The one line naming the read is part of the notice a press shows, and a reader who turns the read off sees no such line.

Ruled 2026-10-19 by the owner (DEC-28). Summary jobs run on a reader's open or press and keep finished parts as they arrive. Opening a stored summary makes no summary call or charge.

• What it is. A model-written summary of what a session did: a lede and phases with titled bullets, each bullet citing at least one entry by fact id, in the closed shape. Unlike a reading, which stores one bounded model sentence per constraint, a summary stores model prose throughout: the lede, phase titles and bullets. Every one is held to the shape's backstop at production, and a string that fails it is withheld in place.
• What is sent. Entries from the session's own record, read in order and bounded in bytes and time: the person's words, the agent's words where the harness record admits them (Claude Code only today), and the checks and files the record shows. Everything goes through records.redact_secrets first and the byte bound second, as every harness invocation does. No saved intent is needed or sent. The producer sends exactly these carriers, each redacted before it is clipped: the person's words and text relayed in a person turn, at most 1,200 characters per entry; the agent's words, at most 700; a check's masked title, at most 220, with the source's result token (failed, passed or not-recorded); a written file's display path, at most 220; earlier phase titles the model wrote for this same summary, as context only, within one sixteenth of a window; and, for the lede, the menu lines the surviving phases cited, sent again within one window. No tool output is sent yet: the source admits none, so an output prefix waits on that source change and the tool-output grant. The producer contract owns the exact shape.
• To whom. The provider and destination the notice names, invoked as the operator's own harness, under the bounds above. Summaries have a grant of their own, bound to provider, destination and content tier, separate from Analyze's; turning summaries off leaves Analyze as it was. Consent, destination and the tool-output grant are checked again before every part of a multi-part summary, so a revoke stops the job at the next part.
• When. A finished session is summarized when the reader opens it, unless summaries are turned off, and later opens read the store without a call. A running session updates only on Update summary, reading only new entries. There is no interval. These are reader-requested calls, not unasked ones.
• Ceilings. Each summary has whole-job ceilings on calls, bytes sent and seconds, and summaries have a rolling cap of their own, so a summary cannot spend Analyze's 100 attempts in 24 hours. The measured ceilings are 37 calls, 768 KiB sent and 600 seconds, with a separate rolling cap of 200 summary calls per 24 hours. The producer's plan refuses oversized jobs before the first charge and reports the allowed windows, bytes, calls and seconds. Each attempted part has an idempotent receipt in summary_spends; failed and timed-out attempts stay charged. Analyze's ledger is untouched. Cancel keeps finished parts; an interrupted job reports them at restart without resuming. Jobs outlive the page that started them.
• Timeout. Every call has a 180-second subprocess timeout (session_summary_call_timeout). No call starts unless its full timeout fits inside the remaining whole-job seconds.
• Off switch. Turn off summaries, one press from the notice and the card, stops every summary call until it is turned back on, and an answer of off already stored survives restart and upgrade. It changes neither Analyze's grant nor a goal-summary answer, and it cancels a summary call already running. A stored Pause model calls also refuses every summary call, with the reason model-calls-paused. Its summary switch is disabled while paused and says "Model calls are paused"; its stored answer is preserved through pause and resume. The first summary shows a non-blocking notice naming all the carriers above, Claude Code/Anthropic and the configured destination, and the off switch. A new destination or wider content tier repeats the notice. Each part rechecks grant, destination and content; this source sends no tool output and cannot infer a tool-output grant. Turn off summaries, Delete summary, Discard everything and Cancel bar late publication: a reply that returns after one of them is not stored. Delete summary takes a second press, like Discard everything, and says what it removes before it does. --no-observer-model refuses every summary call at startup.
• Storage. A store of its own under COMPASS_HOME (by default ~/.compass), keyed by harness and session and independent of any saved intent, so a session with no saved words can have one. Discard everything deletes the discarded session's summary, stopping one being written first, and only after a clear that landed over words that existed; a clear over nothing typed leaves it. If that delete fails the reply says so and the page names Delete summary as the way to finish. Each field is named and admitted. Strings are redacted on the way in and again on the way out, because any local process can rewrite the file. It has an aggregate byte bound and an eviction that can never push out a reader's saved words. Delete summary removes one session's summary, which the next open of that finished session makes again unless summaries are off or model calls are paused, and --forget deletes the store. Invariant 2 names its separate file and 64 MiB aggregate bound. --no-annotations does not govern this store: summaries need no saved intent. The model job must honor --no-observer-model; this store only reads, writes and deletes local state.

A violation is a security bug on the same terms as the bounds above, and also: a summary call made after Turn off summaries or under --no-observer-model, a part sent after consent or the destination changed, a job that passes its ceilings or charges Analyze's cap, a stored string that leaves the store unredacted, or an eviction that removes a reader's saved words.

What is accepted rather than solved: the code checks that a citation names a real entry and sets a bullet's kind from it, but it cannot check that the cited entry is relevant to the sentence. A local rewrite of the store faces the limit the 2026-10-05 delegated acceptance records for a reading's detail: redaction and escaping apply, and nothing authenticates model output against a local process that can rewrite the file.

Ruled 2026-10-23 by the owner (DEC-26). With the switch on and the session on screen, a Haiku check of the latest turns runs about once a minute and produces the live drift level. It is a call the reader starts, under DEC-28, with a monitor notice shown before the first charged call.

• What is sent. The saved goal, and, redacted and clipped first, the person's own messages, the agent's replies, the commands of checks with their result, every other command as its masked line with its exit status (a command that cannot fail is left out), and the paths of files written, from this session's own record only. The recent window is sent again by each later check, and again each time the switch is turned off and on. Where Compass cannot name the destination, checks and paths are not sent, as for Analyze. No command output, file contents or other tool output is sent.
• How it runs. A supervised claude --print child on an explicit Haiku id, set with --claude-monitor-model (default claude-haiku-5-5; only an explicit Haiku id is accepted, and the reading model's Sonnet floor is unchanged), with no tools and no session persistence, in a private working directory. It is never resumed into or injected into the watched session. Nothing is written into the session.
• What holds it. A lease in memory, one per session, held by any number of tabs. A tab beats about every 20 seconds, and a visible tab that stops for 50 seconds has left. A hidden tab pauses the checks and keeps the lease. The lease ends when the last tab leaves, the session ends, model calls are paused, nobody answers the 20-minute question within 10 minutes, or a cap is spent. A restart starts with no lease and makes no check until a page starts one.
• What caps it. At least 60 seconds between two checks of a session, 30 checks per session per window, and its own rolling 24-hour cap across the board (240 checks at present), kept apart from Analyze's. A check cancelled by an Analyze press is not refunded.
• What is not known yet. The page labels its level Live monitor · Haiku, and its accuracy check has not been run: it ships labelled and is qualified later, so read its level as an account of the latest turns, not a measurement.
• What it never does. It never feeds or triggers the unasked lane and never raises a notification. The estimate stays as the level when the check is paused, capped, failed or has not run.

The Analyze drift control (formerly named Ask for a reading and Check for drift) is enabled by the captain's acceptance of the recorded case review on 2026-09-14, published as reading_check: "accepted". The amended enablement rule is owned by DEC-17. The acceptance record under docs/abstention/ carries only marks, hashes and decision metadata.

The Claude Code producer has its own gate, opened by the owner's acceptance on 2026-10-02 and published as accepted, never passed: every scored Claude Code run failed, and claude-acceptance.json lists each one with its own verdict, digests, counts and spend, which a test reads back from the result files. It carries no session text. The results, their grants and the spend ledger are unchanged. The amended rule is owned by DEC-21.

The evaluator still asks whether the producer says not verifiable from available evidence on every case a person marked, in advance, as one it should not judge. Two scripts run it, both outside the gate and neither in CI, and the ruling of 2026-09-10 on what they may hold is restated here so it is not rediscovered.

The cases stay local and uncommitted. scripts/mark_abstention.py --build writes abstention-cases.json, and that file stays on this machine, under ~/.compass: it names the session ids the cases were drawn from, and for a Claude session it carries the opening user turn, which is prompt text. Historical replay packets also carry the frozen session row and semantic facts, a user message's fact with its whole words up to 1,000 characters as a reading reads them; they have the same local-only boundary. It is never committed. Only the expectations and the results are committed. abstention-marks.json holds one sixteen-character hash of (harness, sid) per case and two tokens, judge or abstain. Replay marks also hold a hash binding them to the frozen packet. abstention-results.json, the scorer's local half, may carry the producer's withheld reason and its cutoff sentence and also stays under ~/.compass; the committable summary the scorer writes to docs/abstention/ carries case ids, marks, outcomes, counts, coverage, the sha256 of the marks file as scored and a timestamp. Replay summaries also hold a hash of the cases and rubric, so changing either invalidates the report. No session id, no project, no title, no prompt text and no model prose reach the repository from either script, and a test asserts that none of the local half's fields (the session id, the project, the title, the opening ask, the cutoff sentence, the model's detail) appears anywhere in the summary.

The one exception is a set of synthetic cases written for this repository and run against a fake model, in scripts/premarked_cases.py and its test. They hold invented repositories, commands and commits and no session text, so they are committed; recorded cases stay local as above.

A scoring run names its producer with a required --producer, and only claude may score: no Codex spend is authorized for this qualification, so --producer codex reports and refuses to score. A Claude Code run spends the operator's Anthropic capacity through reading.ClaudeReadingModel, the same subprocess and flags as POST /api/reading above, pinned to the CLI the run verified. It spends once per case whose ledger holds anything citable and sends exactly what that route sends for the same session: a format 5 case's own goal and outcome lines in place of the reader's typed words, and the bounded, redacted menu of ledger entries. A Claude Code case also carries its checks, frozen from the transcript as it stood at the capture, with their redacted output tails, as a press with a tool-output grant would. The owner authorized that sending for this qualification only, 2026-09-24, and bounded it at twenty calls, one of them the browser walk. The owner later raised the ceiling to 23 scorer calls and 26 Claude CLI invocations overall, and on 2026-10-01 directed the qualification to run to completion within it. When the second continuation failed and had spent the last of those calls, the owner authorized one more five-case run past that ceiling the same day: 28 scorer calls and 31 Claude CLI invocations overall.

The scorer refuses to start unless the call reaches Anthropic (reading_route.destination names Anthropic) through the native installer's CLI, whose version file and --version line agree, and unless every case is marked with closed tokens. On macOS the CLI must also satisfy a pinned code requirement, checked with codesign --verify --strict before the file is first run: signed through Apple's Developer ID chain, identifier com.anthropic.claude-code, team Q6L2SF6YDW (Anthropic PBC, measured on 2.1.283). An unsigned stub saved in the install layout is refused, and so is a machine where codesign cannot run. No other platform checks a signature. Linux has none to check, and whether the Windows CLI carries an Authenticode signature was never measured. There the committed result records the binary's sha256 as unchecked sha256:<hex>, which names the file that ran and not who built it. The scorer copies bytes from one held regular-file handle into an owner-only (0700) private directory, checks the handle's identity before and after the copy, and makes the executable read-only to its owner (0500). It refuses a source larger than 512 MiB before allocating the destination and stops if the source grows past that limit during the copy. Signature verification and --version run against that copy, and every scoring/probe call uses it. Rewriting or replacing the installation after the copy cannot select the executable for those calls. The context removes the copy when scoring or probing ends, including refusal paths and interrupted verification.

The committed summary names the producer, model, argv digest, destination, installation path with the home directory written ~, version, signature phrase and copied-byte digest (binary_sha256). A resume carries records only when a versioned ledger run digest binds them to the full current producer binding, including the copied-byte digest. Editing the local summary cannot supply that match, and legacy records-only run digests refuse resume. A resumed case whose source no longer passes provenance checks replaces its former result with a withheld record without another model call. The private file's device, inode, size, mtime, ctime and sha256 are confirmed unchanged before and after --version, and compared before every call (score_abstention.PinnedClaude). Each identity read samples metadata before and after hashing. A changed copy refuses that call and every later one. A process running as the reader can still rewrite or replace files inside its own private directory between a check and spawn; this does not defend against the account itself. On macOS the authentic CLI's held-handle copy was measured on 2026-09-29: equal sha256, valid pinned code signature, and successful --version and --help under an OS no-egress sandbox, with zero model calls. The same version's authentic Linux ARM64 ELF was measured the same day: its signed release manifest and pinned Anthropic signing-key fingerprint vouched for the source hash, the held-handle copy had equal sha256, and both commands succeeded as a nonroot user in a container with no network, no capabilities, and an isolated HOME/config/cwd. Both platforms returned 22 stdout bytes for --version, 22,114 for --help, and no stderr. Linux x64 and Windows copied-CLI behavior remain unmeasured. On Windows Python 3.11.0 through 3.11.9, a shared temporary directory may not honor the requested owner-only ACL; this platform has not been qualified for real scoring. Synthetic helpers establish copy/cleanup mechanics, and do not replace those native measurements. The previous installation-path pin was chosen while copied-CLI behavior was unmeasured; the macOS and Linux ARM64 prerequisites are now satisfied, and the same-owner limit remains explicit.

Local preparation owns its cwd, output file and descriptor before yielding. An interruption before charge removes them and is re-raised. Every call is charged after successful local preparation and before it runs to one JSON ledger at a fixed path under ~/.compass, under an exclusive lock, with the digests of the marks and the cases it was made under. It never follows COMPASS_HOME or HOME: the home is the account's own, and scoring refuses while HOME names another. Without an observable account home, canonical roots stay unavailable and scoring refuses before runtime configuration, packet reads or executable verification. The committed result records a hash chain over the ledger's charges and their digests, and scoring refuses while the ledger does not begin with it, reading the committed result at its fixed path whatever --out says. The scorer also re-checks each case's provenance against this machine's transcripts, history and ends, and spends nothing on a case that claims recorded and is not vouched for. One lifecycle may be vouched by the transcript rather than the history store: a Claude Code turn stop older than the store's oldest observation, which the transcript's own top-level stop_hook_summary for that session marks at that moment. A stop the store still reaches is never vouched that way, and a stop or end that had not settled before the capture is refused at score time as it is at freeze. Whoever can edit the transcript or trim the history store's oldest observations can already forge either record, which is the local-process exposure this document accepts throughout. For a Claude Code case that includes its contents, rebuilt from the transcript as it stood at the case's captured_at. The checks and their output tails must be exactly the transcript's. The user messages must be the newest ones up to the capture, in order, with none missing between them, none repeated, and at least as many as the board's bounded tail reads of the transcript as it stood at the capture, whose length the case records (transcript_bytes), and no case may name less than that length (transcript-bytes-differ). A case the freeze cut at its capture (transcript_cut) must name it exactly; its user messages come from the transcript as it then stood, never from the board. An older message may be absent, because the board read a bounded tail. A fresh --score never replaces a written result that charged calls; only --resume rewrites one. A transcript now shorter than that length, or a case that records none, is demoted (transcript-truncated). A capture with a user or assistant message between the recorded stop and itself is refused at freeze and demoted at score time (activity-after-stop); administrative records such as turn duration do not resume work. If the bounded parent check scan cannot reach the capture cutoff, freezing refuses and the score-time contents check demotes the case (check-cutoff-unreachable). A case frozen under other parser code is named as such (frozen-on-another-parser) rather than read as tampered. The stamp hashes a versioned AST representation of the derivation files: the shared byte reader, check producer and reading producer. Comments and formatting do not move it, while literals, expressions and control flow do. Existing byte-stamped packets remain incompatible; neither cases nor marks are rewritten to fit the new stamp. A mismatch still refuses the whole scoring run before consulting or charging its ledger, and the contents check still requires the facts derived at capture to match. On Windows the home falls back to USERPROFILE, so the HOME protection is POSIX only. The ledger stops at 28 calls across every run and producer, refuses every call when it cannot be read, refuses calls under other digests, and freezes each packet's marks once it holds one. A failed run may be followed by a fresh packet only through a reviewed, fixed-path continuation grant: its marking phase binds the old result's exact ledger prefix and a new case digest, and its sealed phase binds the new marks and cases-and-rubric digests before scoring. Each later grant may follow a continuation that also failed, bound to that result the same way, and only while every earlier grant is sealed with a next key equal to the following grant's previous. A grant without its predecessor, numbered past the chain's fixed bound of nine, or under a name the pattern never writes, is refused. Every earlier packet's charges must carry its own key, in ledger order, and the whole chain is checked under the charge lock against the same 28-call cap. The failed result cannot be overwritten, and a grant is not permission to send real session evidence or increase spend; both need separate owner authorization. The ledger holds case ids, times, statuses and digests only. The scorer does not pass through the reader's rolling budget, so that ledger is the bound. --probe-argv writes and charges nothing, and it cannot reach a real model through anything the operator configured. It starts its own stub on 127.0.0.1 and runs the verified CLI twice, once signed in with a placeholder API key and once with a placeholder OAuth token and a placeholder account (a random @example.invalid email and a random UUID) in a config directory of its own, so the operator's account is never read. Removed from its environment: every ANTHROPIC_*, CLAUDE_CODE_USE_* and CLAUDE_CODE_*OAUTH* variable, CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, http_proxy, https_proxy, all_proxy and no_proxy in either case, and the CLI's own CLAUDE_CODE_HTTP_PROXY, CLAUDE_CODE_HTTPS_PROXY and CLAUDE_CODE_PROXY_URL. It refuses to run when reading_route.destination would name anything but the stub, and counts the call good only when the reply carries a nonce only the stub knew (recorded probe: refused, not charged). It reports only yes or no facts about each request, never its text: whether the home path, the user name or the state directory appear anywhere, and in the OAuth pass whether the placeholder email appears in the disclosed block and whether the email or UUID appear anywhere else. Any of those found fails it. It cannot see traffic that went elsewhere; only an OS sandbox can. The failed Claude Code result is docs/abstention/claude-results.json; an authorized continuation has its own file, as the abstention documentation specifies. Neither opens the gate by being written. A case the producer refuses before the model, an empty ledger or a session the board no longer lists, spends nothing. The yardstick is handed to the producer as an argument; the run writes nothing to compass-annotations.json and increments no reading count. Historical replay reads the frozen row, facts and clock instead of the live board. Reviewer excerpts and later context are not model inputs. Its file format and checks are owned by the abstention documentation.

Synthesised cases are admissible in the rubric expectation file, cross-verified by a different agent than generated them, and their text is agent-written rather than recorded. It goes through records.safe_text before the producer sees it: redaction before the clip, in that order, the same as anything derived from a transcript. The rubric file also stays under ~/.compass; the summary records for each of its cases the kind, the origin, whether it was admitted and why not, and the two scored columns, never the case body. Each of those is a closed token or empty: the file is hand-written, so an entry naming anything else -- a kind, an origin or a harness outside the sets, or a key that is not a case id -- is refused rather than copied into the summary.

The drift levels check is a second check under the same rules, and docs/drift-levels/ is its committed half. scripts/levels_cases.py --build freezes cases from recorded Claude Code transcripts into ~/.compass/drift-levels/cases.json. Each case holds the session id, the transcript path, the working directory, the check lines and written paths layer 1 publishes, and the intent the owner set for the case. The build refuses a COMPASS_HOME inside the repository. The owner's marks stay beside the cases, and only their sha256 is committed, in marks-digest.json, before any reading is attached or any result is written. Readings attached afterwards, which carry model detail, stay in ~/.compass/drift-levels/readings.json. results.json carries case ids, closed kind and reason tokens, marks, levels, outcomes, the digests and a timestamp. It carries no session id, path, command, intent text, fact id or model prose, and a test asserts that none of the local fields appears in it. Scoring calls no model and writes to neither the annotation store nor the reading route. levels_cases.py --read is the one mode that calls a model, and it runs only when the owner says to. It sends one case's frozen facts and intent to Codex, the way a press sends a Claude Code session's record, but with no check output and no user messages, since the cases froze neither. A press sends the messages you typed; this sends none. It charges the reading home's reading ledger and never writes the annotation store. What comes back stays in ~/.compass/drift-levels/replayed-readings.json. Its record, replay.json, holds case ids, closed tokens, times, and the ledger job id built from a case id and a time. The drift levels documentation owns its format.

The drift replay check is a third check under the same rules, and docs/drift-replay/ is its committed half. scripts/drift_replay.py reads the pushback fixtures under tests/raw_sessions/ (redacted by scripts/redact_session.py, gitignored) or, with --source original, the logs under ~/.claude/projects. Its cases, its owner's blind marks, its outputs, its spend ledger and the salt behind its case ids stay under ~/.compass/drift-replay/, and the build refuses a COMPASS_HOME inside the repository. Its claim items and claim marks, each with the marker's one-line reason, stay there too. Only count and digest summaries are committed: the digests hold digests and counts, the results closed tokens, counts, and case and claim ids salted with a local secret, so a committed id cannot be recomputed from a session id and a time. --live calls no model. --read sends what a press on that session would send, through the same verified, pinned Claude Code CLI the qualification uses: the person's messages, the agent's messages once the producer reads them, each check's line, result, times and redacted output tail, and the intent. The owner authorized that send and its spend on 2026-10-03, bounded at 240 calls, raised to 440 on 2026-10-04, and then to 870 on 2026-10-04 for the Analyze drift follow-up, on the same ledger ~/.compass/drift-replay/spend.json. That path is under the operator's home whatever COMPASS_HOME says, so moving the home does not reset the count. Each call is charged before it is made, under an exclusive lock on macOS and Linux (Windows has none, so the cap there holds for one run at a time), and never by a case the producer withholds or by a dry run; a ledger that will not parse refuses every call, and the charged calls the run's own record holds are a floor a deleted ledger cannot go under. Two consecutive charged failures or replies with no parsed answer stop the batch. Failed cut-arms stay charged and are not stored as read, so a tagged retry can read them again. With --source original the words sent are the session's own, through only the redaction a press applies, not the fixtures' redaction. It never writes the annotation store and never posts to the reading route. The drift replay documentation owns its format.

The authorized follow-up has at most 239 additional Analyze attempts across all three routes: 190 replay, 31 qualification and 18 live. The qualification and live allowances are included in 239. They cannot be added to it or transferred to another route. The existing 631 replay charges and 28 qualification charges stay intact, along with their failed results and grants.

scripts/analyze_campaign.py reads a reviewed repository manifest and a fixed account ledger, ~/.compass/analyze-closure-spend.json. Actual final prompt, model, runtime and output-cap digests bind each reservation; experimental replay also binds its study code and condition. Reservations precede transport, and failures remain charged. Immutable reservation, classification and acceptance receipts detect missing or rewritten state. A reviewed zero-charge genesis digest is required for activation; an activated campaign never creates replacement state automatically. This guards accidental reset, not an account holder who rewrites both the repository authority and every private receipt.

Every admission validates the current ledger and each ancestor. Proof assembly may use the snapshots validated during that admission; it cannot cache them for a later request.

By default, the lanes run in replay, qualification, live order. Each registered batch needs measured, independently reviewed acceptance before the next batch. Transport usability is insufficient. A semantic, coverage or protection failure stops every lane, as do two consecutive unusable charged attempts, except for the finite semantic-measurement amendment below. Pending or orphaned attempts block another launch. Batches charge at most 25 attempts including retries, and each lane opens with one availability attempt. Only an explicit same-slot retry under its registered allowance can follow an unusable opening.

Future inputs may be explicitly held without invented request hashes. Held slots cannot spend, be skipped or pass acceptance, and the authority has no unholding or reset API. A live wrapper in scripts/live_analyze_campaign.py reserves at the unchanged production executor seam after the native consent route and refuses unmetered Codex execution for that foreground process. Its instrumentation supplies no complete process or network trace. Native replay preflight binds its fixed ten-file implementation inventory and actual checkout. Every registration requires an exact positive integer repeat and a unique (phase, case, arm, condition, repeat) identity; extra metadata cannot shadow a pair. Every declared critical group requires three static registrations with distinct integer repeats 1, 2 and 3 before charge. The ten historical protected rows must have distinct (case, arm, claim) identities; missing or unknown independent admission refuses before the first replay model charge. Unsupported semantic conditions refuse rather than pass unread. When neither observed arm draws a required protected claim, unresolved comparison adds a coverage failure and blocks acceptance. Future pairs with no outputs remain pending; the comparison does not require a favorable legacy result. The production pilot forwards the supplied stamp-bound final lookup like the shipped reading prompt builder; matched scope and first-1000 controls remain explicit comparisons. Historical protocols remain unchanged and need separate, independently reviewed prospective translation before activation; translation alone grants no source admission. No campaign is activated by installing this machinery, and no earlier failed qualification becomes a pass. The replay documentation owns the preparation and measurement boundary.

The owner may authorize a prospective qualification-first campaign within the same 239-attempt allowance. Its only alternate order is qualification, replay, live. All 30 qualification slots must have actual request bindings; the 31-attempt limit includes its one registered retry. Every replay and live slot must be explicitly deferred. Their fixed planned slot identities and batch partitions remain, but their request maps are empty and their protocol, binding and evidence fields are explicitly null. Those fields express absent admission, not placeholder hashes or an exemption from a source requirement. A partially held later lane or held qualification slot refuses this profile.

Qualification can then reserve without replay acceptance. Its sealed fourth grant, actual native source and prompt checks, model and packet bindings, independent batch reviews, historical 631/28 prefixes, shared ledger and activation guards still apply. The 190 replay and 18 live allowances cannot be borrowed. Held lanes cannot reserve or pass either batch or lane acceptance. A failure still stops the whole campaign. Replay's original protection obligations remain pending behind its hold; qualification must independently meet its own typed native source and five-kind floor. This profile does not depend on completing separate observer, ordinary-session, cold-study or native-window measurements.

This is a new reviewed prospective authority, not a migration of an activated campaign. Its manifest remains immutable: there is no automatic unholding, replacement genesis or reset. Releasing the held lanes later requires a separate reviewed design that preserves charged attempts. Installing the guard or preparing cases does not activate it or supply blind marks.

The owner authorized 31 fresh qualification attempts after the stopped run reached 30 native qualification charges and two shared charges. This replaces the stopped lane's 29 unused attempts; those cannot be added again. The fifth grant's bound key has a cumulative native ceiling of 61. Earlier keys retain their 28 or 59 ceilings. With 190 replay and 18 live attempts still held, the cumulative shared allocation is 241: two spent, 31 fresh and 208 held. No held allowance can be transferred to qualification.

The fixed successor manifest and independently reviewed handoff bind the original manifest, activation anchor, complete two-call shared state, thirty-call native prefix, failed fourth result and actual native/shared attempt joins. The old semantic stop is established by its settled failure receipt; an explicit stop receipt is bound only if it already exists. The successor never creates a stop file for the old run or rewrites its failure.

An explicit one-time initialization appends one epoch to the same account ledger under its existing lock. The original state projection, excluding only the new epochs field, and its receipts remain bound. New transition and reservation receipts live in the separate .epochs/1/ tree. The new epoch has its own reviewed zero-charge activation anchor and fresh batch acceptance; it cannot inherit the old opening batch's acceptance. The original campaign remains stopped and inspectable. Missing or changed ancestor, transition, handoff, source or grant bindings refuse further launches.

The fifth grant and handoff require newly frozen case, marks, rubric, model and actual request bindings. Qualification alone may spend up to 31 attempts, including its opening exposure and one registered availability retry. Replay and live remain held. The existing failure, orphan, batch review and source guards apply to the new epoch. Installing this software neither initializes an account nor supplies a grant, source admission or accuracy result.

After the owner reported repairing Claude Code sign-in, they authorized carrying the fifth run's 29 unused attempts forward and adding two. The sixth grant admits 31 available attempts, including the first diagnostic exposure and one retry. All 32 native charges and four shared charges remain spent. The cumulative native ceiling is 63 and shared allocation is 243, including the unchanged 190 replay and 18 live attempts held. Earlier keys keep their earlier ceilings. This is one finite continuation, not permission to reopen arbitrary stopped runs.

The fixed login-resume manifest and independent handoff bind the stopped fifth result, all ancestor manifests, transitions and reservation receipts, the exact native 32-call prefix, and the new source, scorer, packet, marks, model and request digests. Initialization appends only epoch two under the existing account lock; both earlier epochs remain unchanged and inspectable. No earlier batch acceptance carries forward. Missing or changed ancestry refuses execution. The original three-repeat protocol and batch stops remain required.

Only qualification opts into execution diagnostics. Its raw stdout and stderr stay in private transient files and are deleted at cleanup; neither is added to a diagnostic receipt. Both streams retain independent supervised file-size limits. The receipt holds the charged attempt identity, request/model digests, actual return code when available, monotonic elapsed time, closed exception category and a closed reason label from at most the first 8 KiB of each error stream. A text match is a CLI-reported hint, not proof of provider causality. Successful answer text is never used to classify an authentication problem. Diagnostic receipts stay in the owner-only packet directory (0700, files 0600), never public results or dashboard data. Unwritable or non-private diagnostic storage refuses before charging; a later write failure cannot refund a charged attempt or authorize another call.

After the sixth run stopped on an accuracy failure, the owner authorized a corrected producer and a fresh qualification. The seventh grant carries its 29 held attempts forward and adds two, for 31 available attempts: thirty readings and at most one availability retry. All 34 native charges and six shared charges remain spent. The cumulative ceilings are 65 native charges and 245 shared attempts, including the unchanged 190 replay and 18 live attempts held. No earlier key receives the new ceiling, and a semantic stop cannot be retried.

The fixed per-clause manifest and independent handoff bind the failed sixth result, its accepted opening batch, every earlier stopped epoch and immutable reservation, and the exact native 34-call prefix. New source, scorer, packet, marks, model and request bindings precede execution. Initialization appends only epoch three under the existing lock. Missing, changed or unfinished ancestry refuses execution; older epochs are never reset or resumed. Installing the software does not initialize an account, admit a packet or supply a passing score.

The full pre-execution suite caught a scope omission after the zero-charge preparation was activated. A fixed, independently reviewed zero-charge reseal record binds both preparations, their handoffs and the exact original transition bytes. It permits one replacement of epoch three's strictly empty genesis, before any reservation or charge. An exclusive immutable reseal receipt is written before the account update; the original transition and every charged ancestor remain intact. Missing or mismatched records, a partial update, a second reseal, or any attempted reading refuse execution. This correction adds no allowance and cannot repair a scored failure.

The opening is the first registered exposure, followed by batches of nine, ten and ten with independent review between them. No old acceptance carries forward. Existing source, diagnostic, charge, retry and stop guards remain required. This is one finite continuation, not permission to reopen arbitrary stopped runs or borrow held replay and live allowance.

The seventh run identified both sampled Goal departures but judged an approval-qualified outcome whose scope was unknown. It stopped after two charged readings. The owner approved carrying its 29 unused attempts forward and adding two, giving one new 31-attempt allowance for thirty fresh readings and at most one availability retry. All 36 native charges and eight shared charges remain spent. The new cumulative ceilings are 67 native charges and 247 shared attempts, including the unchanged 190 replay and 18 live attempts held. Earlier grants retain their own ceilings, and the current semantic stop cannot be retried.

The fixed eighth grant, manifest and independently reviewed handoff bind the stopped seventh result, every charged ancestor and immutable receipt, the seventh run's opening acceptance, and its original zero-charge transition and reseal. Initialization appends only epoch four; no earlier state, stop or acceptance is reset or carried forward. Missing or changed ancestry refuses execution. Admission and the complete local checks precede zero-charge activation; merged software and passing CI precede every model call.

Source-derived inputs bind the corrected producer, parser, scorer, exact native model request and binary before output. A changed attribution criterion must declare its scope and receive fresh independent pre-output marks and rubric adjudication. Unchanged expectations may transfer only after their material, scope and selection are independently checked. No result is regraded and no answer from a changed producer counts toward the new run.

The first exposure is the one-call opening, followed by independently reviewed batches of nine, ten and ten. The existing semantic, coverage, charge and availability guards remain; one retry cannot cross a semantic stop. This is one finite continuation, not authority to reopen arbitrary runs, increase an older ceiling or borrow replay and live allowance.

The eighth run stopped after two parsed answers because an approval-qualified outcome was judged without established approval. The owner approved carrying its 29 unused attempts forward and adding two, giving 31 available attempts for a fresh thirty-reading measurement and at most one availability retry. All 38 native and ten shared charges remain spent. The new cumulative ceilings are 69 native and 249 shared attempts; replay's 190 and live's 18 attempts remain held. Older grants and their stops retain their original limits.

The owner also removed the requirement to stop measurement at its first failing semantic batch. Only the ninth-generation campaign may continue to the next registered exposure after a semantic failure. Every wrong answer, grade and charge remains recorded. Such an exposure is terminal measurement evidence, never a retry slot. Batches of one, nine, ten and ten still require independent measured review. A measured review records the actual failures and cannot stand for qualification acceptance. A failed aggregate remains failed and cannot arm another lane or the qualified browser-verification route.

Coverage, protection, orphan and source-binding failures still block launches. An unstopped process or oversized response latches a protection stop without retry. The existing limit on consecutive unusable attempts and the single registered availability retry remain. No option or arbitrary manifest field can remove these checks or increase the finite allowance.

The fixed ninth grant and reviewed handoff bind the complete paid predecessor, including its accepted opening, every earlier failed result and immutable receipt, and both original transition and reseal in epoch three. Ordinary initialization appends only epoch five; it resets no earlier state and carries no prior batch or lane acceptance. Missing or changed history refuses execution. Source admission and the complete local checks precede activation; merged software and current-head passing CI precede spending.

Fresh source-derived inputs bind the corrected producer and scorer before output. Unchanged expectations may transfer only after their scope, material, selected entries and citation menus are independently checked. A changed producer cannot reuse earlier answers or regrade an old packet. This amendment permits completing one finite measurement, not reporting a failure as a pass or reopening an earlier stopped run.

After the ninth-generation qualification passes, a separately reviewed profile may allocate one of the existing 18 held live attempts to a foreground browser reading. The other 17 live and 190 replay attempts remain held; this adds no attempt to the 249 shared ceiling. The profile binds the actual qualifying result, all thirty usable exposures, full qualification acceptance, current runtime and scorer, model request and independently reviewed browser context. Measured batch reviews cannot supply that acceptance. An explicit technical stop refuses the route even when an earlier qualifying result passed.

The wrapper starts the genuine application and preserves its consent, provider selection, collector, resolver and native executor. Its private PATH excludes Codex; background reading is disabled. Before the press, disclose Claude Code and Anthropic and bind the selected session, saved intent, consent, startup identity and exact prompt. Only this registered foreground request may launch the model. Construction and mocks establish no browser pass.

The route account and context use a separate fixed conditional-priority namespace. Its exclusive activation marker remains outside that namespace, at ~/.compass/claude-route-live00.ACTIVATED.json, so deleting an account or restoring a prepared profile cannot mint a second allocation. Every reservation stays charged, and settled failures are immutable. A late source change cannot hide an already charged native warning or prevent its durable closed settlement. Missing state, orphaned calls, unknown statuses and source or admission changes refuse another launch; no retry is allocated to this route.

The opt-in typed-Claude qualification freezer may make an owned transient copy of the raw historical source prefix, as the replay already makes a cut transcript. This is a study-input exception to the runtime's memory-only source recovery rule, not permission to cache recovered replies. The source-cut helper admits a prefix no larger than 32 MiB and uses bounded lookahead to prove the capture boundary, refusing records over 1 MiB. The existing freeze and vouch provenance scans retain their separate limits. The source is opened without following a symlink where supported; its descriptor identity and source stamp must agree before and after the read. A 0700 temporary directory and a 0600 file hold that raw input only while the stamped production reader runs. Normal completion, refusal and exceptions remove the cut. Abrupt process termination may leave an owner-only temporary copy, which the operator must remove; the code does not promise secure erasure or protection from another process under the same account.

The frozen packet retains existing bounded agent excerpts and exact selected identities, prefix, word and prompt digests. Recovered complete replies remain in memory and enter no new packet field, marker output, cache or history. Later source appends may be ignored beyond the bound capture prefix, but a changed prefix or selection refuses before transport. Existing packets are never upgraded. This first prospective protocol refuses adopted goals and sourced outcome lines; it establishes neither their qualification nor model accuracy.

The model-free studies use separate tagged cohorts under that same private directory. Their initial blind marks stay private before later proof is opened. The exact imported cohort, including the later proof key where used, is bound by committed counts and a digest before output. Positive-proof marks name only recorded evidence in the private key. The Codex study loader reads an operator-selected CLI or editor parent log, rejects exec and worker metadata, applies the runtime's measured injection filter and masks words before private storage. Its committed result holds one salted case id, counts and a digest. It calls no model, adds no runtime fact and grants no Analyze eligibility. The historical replay cases and reads are not overwritten.

The owner-approved qualification source work also admits explicitly reviewed Claude Code exports outside the canonical projects directory. The marker's export freezer and the scorer's reporting and scoring modes require the paired --reviewed-exports manifest path and --reviewed-exports-sha256 digest. The manifest has a closed schema, at most 32 distinct full session UUIDs, canonical absolute regular-file paths whose basenames match those UUIDs, and complete-file SHA256 digests. Its review fields record the caller's review; they do not authenticate a reviewer or confer trust on a case-supplied path. The caller must independently choose the manifest and pin its digest. A process able to rewrite all local inputs remains inside the accepted same-account trust boundary. Claude case specs under this explicit resolver use eight lowercase hexadecimal identity characters. Malformed ids and full-UUID aliases refuse before board, history or canonical-source fallback; the manifest still binds the full UUID. The default path without this opt-in is unchanged.

This initial import admits only idle captures with an exact native Stop timestamp, the configured settle interval, and no conversation continuation through the capture cut. The Stop must name the preceding top-level, non-meta, non-sidechain assistant end_turn, with a valid earlier human ancestor in physically prior UUID ancestry. Native metadata clocks may be skewed; parent wall-clock ordering is not required. The final and human ancestor must yield their native text events, which excludes thinking-only, synthetic-agent and injected-only records. This does not require the ancestor to survive prompt selection or guarantee whole final-word allocation. Missing hookLabel means Stop; another explicit label refuses. This route currently supports only preventedContinuation: false. A true value is unsupported here, not proof of continuation; the canonical collector and its existing Stop semantics are unchanged. The first physically future record ends the prefix even if a later-written record is backdated.

The manifest is limited to 64 KiB, each complete source to 32 MiB, and each native record to 1 MiB, counted on the native newline-only record boundaries. Literal carriage returns inside a record or between JSON objects on one line refuse; CRLF terminators and escaped JSON carriage returns remain valid. Nonregular files and symlinks refuse; opened descriptor and path stamps must agree through the bounded read. The existing 8 MiB check scan and 400,000-byte tail remain unchanged. An admitted export is rebuilt directly through the native freeze helpers without a live board read. Source lookup, machine vouch and the scorer use the same explicit resolver. Immediately before the charging delegate, the scorer rechecks the manifest, complete source, native cut, case and production selection, plus the current intake scripts and runtime parser stamp. Changing even source bytes beyond the prefix requires a new reviewed manifest and packet.

The source-cut exception above still governs transient raw input and cleanup. Receipt metadata is separate from the production-reading seal; it adds no complete reply cache or new evidence class. Existing cases without a receipt retain their canonical provenance rules and are never upgraded by a matching UUID. Import establishes source and lifecycle eligibility only. It does not supply semantic blind marks, a genuine-kind verdict, accuracy, a grant, campaign activation or permission to bypass a spend guard.

A violation here is a committed file under docs/abstention/, docs/drift-levels/ or docs/drift-replay/ carrying a session id, prompt text, a recorded command or path, or model prose, or a scoring run that reaches the annotation store or the reading route.

Dispatch markdown is read from XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/spacedock-dispatch when available, with the legacy /tmp/spacedock-dispatch path retained for existing producers. The legacy location is in a shared temporary namespace where another local user can plant matching filenames; a filename match alone establishes neither ownership nor safe contents. Both use the same checks: O_NOFOLLOW, an anchored directory descriptor, realpath containment, regular files owned by the current uid, and refusal of group- or world-writable files. Files larger than 65,536 bytes are refused, including growth during the bounded read. The directory must also belong to the current uid. Platforms without the POSIX no-follow and ownership checks refuse this source. The 32 MiB semantic backfill limit applies to transcripts, not dispatch artifacts: a dispatch is a short Markdown file, and a transcript-sized allowance would let a planted artifact force a large read.

SPACEDOCK_BIN, when set, must be absolute; otherwise discovery resolves spacedock and also requires an absolute result. Accepting a relative override or resolution could execute a planted program when the working directory is on PATH. The child gets only PATH (the OS default), HOME and LANG, a fixed argv without a shell, and a two-second timeout. Discovery output over 64 KiB is rejected after capture; that is a parsing cap, not a streaming bound on subprocess output allocation.

The terminal registration file is created with mode 0600. Its reader checks that exact mode, uid, regular-file type and a 16 KiB limit on the opened descriptor, refusing symlinks. This capability trust check is POSIX-only; platforms without O_NOFOLLOW or getuid, including native Windows, refuse terminal registration and report why. Shutdown uses a separate bounded regular-file read of server_generation solely to decide whether to remove its own file. That cleanup read does not require ownership or mode checks and never consumes a token, port or lease; it preserves files with a different generation, nonregular files and files over the byte cap. The tmux adapter attaches with -r; it exposes no pane-input method, HTTP input/control requests refuse, and any client WebSocket frame closes the connection. Control lines and queued output each have a 64 KiB byte cap; overlong frames disconnect instead of growing the buffer. The snapshot retains at most 12,000 characters. These bounds supplement the 512-frame limit.

The optional xterm JavaScript and CSS are vendored and served at /assets/xterm.js and /assets/xterm.css. Only loopback peers with the ordinary origin checks can receive them, and both return 404 unless the interaction feature is enabled. Serving an asset starts no terminal.

The directions reader reads one more file: Antigravity's <antigravity.root>/brain/<conversation-id>/.system_generated/logs/transcript.jsonl, found by observer.resolve_directions. Only records whose type is USER_INPUT and whose source is USER_EXPLICIT are read, and of those only content, created_at, step_index and truncated_fields (transcripts.antigravity_direction). The planner's responses and thinking, tool calls, command records and their exit codes, system messages and conversation history are never parsed into anything. The file is read by the bounded tail read every transcript gets. It is refused when it, brain/<conversation-id>, .system_generated or logs is a link: its real path must be exactly that path under the real brain/ directory, so a link above brain/, such as a linked ~/.gemini, is followed and one below it is not. The conversation id is refused when it could climb out of brain/. The reads then open the file without following a link where the platform has O_NOFOLLOW, so a file swapped for a link after the check is not followed. Windows has no O_NOFOLLOW, and a parent directory swapped between the check and the open is not caught on any platform; both need write access to the owner's ~/.gemini already.

What is read is the words the person typed, the class every other harness's user messages are already in. They become steer facts in the observed record, under the same line bound and redaction as those, and the newest one is the row's title and last prompt when the CLI log does not carry one, which it does not in 1.2.11. They are also kept in semantic-work-history.json, cut to 112 characters, like every harness's directives, and --forget does not clear that store. After a reader allows a reading, those directions may be sent to the reading model with the rest of the record, whole up to 1,000 characters where the prompt has room, as every harness's user messages are, and the opt-in unasked lane, when switched on, may send them without a press, exactly as it sends a Claude Code, Codex or Pi session's user messages. The file is kept apart from observer.resolve_transcript on purpose: every caller of that one reads work or tool output (the observer, the gate and Spacedock boot scans, the working-directory read, workflow discovery), and none of them is handed this path, so "Compass can't read work from this harness" stays true. A direction the harness truncated is refused by "Add as a line" rather than saved as the whole of what was typed. The shapes behind this are in docs/captures/antigravity/transcript-shapes-1.2.11-macos.jsonl.

Every signal Compass sends today needs somebody in front of the machine: the macOS popup, the browser notification in a tab that is open, the board itself. DEC-4 ruled on 2026-09-02 that Compass may reach further, in one shape and no other. The operator supplies one endpoint, and Compass posts a count to it.

This is the section to read before building that, and it grants nothing on its own. The reach endpoint provides this capability. The outbound surface is the quota poll, the explicitly enabled observer model, and the operator-configured reach endpoint.

Why this needs its own section rather than an entry under Usage quota reads: that section's endpoint list is closed, and every entry on it is a vendor Compass chose and verified. Here the endpoint is one the operator pastes in, so the list cannot be closed and there is no vendor to vouch for. What bounds the exposure is the payload rather than the destination, which is the opposite way round from the quota poll and is why the two are not one rule.

The bounds, all of which hold together:

• Off until a URL exists. There is no default endpoint and no provider Compass picked. With no URL configured nothing is posted, which is the shipped state today. DEC-4 refused a first-class push through a provider Compass chooses, so an endpoint the operator already uses, ntfy, Pushover or a Slack webhook being the common ones, is the whole mechanism.
• One destination, and it is the operator's. Compass posts to that URL and nowhere else, follows no redirect, and ignores proxy environment variables. Those last two are the rules the four forwarders and the MCP server already hold to; the loopback check beside them is the one rule that cannot carry over, since the whole point here is a destination that is not this machine. So a redirect cannot move the destination after the operator chose it, and that is what replaces the loopback guard rather than sitting beside it.
• Counts and states, never a session. The payload carries how many sessions need a human and how many finished and were never read. It carries no session name, no project, no title, no path, no prompt text and no request text. A person who gets a nudge opens the dashboard to find out which session it was, and the count is the whole message.
• Two counts, not three, and the missing one is deliberate. DEC-4's own wording offered a third, how many sessions went quiet, and what is missing is not the elapsed reading but the threshold. last_activity is published on every row and the board renders an idle duration from it, so now - last_activity is a reading the runtime already takes. What nothing decides is when quiet becomes worth a nudge: config.py holds no such threshold, and events.py's stale is a different fact, a finish stamp contradicted by later activity rather than a session that went quiet. A third count would therefore have to name its own threshold, and naming one is a product decision this section is not the place to make. If DEC-4's third count is wanted, that threshold is the work, and it is smaller than it looks.
• Throttled, and a change is what triggers it. At most one post per configured interval, with a change in the counts as the trigger rather than a timer, so a board that is not changing sends nothing and a flapping one cannot turn into a stream.
• The URL is a credential. A webhook URL is a bearer token wearing a path: whoever holds it can post to the operator's own phone. It is never logged, never echoed, never served on the loopback port, and never printed by --diagnose, which is the handling Usage quota reads gives a vendor token. Redaction has to cover the whole URL and not only a query string, because these providers put the secret in the path.
• Off switch. The feature ships --no-reach with it: a flag that disables the pathway for a run regardless of the stored setting, mirroring --no-usage and --no-history at every one of their sites, including the branch that forwards flags to a respawned daemon, so a restart cannot re-enable what the operator disabled.

A violation of any of those is a security bug: a post with no URL configured, a post to any destination but the configured one, a redirect followed, a payload carrying any field beyond the counts named above, the URL reaching a log line, a --diagnose line or a loopback response, or a post rate above the configured interval.

What is accepted rather than solved: the endpoint is a third party, and what it does with a count is outside Compass's control. That is the same trust the operator extends to that provider by using it, and it is a real transfer. A count is a small thing to leak and it is not nothing. How many sessions on this machine need a human, and when, says that the operator is working and roughly how hard, to anyone who can read the notification stream. That is stated here rather than implied.

The server writes eleven files, all under ~/.compass (relocatable with COMPASS_HOME, authoritative when nonblank): compass-<port>.json, recording the running instance (pid, port, started, log, python); compass-<port>.log, where a detached (--daemon) instance's output goes; compass-dismissals.json, the sessions the reader marked handled, described in Dismissals below; observer/<harness>_<sid>.json, the sidecar GET /api/observe records when a reader opens that panel for a session, named in invariant 2 above; compass-history.json, the history of what this server observed, described in Local history above; compass-annotations.json, the typed or explicitly adopted goal, typed expected outcome lines and readings taken against them, named in invariant 2 above and turned off by --no-annotations; compass-deliveries.json, what became of each notification this board raised, described in Delivery records below; compass-departures.json, what an unasked reading raised, described in Unasked readings below and written only with that feature switched on; compass-ends.json, the session ends this board observed, described in Session ends below; ci-read-off, the marker the page's switch for the pull request CI read leaves when it is off, described in Pull request CI reads above, which holds one line and is removed when the switch goes back on; and semantic-work-history.json, the operator-cockpit prototype's own store, described under the prototype below and not reached by --forget. One forwarder writes a twelfth, in the same directory and named in invariant 2 above: statusline_hook.py keeps statusline-<harness>-<session>.json per conversation, holding a normalized state name and a timestamp, so a status line that fires many times a turn posts once. The directory is created 0o700 because the log can carry local paths: uncaught tracebacks land there, not just Python-level prints. Nothing ever removes or rotates the log: a --stop (or a killed process) deletes the state file but leaves the log behind, since it is the record of a detached run, so ~/.compass accumulates one log file per port indefinitely.

POST /api/shutdown stops the server and is gated by the same _local_ok() checks (Host, Origin, Sec-Fetch-Site) that already protect /api/notify. It adds no new exposure of consequence: any local process that can reach the port could already read every session on the machine through /api/data, and can now also stop the server. That is a smaller capability inside the same trust boundary described above, not a new one.

GET /api/overlays reads the event overlay ledger and is a diagnostic, described in docs/design-needs-input.md. It carries no session content: an overlay is a harness name, the collector key for the session, a state kind, three timestamps, and a subagent id the hook supplied, capped at ingress. The collector key is Claude's eight-character transcript prefix and the whole session UUID for Codex, Antigravity and Gemini CLI, and /api/data already publishes both, along with titles and prompts this route never sees. It applies the strict same-origin check rather than the relaxed one /api/data uses for navigations, and answers 503 when the process runs without a coordinator.

The same route serves the bounded record of state disputes, where an event overruled a session the dashboard had read as waiting. A record holds the same fields plus the two activity timestamps the reducer compared, and no more: the row's title and its state detail are deliberately absent, because a state detail can carry a permission prompt's own text, an open question's, or a plan's first line.

--unasked-readings is off by default, and it is the only feature here that sends your words and your session's record to a model with nobody watching. Everything else that reads a session with a model happens because somebody pressed a control and saw a disclosure first. This one happens because the operator passed a flag, so the flag's own help text is where that disclosure lives.

What it sends is less than POST /api/reading sends, on the same path: the goal you typed, and the observed record the reading is allowed to read, through a supervised Claude Code or Codex CLI on your machine under your capacity. Claude Code reads Claude Code sessions; Codex reads Codex sessions. On other harnesses the lane prefers Claude Code, where a pressed reading prefers Codex. If the preferred provider is unavailable or unqualified on this machine, the other serves. A failed launch never tries a second provider. That record carries your messages in the session whole, up to 1,000 characters each where the prompt has room, as a pressed reading's does. It never sends what the agent said: a pressed reading of a Claude Code session carries the agent's own messages since 2026-10-03 (Observer model calls), and the lane leaves them out, entry and words alike. Your expected outcome lines are never sent by it, and a session with lines and no goal is not read by it at all (item 12 of DEC-24). The lane uses reading_policy.GuardedModel, the same guarded model seam as a requested reading. It sends no outcome lines or agent messages, and no tool output but one kind: on Claude Code, reading a Claude Code session where Compass can name the destination, a check or command that failed goes with its masked line, its exit status and the last 180 characters of its output, as for a pressed reading, except from a shell call that ran more than one thing, which sends the line and exit status alone. A check that passed, a run with no result, a CI pass and a command that cannot fail never go, and neither does anything on the Codex route, whose stored Allow covers words. The reading's cutoff says only failures were sent. Claude Code runs under the owner's 2026-10-02 acceptance and needs no separate grant. Codex sends only with a stored Allow for the current destination, checked again at the seam. With no grant, after Pause model calls, under the model off switch, or after a destination change, nothing is sent and the skip is logged. The session's Drift card shows the grant and a toggle to allow or revoke it, with the words and destination disclosed beside it. Attention points to that toggle when a session with a typed goal is waiting for permission. The grant covers every session routed to Codex at that destination; Analyze and Resume cannot grant it. A revoke cancels this daemon's in-flight Codex check and refuses subsequent sends; Pause does the same for either provider. A call already sent cannot be unsent. A cancelled call that spent capacity keeps a withdrawn check row for the caps without publishing a finding or claiming a completed check. The lane does not charge Analyze's budget; its own caps below bound it.

Start with --unasked-readings to enable the lane. Without that flag neither the toggle nor the Attention cue appears. The flag remains off by default; the delivery and qualification preconditions for changing that default are unchanged.

It is bounded three ways, and the bounds are the posture rather than a preference. One reading runs at a time for the whole board, so a board where forty annotated sessions cross a state boundary together starts one subprocess and not forty. A fifteen-minute per-session floor holds a second reading of the same session off, because a session can cross a boundary repeatedly inside a minute. And two counts of CHECKS RUN, per session and rolling per day (three per session, twelve per rolling day), stop the lane entirely once spent. Counting only what was raised was tried and is wrong: a board whose sessions are all healthy raises nothing, so nothing advances the count and the lane runs forever. Measured on that version, five sessions ran 480 subprocesses in a simulated day against a daily cap of 12. A spent count is stated on the board rather than passed over in silence: the reader is by construction not present, so a limit being spent and a session found to be on track must never render alike.

~/.compass/compass-departures.json holds every check the lane ran, opened 0600 with the mode in the open call and written through a temp file and os.replace. Every check and not only the ones that found something: a check that found nothing still spent a subprocess, and a store of findings alone bounds nothing, which is what the caps count. It is also the only way the board can say whether a particular session was looked at, as against whether the feature was switched on.

A record holds a harness key, a session id, the server's clock, and the annotation revision and evidence window it read against. A check that raised something also holds the constraint and clause that departed, the model's own sentence about it, and the evidence ids it cited. That sentence is prose a model wrote about your session, which is the same class of content the annotation store already holds and is bounded the same way. On a Claude Code session it may quote a line of a failed check's output; it is scrubbed as a pressed reading's explanation is, of credential shapes and of the call's masked values, and the same text reaches the local notification. Nothing sends it anywhere. With the switch off the file is never created.

The switch governs writing, not reading. A file that already exists is read on every collection and on every GET /api/annotations whether or not --unasked-readings was passed, and every raise it holds is published on the row it belongs to, so turning the feature off stops new checks and retracts no record. The board says as much rather than leaving the reader to infer it from a panel that has gone quiet.

Discarding what you asked of a session withdraws its raises too. The constraint, the clause, the model's sentence, the evidence ids and the producer's account of what it read are blanked in place and the row is marked withdrawn, so nothing quoting the words you took back survives on disk or on GET /api/annotations. The row itself stays, holding only that a check ran and when, because the row is what the two caps above count and deleting it would refund the subprocess it spent.

Discarding here means the clear field of a POST /api/annotate body, which deletes every revision and, after a clear that took at least one revision, the session's stored summary. The store counts what it took under its own lock (the reply's removed field, null on any other arm), so a save from another tab that the page had not yet seen is taken too and never leaves the summary standing. The reply's summary field says deleted, absent, stopped (nothing stored and a running job stopped), a refusal token (unwritable, unavailable), or untouched, and the page's sentence claims only that outcome. It is reachable from the board as discard everything, a control under the goal and the expected outcome on the session page's drift block, offered only where a revision is stored and armed by one press before a second performs it. The board's own clear control beside the goal, and remove beside an outcome line, are a different act: each empties one box or drops one line, and the save that follows appends a revision without those words. The words you typed are still in the earlier revisions and a raise quoting them is still quoting them, so nothing is withdrawn. Naming both is the point, because the shorter name is the one printed on the button, and the board now says so where the reader meets the two controls rather than only here.

A session's end is the one fact a final reading rests on, and until 2026-09-12 the board held it only in the memory of the process that saw the SessionEnd hook fire. Measured 2026-09-11: three sessions that read as ended came back after a restart as merely quiet, and no final reading could be taken on any of them again. So the coordinator now writes the end through to ~/.compass/compass-ends.json, opened 0600 with the mode in the open call and written through a temp file and os.replace, and a collection reads it back onto a row the running coordinator never saw end.

A record holds a harness key, a session id and the harness's own stamp for the end. Nothing else: no title, no prompt, no project path, no reason. One record per session id, the later stamp winning, and at most 512 of them, the same count the coordinator's own memory refuses new ends at, so the file can never restore more than a running board would have held. Nothing sends it anywhere. A corrupt, truncated or over-cap file degrades to "no ends", and every row then reads exactly as it did before this store existed; one malformed entry is dropped on its own without discarding the rest.

What a stored end may not do is invent one. Absence means the end was not observed by any run of this board, never that the session is still open, which is the same reading the coordinator's memory gives. A stored end also loses to later activity: a session resumed while the board was down produced no session_started this process could see, so a file written more than the activity grace after its end is the only tell that the id is in use again, and the stored end is then not applied. Activity here is whatever the row counts as activity, which is wider than the session's own transcript: on Claude it is the newest of the task file, the parent transcript's newest conversation record, the subagent transcripts, the agent files and the child sessions. The parent is read by its newest user or assistant record rather than its mtime, because Claude Code appends bookkeeping records such as away_summary after a turn stops, and read as mtime one retired the stop it followed. The exposure accepted with that guard is stated rather than solved. A harness that writes any of those after SessionEnd would have its restored end dropped, and the row reads as it does today, no end observed, which is honest rather than wrong. A live end, observed by the running coordinator, takes no such guard, because the coordinator retires it itself the moment the id is seen in use.

A Claude Code turn stop may also be read from the session's own transcript (owner, 2026-10-02): its top-level stop_hook_summary, from the bounded tail the collector already reads. Nothing more is read, stored or sent, and it is never written as an observed stop (finished_at). Whoever can write the transcript can forge one, which is the local-process exposure accepted throughout. The worst it buys is a reading the reader pressed for, saying it covers a turn that had not finished. A summary written after a hook's feedback, which keeps the turn going, is refused by the collector and by the scorer's transcript vouching above alike.

The coordinator is the only writer, so two flags govern the file by construction rather than by a switch of their own. --no-events leaves it unread and unwritten, exactly as it leaves the focus command with no capability: with no coordinator there is nothing to write an end and the collection then reads none back. --diagnose builds no coordinator either, so it reads the harness stores and never creates or touches this one. --forget deletes it along with the history store, because the command removes the machine's memory of what it observed and a durable end is exactly that class. It is refused while a dashboard is running on the port, and the history store's refusal is what covers it: a live coordinator still holds the ends it observed in memory and keeps publishing them, so the delete would change the file and not the board.

Two dashboards on one machine share the one file, and two ends landing in the same instant resolve last-writer-wins on the whole file, the exposure Dismissals below already accepts; the write lock is intra-process, as it is for the delivery record.

Raising a notification writes one file: ~/.compass/compass-deliveries.json, opened 0600 with the mode in the open call and written through a temp file and os.replace, exactly as the dismissal store is.

A record holds a harness key, a session id, the server's clock at the attempt, which producer raised it, and one of five outcome tokens. Nothing else: no title, no prompt, no project path, no question text and no notification body. What the operating system did with the banner is not in it either, because nothing reports that back. Nothing sends it anywhere.

POST /api/lane is the one route that writes the browser half, and what it refuses is the point. The page may report that a notification lane exists in it and may never report a delivery, so the body carries two scalars about the tab and a body naming a session is refused with a 400 rather than having its session dropped. The record it writes is one timestamp for the whole board, held in memory and never on disk. It is gated by _local_ok() alone and carries no capability, for the reason /api/dismiss does not. What a forged request buys is worth stating in the right direction, because an earlier draft of this paragraph had it backwards. A forge stamps the server's clock at the moment it arrives, so every raise already on record renders the sentence saying the report came after it, which claims nothing. It is the raises AFTER the forge that render the reassuring sentence, and the most it can say is that a tab reported a working notification lane some minutes before the raise. That is a statement about a tab, never about a delivery, and the negative sentence it displaces already claimed nothing either way. A local account that can post this can already read every session on the machine through /api/data.

Marking a session handled writes one file: ~/.compass/compass-dismissals.json, opened 0600 with the mode in the open call so it is never briefly world-readable, written through a temp file and os.replace so a reader mid-write sees the old file or the new one.

It holds a harness key, a session id, and two timestamps per entry. Nothing else: no title, no prompt, no project path, no state detail. Nothing sends it anywhere either. The one route that reads it out is GET /api/cleared, on the loopback port, and what that serves back to the page is strictly less than /api/data already does. It applies the strict same-origin check rather than the relaxed one /api/data uses for navigations, and answers 503 under --no-dismiss.

Two properties bound what a forged POST /api/dismiss can do. The body carries no timestamp: the watermark that decides how long a mark holds is the server's own clock at the moment it lands, so there is no value a caller can send that hides a row past that session's next write. And the file is capped at 256 entries, oldest mark evicted first, so nothing can grow it without limit. A corrupt, truncated or over-cap file degrades to "no dismissals", with every row visible, rather than raising, and one malformed entry is dropped on its own without discarding the rest.

To clear it, delete the file, or use the page's handled chip to restore individual sessions. --no-dismiss leaves it unread and unwritten for a run.

Two exposures come with the feature and are accepted rather than solved. The first is that clearing a session suppresses its desktop popup as well as its row, including a session still waiting on an answer, which is what the control is for when the gate was answered somewhere else. It is also the most a forged POST /api/dismiss can achieve: one session's alert stays silent until that session writes again, and its standing question is still on the board the moment the row is restored. The second is that two dashboards on one machine share the one file. Each picks up the other's marks on its next collection, but two marks landing in the same instant resolve last-writer-wins on the whole file, and the losing mark is lost. docs/design-dismissals.md records why that race is stated rather than solved.

The board is rebuilt from the harness stores on every start, so a restart used to leave it with no memory of sessions that already ran. Compass keeps its own history of what it observed, on this machine, so the board can open knowing what happened before it was last closed.

One rule fixes the rest: the store holds nothing the live snapshot does not already serve. What is kept is session identity, states and the transitions between them, gate open and close, turn boundaries and their timings, tool names and counts, and the derived two-segment project label the board groups by: it is published on every row, it is capped at the last two segments rather than being a path, and both panels that read the history group by it, so the history cannot be seeded without it. Never a raw working directory.

What is never written to it, under any circumstances and with no exception available:

• Tool input, in whole or in part, including any substring of a command.
• Paths. Neither a session's working directory nor any path a tool touched.
• File contents, of any file.

Prompt-derived text is avoided by default and allowlisted per field when a feature needs it. Until 2026-09-04 this was a fourth outright prohibition, and DEC-13 replaced it with the allowlist below. What did not change is that the store keeps no prompt-derived text nobody named: a carrier absent from the allowlist is banned exactly as firmly as tool input is, and the allowlist is a list of decisions rather than a category.

The reason the ban became an allowlist is that it was stricter than the product around it and the asymmetry was doing no work. The dashboard already publishes prompt text. Published text below owns the enumeration, and the carriers that reach the page raw are these ten: title, last_prompt, state_detail, project_key, project_name, worktree, tasks[].subject, tasks[].activeForm, subagents[].name and subagents[].parent. More reaches the page through records.safe_text, including the observer's derived goal and Codex's title, which is a prompt because Codex writes no generated title. And GET /api/observe already writes prompt-derived text to disk as a sidecar under ~/.compass/observer/, redacted on the way in and written owner-only. Prompt text on disk in Compass's own state was therefore already a shipped pattern with a review behind it, and the history store was the one place holding a harder line than the surface it records.

A field carrying prompt-derived text may be kept only when every one of these holds:

1. it is named in the allowlist below, on its own line, with the feature that needs it;
2. it is already published on the live board, so the one rule above, that the store holds nothing the live snapshot does not already serve, still holds unchanged;
3. it has passed records.redact_secrets, through safe_text or redact_clip, before it is bounded and never after, the order Published text requires and for the reason given there;
4. it is bounded to a cap this section states;
5. it lives inside the retention window, the size cap, --no-history and --forget described below, with no separate lifetime of its own;
6. its admission bumps history.SCHEMA_VERSION and appends the old value to history.READABLE_VERSIONS, so an upgrade reads the records already on disk instead of discarding them. Every admission is additive, because each field is re-validated on its own and a record written before a field existed is a record with that field absent. The store used to compare the version for equality, which meant the bump that came with the first admission would have wiped fourteen days of history on upgrade with no signal but a reset reason nobody reads. A version outside that tuple is still refused, which is the case the header exists to report.

The allowlist, one line per field:

• annotation_goal, for the outcome baseline DEC-15b admits. What the reader typed one session should achieve, at most 1,000 characters as the annotation store bounds it and at most 256 as this store does, which keeps a longer goal's opening. Published on every row, redacted by records.safe_text inside annotations.annotate before either bound is applied, and kept so the words a reading was read against reopen after a restart and after the live row leaves the board.
• annotation_line_1, the first line of the expected outcome: one thing the reader typed the session should produce, at most 240 characters on one line as the annotation store bounds it and at most 256 as this store does. Same redaction and same reason as the goal.
• annotation_line_2, the second outcome line. Same bound, same redaction, same reason.
• annotation_line_3, the third outcome line. Same bound, same redaction, same reason.
• annotation_line_4, the fourth outcome line. Same bound, same redaction, same reason.
• annotation_line_5, the fifth outcome line. Same bound, same redaction, same reason.
• annotation_line_6, the sixth and last outcome line. Same bound, same redaction, same reason.
• first_prompt, the first recorded user prompt offered by DEC-22 so a reader can choose the original goal without retyping it. Published for Claude Code and Codex, redacted before clipping to 140 characters plus the clipping mark, and scrubbed to the same bound on history reload. Its existing history retention, size cap, --no-history and --forget apply unchanged.

DEC-22 also admits an explicitly adopted latest or first prompt as annotation_goal, and, since the owner's ruling of 2026-10-01 (amended), one of up to five of the reader's own prompts chosen from the observed record, under the closed source token chosen-prompt. The five are published as prompt_choices on the focused project context only, each redacted by records.safe_text before it is bounded to the goal's 1,000 characters, and they are neither stored nor admitted here: no history field holds the list, and only the one the reader adopts is kept, as annotation_goal. A choice is resolved again on the server by its fact id, and refused unless its displayed text and time still match an offered source; a copied correction, a harness control and a local command are never offered. Authorship is inferred from the harness user-message shape and injected-prompt filter, which fails open; it is not proof a person wrote the message. The server resolves the published source again, requires its displayed text and source time to match, and refuses implicit adoption over an existing goal. Adoption uses the same 1,000-character, one-line annotation writer for the goal. Its closed source token and source time survive with the revision and the reading that used it; an explicit goal save makes typed words instead.

Amended by the owner, approving the Analyze drift plan, 2026-10-04: the menu's five choices are built only when the reader opens it. A listed later direction may also be explicitly chosen with "Make it the goal". The server resolves its fact id in the same session's own source record, requires a person-authored message after the goal's direction floor, and verifies the displayed words, source time and saved revision again before adoption. Claude and Codex use a stable, bounded backward 64 MiB search so recent messages in long files and paged entries can be reached after they leave the live tail or semantic history. Missing, changing and ambiguous sources are refused. A duplicate outside the consumed byte or clock allowance is not checked. The draft asks whether to keep or clear standing outcome lines and saves only on Save intent. No list or whole source text is stored. Every offered goal choice masks named credential forms before raw line breaks are folded and before the goal cap is applied. This goal-only scan is uncached; Analyze keeps its own words. The prompt lookup returns at most 4,096 source facts from the newest 64 MiB and opening 32 MiB, sharing a two-second clock. It checks conflicting copies of retained identities throughout those consumed ranges. The menu still publishes at most five choices and no whole records. prompt_scan adds only a state and byte or clock stop token, so a partial read is disclosed beside the choices. Known source clipping remains an excerpt even after whitespace folds. Adopted goals never authorize unasked checks, even when the same revision has a typed output.

The history record also keeps first_prompt_at, annotation_goal_source, annotation_goal_source_at and annotation_line_1_source to annotation_line_6_source, scalar provenance for the admitted words: each line's source is the closed token typed or entry, and the entry it came from is not kept here. Schema 4 reads versions 1, 2 and 3 without discarding their observations, and a record's one annotation_output comes forward as line 1. Six line fields make an annotated session's records larger than one did, so the size cap below ages other sessions out sooner; the owner accepted that on 2026-09-24. Unknown versions still refuse. First prompts come from a bounded two-MiB transcript-prefix scan, excluding generated titles, compaction summaries and recognized injected messages. An unread prefix yields no first prompt; it never substitutes a later record. A first prompt that is a harness control such as /clear is still the first prompt, published with the boolean first_prompt_control. No goal is drafted from it, none is drafted from a later record in its place, and the server refuses to adopt it. Source text is at most 140 characters plus the clipping mark. The page names an excerpt rather than silently adopting a longer prompt. Missing source times prevent adoption.

A Claude Code session that states a goal with /goal has it read from the transcript's own records, not from the prompt: the goal_status attachment that carries the condition, and the local_command record that prints the command's answer. The read is forward and incremental over at most the last 8 MiB, so a goal set before that and untouched since publishes nothing: a reader who opens such a session cold sees no detected goal and can type or adopt one as usual. A clear is the same sentinel with met: true, which is the only trace of one in an interactive session. A failed: true verdict, which Claude Code writes for a goal it gave up on, is not a verdict, and a measured run showed it ends the goal: Compass stops holding the goal, publishes the give-up as its own claim (session_goal_gave_up, {at, reason}) and never calls it met. The condition is published as session_goal, {text, at}, masked by the same prose masking a later direction gets and folded to one line, and a condition over 4,000 characters, the limit Claude Code itself enforces, publishes nothing. A condition longer than the Goal field holds (1,000 characters) also carries offered, the bounded excerpt an adoption stores, and cut: true, so the page marks it cut and an adoption names exactly the words the store keeps; a shorter one carries neither key. A subagent's record is never the session's goal. Once the evaluator has decided, the latest met: true verdict joins the goal as verdict, {met, at, reason}. The reason is the evaluator model's own sentence, so it gets the same prose masking, is folded to one line and is cut at 500 characters with an ellipsis. The page draws it quoted, as text, under the label "The harness's claim", and never as Compass's own words. A not-met verdict is not read: the evaluator repeats it on every iteration while the goal is open, so it is progress rather than an end state, and the card reports only the end state. Like a first prompt the goal is not in session history, and it is stored only if the reader adopts it as their goal under the source token session-goal.

A clear and a give-up are published beside the goal and never as it: session_goal_cleared ({at}) and session_goal_gave_up ({at, reason}), and a goal that followed another carries earlier ({how, at}, with how one of replaced, met or gave-up). None of them holds the earlier goal's words. The give-up reason is the evaluator model's own sentence and takes the same masking, one line and 500-character bound as a verdict's reason; its iterations, tokens and duration are not published. Like the goal, none of it is in session history, and a read that starts mid-file publishes none of it, since a missing value means unknown.

The verdict is a claim and Compass tests it. The test is code over the writes and checks the record already holds, with no model call and nothing new sent anywhere. It is stored beside a reading's criteria as goal_verdict, three closed values and a list of at most three fact ids, and a stored value outside them, or a pair the test never gives (a pass with no fact behind it), is dropped on read and the reading renders without it. The verdict never lowers a drift level and never counts as a passing check. A reason that names nothing the record can show is "unconfirmed", never "disputed", because a capped listing cannot prove absence.

The test also looks for text the reason puts in double quotes in the output of a check the record holds: only the redacted last 180 characters the press already reads for one recorded check whose call ran that check and nothing else that may print, never a read, an echo or another command's output, and never more than the press already held. The search needs no grant, since it sends nothing, and keeps nothing: the stored answer is the check entries and a count of one to eight, never a span or any output. A quoted span that holds a credential shape is not searched, nor is one the check's own command line holds, and a match only says where the text is, so the answer stays "unconfirmed" and never raises a level.

A Codex session that states a goal with /goal has it read from the rollout's own records the same way, into the same session_goal, {text, at}, with the same masking, the same 4,000-character bound, the same excerpt keys and the same 8 MiB forward read. The goal is the objective a thread_goal_updated event carries, timed by the goal's own createdAt; Codex writes that event for a set, an edit, a pause and a resume, never for a goal the model creates itself, so a goal the model wrote is never published as the reader's. A clear is the User cleared the goal. line Codex writes in its own <codex_internal_context> wrapper, published as session_goal_cleared only when a goal was held, because Codex writes the same line for a clear with no goal and before every new goal. An objective over 4,000 characters is stored by Codex as a sentence naming a file it wrote the words to; that sentence publishes nothing, and the file is not read. The <codex_internal_context> messages are Codex's own wording and are never read as a prompt the reader typed.

Codex records a goal met only in goals_1.sqlite, beside sessions/ under CODEX_HOME (~/.codex by default), so that file is read too (amended 2026-10-27). It is opened read-only through SQLite's mode=ro URI, and the database is never written, though SQLite's WAL index (-shm) records the reader as it does for any reader. Codex keeps the file in WAL mode, and once its last process exits the -wal and -shm are gone and a mode=ro open fails; with no pending -wal data the file is then read as immutable, as the Antigravity stores are. One query reads the thread id, objective and the two timestamps of rows whose status is complete and whose objective is within the 4,000-character goal bound, at most 10,000 of them, and nothing else in the file: not the token budget, the tokens or time used, or any other status. A row attaches to a Codex row's session_goal as verdict ({met, at, reason}, with an empty reason, because Codex records none) only when its thread id is the session's id and its set time and masked words match the goal the rollout published, so an edited, replaced or cleared goal never inherits another's completion. The working model marks its own goal complete, so the verdict is weaker than Claude Code's evaluator, and it is published and tested the same way: as the harness's claim, which a reading checks and which never moves a level. A missing file, a build without sqlite3, or a read that fails publishes no verdict; a failed read is kept as a store error, once per change to the file rather than once per row. Codex records no give-up, so a Codex goal never carries one.

An Antigravity session that states a goal with /goal has it read from the person's own typed input in brain/<conversation>/.system_generated/logs/transcript_full.jsonl, a file beside the transcript.jsonl the directions are already read from that holds the same records with no field cut. Only a USER_INPUT from USER_EXPLICIT whose request opens /goal and whose metadata carries agy's fixed /goal is a [Slash Command] paragraph counts, and the condition is the request after the command. It is published as the same session_goal, with the same masking and its own 16,000-character bound (agy accepted 5,000 and refused nothing, so the 4,000 the other two use would drop real goals; a longer one publishes nothing), the same excerpt keys and the same 8 MiB forward read, and the same symlink checks guard the path. agy records no end to a goal: a met or cancelled goal is a marker in the model's own reply, which Compass does not read, so an Antigravity goal carries no verdict, no clear and no earlier, and the latest /goal stays the session's goal. The server adopts an Antigravity row's session-goal and still adopts none of its prompts.

The revision number beside them, annotation_revision, is in the record and not on this list. It is an integer the board derives, not text anybody typed.

Reserved and deliberately not admitted, because nothing produces one and this store may not hold what the live snapshot does not already serve: assessment_at, assessment_cutoff, assessment_revision_read, assessment_goal_result and assessment_output_result. The names are recorded so the admission that adds them does not re-argue the naming, and each still needs its own line here.

A test binds this list to history.PROMPT_TEXT_ALLOWLIST and to the record's own field set: an entry with no record behind it fails, and none of the carriers named in history.PROMPT_DERIVED_CARRIERS may enter the record without an entry here. That tuple is a hand-kept list of names, so a carrier it does not yet name is held out by this section and by review rather than by the test. Adding a prompt-derived field to the record means adding its name there in the same change.

The store may never widen the set of fields it keeps otherwise: a field that is not already published on the live board is not a field history may keep. That condition used to run one way only, because the board published prompt text while the never-list banned it outright; with the allowlist the exception is gone and the condition runs both ways for an allowlisted field. The derived two-segment project label is kept by the kept-list above while the never-list still bans the paths it is derived from.

The store lives under Compass's own directory, next to the dismissals file, and is written the way that file and the state file are. It is opened owner-only with the mode in the open call, so it is never briefly world-readable, and it is written through a temp file and a rename, so a reader mid-write sees the old file or the new one. The mode is advisory, exactly as it is for the state file and the dismissal store: Windows ignores it, and root reads it either way.

Retention is 14 days by default, with a size cap, and both are configurable. Eviction is by age first, oldest observation dropped first, so a session that fell out of the window cannot be brought back by raising the cap. The age window and the size cap bound the store together, and raising either does not stop the other applying.

The store is on by default. A digest of what happened while the user was away exists only if the history was being kept before they left, and Compass already writes local state on the user's behalf by default in the dismissals file, and writes the observer sidecar on demand when a reader opens that panel for a session. The trust cost of that default is retention, and the bounds above and the delete below are what answer it.

The off switch is --no-history. It mirrors --no-git at every one of that flag's sites, including the branch that forwards flags to a respawned daemon, so a restart cannot re-enable a store the user disabled. With the store off nothing is written and nothing is read back: the board opens with no memory, exactly as it does today.

--forget deletes the store and exits. It is a one-shot command, in the family of --stop and --status rather than the family of per-run switches, because what it does is not reversible by running the next command without it. It removes the file whether or not the store is enabled, and it adds no endpoint: nothing over the loopback port can delete history. It is refused while a dashboard answers on the port it names, and says to --stop that instance first: a running server holds its own copy of the history in memory and would write the deleted records back on the next transition, which is the one way a delete could report success and not have happened. A dashboard on some other port is out of that probe's reach, so the recording lane also drops its copy when the file it read has gone.

A store that cannot be read is discarded rather than repaired. Corrupt bytes, an unreadable file, a version the running build does not understand: in every case the store is dropped, the board starts empty, and the header reports the reset, so a silent loss of history is never mistaken for a machine that did nothing.

Nothing in the store ever leaves the machine. It adds no outbound request, no forwarder and no endpoint; the network posture described in Scope is unchanged by it.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: a field in the store that the live board does not publish, prompt-derived text in a field the allowlist above does not name, tool input or a path or file content reaching it by any route, a write that is not owner-only or not through a temp file and a rename, an unbounded store or one evicted by anything but age first, a store still written while the feature is off, a respawned daemon that re-enables it, a history file reachable over the port, or any part of the store leaving the machine.

Claude Code and Codex after-tool hooks report a fixed set of destructive command shapes. A report says a hook observed that shape after a tool call. It does not prove the action succeeded. The command stays in the hook process; session detail and Attention show fixed labels only. Coverage requires installed hooks. No matching reports received; missing hooks and unmatched commands can look the same. Unsupported harnesses and disabled runs say so on the page.

The rule here is an allowlist rather than a prohibition, for the reason DEC-13 gave the history store: a flat "never" the code already breaks is a contract narrower than the system, and a reader who finds the counter-example stops believing the rest of the document. So the honest form is a list of named reads. Of an observed session's tool calls, the runtime parses the input at exactly the places below and nowhere else, and each reduces what it read to a bounded summary at parse time rather than keeping anything raw. One further read exists and is governed elsewhere: the ask lane's own ask_operator tool parses the arguments of the call a session makes to Compass, which is a tool Compass owns rather than one it observed, and The ask lane states its bounds:

• claude_data.input_summary reads two fields of two Claude tools. ExitPlanMode carries plan, and what is kept is its first usable line, which is the plan's own title in practice. AskUserQuestion carries questions, and what is kept is each item's question. Both go through records.safe_text and are bounded at config.input_summary_cap_chars, 160 characters. The pair of tool names is claude_data.INPUT_TOOLS, and a tool absent from it has its input read by nothing.
• transcripts.codex_plan reads Codex's update_plan payload, in both shapes Codex writes: the arguments of a function_call and the input of a custom_tool_call. What is kept is the plan steps and their statuses, bounded at transcripts.CODEX_PLAN_MAX_STEPS steps, 64, with each step's text through records.safe_text and bounded at transcripts.CODEX_PLAN_STEP_CAP_CHARS, 160 characters. Codex caps its own plan well below both, and the record is untrusted input, so the bound is against a malformed one rather than against ordinary use.

The operator-cockpit prototype also reads dispatch evidence:

• collectors.codex._child_assignment reads spawn_agent and followup_task arguments from the bounded transcript tail, matching a child task or target before summarizing its message.
• project_context._tool_call_events and project_context._tool_support read Pi bash and subagent arguments for dispatch events, assignment summaries, and counts. The first reads through project_context._call_arguments, which the Pi check reader shares, so the check results add no expression. That reader is two named reads. project_context._pi_bash_check_runs parses a bash command to find the runner, and keeps the runner and result under DEC-23's rules, publishing a title Compass writes ("2 validation checks failed"), never the command or its output. It reads the last 180 characters of the result text, redacted first, and the error flag, and nothing of that tail reaches a prompt. project_context._pi_changes reads the name of every Pi tool call and parses every bash command, check or not, against DEC-23's read-only list; what it keeps is only whether a change followed a check.
• project_context.codex_dispatch_events reads spawn_agent arguments to join a task name to a readable dispatch artifact. Its backward scan is capped at 32 MiB by default; project event output is capped at 100 rows and semantic lines at 112 characters.
• project_context.claude_tool_reports reads a Claude Code session's Bash calls and the path of its Write, Edit, MultiEdit and NotebookEdit calls (file_path, or notebook_path), for the checks it ran and the files it wrote, its subagents' calls included through the same expression. Of a file-write call it reads the path, and of its result the error flag alone. Since 2026-10-23 it also reads the skill name of a Skill call (never its arguments), and of a Bash call's result only the structured toolUseResult.gitOperation.pr (number, url, action), never the command or its output. Both go through closed shapes and publish nothing that does not match them. Tool output in a Claude Code reading states its bounds and where the result may go.

These are evidence reads, not command execution. In total, eight expressions in compass_runtime reach an input payload. The counts and module names are checked by test_documentation. DEC-23's named read for the checks a Claude Code session ran is the eighth, and its entry states its bounds. The prototype has no additional switch that disables just these dispatch reads.

A shape match is a different kind of read from those. It happens in the hook, inside the operator's own harness process, against a payload that process already has, and what it keeps is a verdict rather than a summary. It changes nothing about what the server or the collectors read from a transcript, and it adds no disk store, no path and no subprocess.

The initial literal forms are fixed below. Only Claude Code and Codex PostToolUse, tool Bash, tool_input.command are admitted by the measured captures. Claude's nonzero call emitted PostToolUseFailure; Codex's emitted PostToolUse, so neither a match nor its absence establishes success.

Each whole command may have one rtk, rtk proxy or rtk bypass prefix. No other wrappers, executable paths, environment assignments, shell composition, expansion, redirects, escapes or multiline commands are accepted. Plain tokens contain only ASCII letters, digits and _./:@%+=,-; quotes are reserved for the SQL argument. Commands over 4,096 characters or 64 whitespace-separated tokens abstain. The matcher performs no shell evaluation, filesystem resolution, regex, worker I/O or subprocess call.

The hook posts an identifier for a shape from the named set, the tool name, and a timestamp, which is the shape DEC-5 allowed, plus the three routing fields below. No command, argument, output, copied substring, path, file content or free-text explanation enters this report. Fixed labels can share characters with an input; nothing is copied from it.

Matching has a nominal 5 ms wait in a daemon thread, bounded input and no worker I/O. Late results are discarded. This is best effort: startup, scheduling and transport take separate time, so neither 5 ms nor the tests' 250 ms process containment is a universal real-time guarantee. Forced sleep and pure-Python spin are tested through the actual hook process. A GIL-held regex fails that containment and remains a rejected negative control, never a production matcher. An executor was rejected because it joins its workers at interpreter exit.

Report after, never before. The matcher is reached only at PostToolUse, never a permission or pre-tool gate. Antigravity's PreToolUse is why this distinction matters: an empty object there is a deny rather than an abstention, so the hook is never registered there rather than claiming its empty output is harmless. The reporting hook writes no stdout and exits zero on handled failures.

--no-irreversible disables matching, ingress and publication, and survives daemon respawn. --no-events also disables the feature. Fresh hooks read the explicit irreversible_enabled state-file bit before entering the matcher; an absent bit, missing file or old server means off. Ordinary lifecycle hints remain available with only --no-irreversible. A hook already in flight can race a restart and attempt a post. An off replacement refuses it; an enabled replacement may accept it because the six-field report has no run identity. Ingress still requires the current harness capability and the existing event rate budget.

Every new report carries exactly six fields: v, event, session_id, timestamp, pattern_id, tool_name. Its event is command_shape_reported, its tool is the fixed Bash, and its pattern must be in the table above. Ingress validates that vocabulary independently and rejects any missing or extra field. The report cannot become a lifecycle patch or carry a cwd, transcript path, source sequence or terminal identity. Ordinary lifecycle envelopes still drop the tool name and retain their existing compatibility and routing-hint rules.

The tool-name exception was deliberate: a failing tool's name reaches the page through the loop signal already. The prompt, the tool input and the tool output stay dropped.

Three places carry the envelope's width and they move together in one commit. This document's own sentence spells it as a word, config.py's stated reason for event_body_cap_bytes spells it as a word too because the cap is justified by that width, and events.ALLOWED_FIELDS is the set itself. test_documentation.EventEnvelopeEnumerationTest reads both prose copies against len(events.ALLOWED_FIELDS), so a field added without the words moving is a red test rather than a document that has quietly drifted.

A field the live board does not publish is not a field history may keep. Publication makes a fixed label eligible for a future history decision; it does not authorize storage by itself. This feature keeps no command reports in durable history. A separate in-memory ledger retains the newest 1,000 reports globally, newest 20 per session, for at most 24 hours. Oldest reports are evicted first. The ledger survives collection coalescing and session end, but not a restart. It retains duplicates and orders by report time, then arrival order: these are reports, never an exact action count. Attention shows the newest 20 independently of its session-risk denominator. The list count comes from the reports displayed. No notifications or dismissal controls are added.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: a command, an argument or a tool output reaching a socket, an input read the allowlist above does not name, an operator-configurable pattern, a hook that returns anything but its harness's no-opinion answer, an envelope field this document has not named, or a shape identifier in the history store with no published field behind it.

DEC-23 scopes the command and tool-output clauses above to the hook: they govern what a hook reports and the socket it posts to. A Claude Code check line, and the output tail read to classify it, are a separate read from the transcript. The check line reaches the page the way other transcript text does, bounded and redacted, and neither reaches a model except under the destination rule in Tool output in a Claude Code reading.

Compass ships one MCP tool. A session that wants a human decision calls ask_operator, and the question appears in the dashboard for the reader to answer. This is the only path by which anything a reader does in Compass reaches a running session, and it exists because the session asked. One other direction is written down and unbuilt: Hand-off requests (one verb into a session) below is Compass starting the exchange rather than a reader, it carries one fixed verb and nothing a reader typed, and no shipped feature uses it.

What it is, precisely. Compass ships a stdio MCP server beside the dashboard. It is not one of the four forwarders and shares none of their transport. A harness spawns it, it speaks JSON-RPC on stdin and stdout, and it holds the agent's tool call open while the question is outstanding. It registers the question with the dashboard over loopback and polls for the answer.

The direction is the invariant for everything shipped. Compass reaches into no session today, and the one written-down exception is the hand-off request below, which DEC-2 allowed as a single verb into a session that consents and which nothing ships. It weakens no other sentence in this section. A session can only ever be waiting because it asked to be, and a session that never calls the tool is untouched by all of this. Nothing is typed into a terminal, no harness store is written, and the tool cannot answer a native permission prompt. That last point is not a limitation to be lifted later: answering a harness's own gate is refused, and the four probes DEC-2 filed are research rather than a roadmap.

What the reader's click can and cannot say. The question's options are recorded when the question is registered. An answer names the question and an option by index, and the MCP server returns its own copy of that option to the agent. An answer cannot introduce text. The strongest thing a forged answer can do is select the wrong one of the options the asking agent itself wrote, and it cannot put new content into that agent's context.

What is bounded. The question text and the option list are bounded when they arrive, and rendered as text and never as markup. The number of questions outstanding at once is capped, and the honest answer past the cap is a refusal the server turns into a decline rather than an error. A question that is never answered expires and declines. The question is also delivered as a notification: on macOS by the server, through the same truncation and AppleScript escaping the needs-input popup uses, and elsewhere by the page, which passes the text to the browser's own notification API and applies neither (it is not building a shell command, and the text is already bounded at the ingress); the notification is a pointer rather than a decision surface, and an option can only ever be chosen back in the page.

Failure is always a decline, never a hang. If the dashboard is not running, if no reader answers, if the deadline passes, or if the process is stopped while a question is outstanding, the tool returns a decline and the agent proceeds as it judges best. A stopped dashboard releases every outstanding question before it exits. A tool call that gives up for any of those reasons also withdraws its own question on the way out, so a card nobody is waiting on leaves the board instead of staying clickable until its deadline. A click on a question whose asker has gone is accepted and discarded either way, which is why the withdrawal matters to the reader rather than to the agent.

The standing permission this needs, and what granting it means. At default settings every harness gates the first call to this tool in the user's own terminal, before the call reaches Compass. The feature is therefore useless until the user grants the tool once, which on Claude Code writes permissions.allow: ["mcp__plugin_compass_compass__ask_operator"] into that project's .claude/settings.local.json. Granting it means that project's sessions may pause themselves on a Compass question without asking again. It is scoped to that directory, it is the user's to revoke by deleting the line, and Compass never writes it.

Answering is a real decision. Every other click in the dashboard changes what you see. This one changes what an agent does next, with your credentials, in your repository. The exposure that follows is recorded under Known and accepted rather than solved here, because loopback is not a per-user boundary.

The ask lane runs one way. A session asks, a reader answers, and Compass starts nothing. DEC-2 ruled on 2026-09-02 that Compass may also start the exchange, in one shape and no other: when a quota window is about to close on a session that is mid-task, Compass may send that session one request for a hand-off summary, so the operator gets the state of the work written down instead of writing it from memory before the cutoff. This is the boundary the hand-off request has to respect, and it is written before the code exists for the same reason the quota, git-probe, history and light-harness boundaries were.

This section grants nothing on its own. No shipped feature sends anything into a session, and the ask lane's direction claim is amended for this section and for nothing else.

What may be sent is a request for a hand-off summary. Not a prompt the reader composed, not a line off the board, not a retry of the operator's last instruction: one fixed request Compass authored, in plain text, whose content does not vary with what the reader typed or with what the session holds. That is what keeps this out of the general write path into terminals that DEC-2 refused as a standing answer, and it is the same property the ask lane relies on in the other direction, where an answer can only ever select one of the options the asking agent itself wrote. A reader cannot introduce text through either.

The verb is also not a permission answer. DEC-2 confirmed the refusal of native-gate answering rather than lifting it, so nothing here reaches a harness's own prompt, and the ask lane's sentence on that stands unchanged.

The receiving side decides whether to accept, and the mechanism is the harness's rather than Compass's. What follows is read off Claude Code's own documentation and has not been measured on a machine here, which is stated plainly because this repository's standing lesson is that desk research got the field, the unit or the rendering wrong five times out of five. Four facts are documented, not measured:

• that the inbound setting, crossSessionInbound, has values that refuse an inbound message or hold it for the session to accept;
• that a held message lapses after a dialogExpiry of five minutes;
• that a delivered message counts toward usage the way a prompt the operator types does;
• that the socket lives in a per-user directory under the system temporary directory, of the shape /tmp/cc-socks-<uid>.

The build that lands E7 measures all four first, records the capture under docs/captures/ the way every other harness vocabulary here was earned, and replaces this list with the measurement. Until then no sentence in this section rests on any of them being exactly right. What the section does assert is the rule Compass sets for itself: a session that refuses inbound messages is not reached, and a request that lapses unread is a request that was not delivered.

Compass sends no authentication line, on any platform. The socket protocol documents one, and the reason to leave it unused is not convenience. Verifying that a session is Compass's own child is one permission class. Presenting a credential that would reach any session on the machine is another, and sending the line asserts the second. So the verb reaches a session that already accepts inbound messages, and it reaches nothing else.

The per-session token is never logged, never echoed, never served on the loopback port, and never printed by --diagnose. Neither is any path that contains it. That second half is not a flourish: the token is documented as part of the socket's filename rather than as a separate field, so a redaction covering the value while printing a directory listing, an error message or the path itself leaks the whole thing. Both the value and its containing path get the handling Usage quota reads gives a vendor token. Published text records what redaction covers today, and a path-shaped secret is the case it does not yet name, so E7's change adds it there in the same commit.

Finding a session's socket means reading a path that is no harness store and lies under no root config.resolve_store_roots returns. That function documents three Claude roots today, claude.projects, claude.tasks and claude.teams, and no fourth. Scope makes a read outside the documented store paths a security bug "however the path was derived", so this read is a security bug until its location is documented there. Naming it belongs to E7's change rather than to this section: the commit that opens the socket adds the directory to the documented roots, and a reviewer who finds the open without the entry has found the bug this paragraph predicts.

They are two pathways and not one, which is why invariant 1 names them apart. Light harness usage starts a fresh harness process and hands it text Compass composed out of a session, so the operator's own words leave the machine on a request Compass made. A hand-off request writes one line to a socket on this machine, to a session the operator already started and is already paying for. Compass makes no network request for it, and the fixed verb carries nothing derived from any session.

What leaves the machine afterwards is what that session sends next, on its own connection and its own credentials, exactly as everything else that session does leaves. So this pathway adds nothing to invariant 1's count of outbound requests, and the invariant names it anyway: a reader counting network exposures who found no mention of a verb that causes a vendor round trip would be right to distrust the count.

It does spend the operator's capacity, and Light harness usage's rule about that holds here without being restated. A feature that consumes capacity states what it consumed.

An absent socket, a stale token, a session that never answers, an inbound setting that refuses, a message that lapses: each one ends as the board reporting that the hand-off was not delivered. None of them holds a request open, blocks a shutdown, or leaves a session parked. This is the ask lane's rule in the other direction and it is there for the same reason: neither end of this exchange may be able to wedge the other.

Compass does not retry. A verb that resent itself when a session did not answer would spend the operator's remaining window on delivery attempts at the exact moment the window is the thing running out.

The feature ships --no-handoff with it: a flag that disables the pathway for a run regardless of the stored setting, mirroring --no-ask and --no-history at every one of their sites, including the branch that forwards flags to a respawned daemon, so a restart cannot re-enable what the operator disabled. That flag does not exist yet, and this document does not claim it does. No feature sends the verb, so there is nothing to switch off. A test holds those two statements together: it asserts this section still says nothing is sent and that the parser still has no such flag, so whoever adds the flag is failed here until they amend this section too.

A violation of any boundary in this section is a security bug: text sent into a session that is not the one fixed verb, a verb sent to a session that refuses inbound messages, an authentication line presented, the token or its containing path reaching a log, a --diagnose line or a loopback response, a retry, a socket read from a location the store roots do not document, or a request that blocks rather than declines.

What is accepted rather than solved: as far as the harness's own documentation goes, the socket directory is per-user, so other accounts are held out only as well as that documented shape holds, and E7's capture is what settles it rather than this paragraph. What is certain either way is that the directory does nothing about other processes of the same account. Anything running as the operator can send the same verb to the same session without going through Compass at all. That stays inside the trust boundary for the reason Known and accepted gives for the rest of this document, since such a process can read the operator's secret material directly, and it is the same limit the ask lane already accepts on loopback.

The proto/operator-cockpit branch adds project context and an optional read-only terminal. GET /api/project-context reads bounded transcript and workflow evidence, stores semantic history under the configured state directory, and can invoke the installed Codex CLI for a derived goal. GET /api/session-record uses the same loopback and bounded project/session guards, returns the same redacted message titles as project-context, and exposes no fields or content classes the page could not already read. Each message also carries its fixed number, read from an in-memory index of every message's time and fact id in the transcript (at most 16 transcripts, never written to disk, nothing a person wrote); the index adds no field the page could not derive from the record it already reads, and a read that cannot finish inside its allowance publishes no numbers. This is separate from quota fetching and from the session-history switch. The prototype retains its own semantic-history store. --forget deletes the session-history, session-end and summary stores, removes annotation discard records and copied-correction digests, and withdraws model permission; it does not reach this semantic-history store.

That store carries session text in both directions, and this document did not say so until the annotation work re-counted which files hold what a person typed. A fact's summary is bounded at 240 characters and holds the operator's own directive where the fact is a steer or an observer goal; a result fact's detail holds up to 4096 characters of the assistant's final answer. So the file is a carrier of typed words as well as generated ones, in the same content class as the observer sidecar's goal line, and the redaction paragraph below is what stands between it and a credential.

Semantic history redacts recognized credential shapes before publication and persistence. Loading an older store also redacts nested values and, if any changed, immediately replaces the file atomically with an owner-only copy under the history lock. A read may be the only activity after an upgrade, so waiting for a later history update would retain known secrets unnecessarily. If replacement fails, the read still publishes redacted values, logs a warning without their contents, and retries the repair on the next load. Original bytes can remain until the filesystem permits replacement; this does not erase filesystem snapshots or backups.

The terminal is off unless both --interaction-origin-session and --interaction-origin-registration-file are supplied. When enabled, ten POST operations under /api/interaction/ join the ordinary routes: register, renew, probe-unregistered, probe-spoofed, control, input, expire, disconnect, reconnect, and reset. Registration requires the session-side registration token; renewal requires the lease token. The probe and lifecycle controls have the normal loopback/origin checks, with no additional capability. control and input always refuse. Normal serving returns 404 for this prefix.

interaction_prototype.py joins focus.py as a module allowed to invoke tmux. It validates the registered pane identity before capturing output and attaches a read-only control-mode client. The WebSocket at /api/interaction/stream carries output only; receiving a client frame ends the connection. Its upgrade response carries the same framing header as ordinary responses. Terminal output is a separate exposure from the redacted session summaries: a person or local process that can read the registered terminal can see its captured text.

A harness transcript records what the operator typed, verbatim, so if a key was ever pasted into a prompt the store holds it. The dashboard reads those stores and publishes prompt text. Named as fields rather than glossed, because a prose alias is a name no test can check, the carriers that reach the page raw are these ten: title, last_prompt, state_detail, project_key, project_name, worktree, tasks[].subject, tasks[].activeForm, subagents[].name and subagents[].parent. Those are the two tables in aggregate, and the instruction line's own text passes the same sweep beside them. It is a list of carriers rather than a list of every published string that could hold what the operator typed: more prompt text reaches the page through records.safe_text on the way, including the observer's derived goal, the ask question and its options, a Codex title, which is a prompt because Codex writes no generated title, the focused project context's prompt_choices[].text, up to five of the reader's prompts at 1,000 characters each (240 before 2026-10-27), and since 2026-10-03 the first sentence of each of the agent's messages, as the summary of an agent_message fact on /api/project-context, at most 112 characters. Some of what those carriers hold came from a tool call's input rather than from a prompt directly: a Claude plan's first line, an AskUserQuestion question, and a Codex plan's steps, each under the bounds Irreversible actions states. A sweep of the local Claude store on the machine this was built on found seven distinct live Anthropic credentials in ordinary prompt history. Loopback is no help against it: the dashboard is what someone opens to show a colleague what their agents are doing, so the exposure is the screen and the screenshot.

Credential-shaped runs are replaced before publication, in place, by a visible marker that keeps the prefix naming the kind: sk-ant-…REDACTED, AKIA…REDACTED, ghp_…REDACTED. The words around it survive, because those are the instruction and the reason the line is on the card. The marker is visible deliberately. Someone who sees it learns their prompt history holds a live key, which is the only route by which it gets rotated.

The list of shapes is measured against the local corpus and lives in one place, records.redact_secrets. It is applied at three. Inside records.safe_text, which nearly every published string already passes through, including the ask question and its options, Codex's title and the observer's goal. At the slice, through records.redact_clip, for the strings the other nine collectors build out of their own store by hand: title and last_prompt. And over the assembled rows in aggregate, a backstop under both that also reaches state_detail, the instruction line, task subjects and a subagent name. An ask answer needs no cover, being an index into options the asking agent wrote rather than text. The measurement, the false-positive rate and the rejected alternatives are in docs/design-credential-redaction.md.

Since 2026-10-27 the list also holds the shapes a command's output prints with no vendor prefix: a gcloud ya29. token, an AWS "SecretString" value (escaped JSON inside it included), a netrc password after login or machine, and the signature parameter of a pre-signed URL. The cue list gains passphrase. Each keeps its name and loses its value. Each is cued, and each has a limit where prose can open like it, so some false positives and misses stay: sig= outside a query string, "login page password reset", "machine learning password manager" and sig=overview are left alone because the shape needs the login word, a value with a digit or a capital, or a signature-like value; a loginless default password Reset is masked, and an all-lowercase signature with no digit, +, / or % is not. A "SecretString" value is masked to its closing quote however long it is, and one with no closing quote is masked to the end of its line.

Since 2026-10-03 one shape is cued rather than shaped, beside the AWS secret. The cue is Authorization: Bearer, a --password, --token, --secret or --api-key flag, or a name ending in password, passwd, pwd, token, secret, api_key or apikey in any case (DB_PASSWORD, PGPASSWORD, GITHUB_API_TOKEN, db_password) or an upper-case *_KEY (OPENAI_API_KEY, STRIPE_KEY), before = or : with any spacing and an optional closing quote ("password":). The value after it is masked up to whitespace or punctuation, and a quoted value whole, spaces and all. The cue stays and the value becomes the marker. It was added when the agent's own messages began reaching a reading model, because an agent repeats what it read. Left alone, because each names a value rather than holding one or is ordinary prose: None, null, true, a $VAR or ${VAR}, self.…, os.environ…, a call such as next_token(), PWD=/a/path, sort_key=name; after a bare Bearer, anything shorter than 16 characters or with no digit or symbol ("bearer auth"); and after secret, token or a :, a value with neither a digit, a symbol nor 16 characters (secret=staging, "the token: next"). It is the withholding direction and was not measured against the corpus the shapes were, so a harmless value that looks like a credential is masked too. A title a cue newly masks hashes to a new fact id once (project_context records the precedent).

The order matters as much as the coverage. Redaction runs before the bound, never after, because a key cut at a 140-character cap is still a hundred usable characters of key and a shape whose tail has fallen off no longer matches. A slice that ran first is what published a URL credential cut short of its @.

Since 2026-10-05 the shared filter also checks a second view with transparent HTML inline formatting removed, before the credential hint check. A match masks the corresponding original span; ordinary spaces, newlines and harmless formatting remain, and the raw scan still masks credentials in tag attributes. The supported elements are a, abbr, b, code, del, em, i, ins, kbd, mark, s, samp, small, span, strong, sub, sup, time, u and var, including closing and self-closing tags and quoted attributes. Slash-command arguments are masked before their tags turn into spaces. This extra view is limited to 16,384 characters: longer text containing one of those element starts is withheld as a redaction marker, including an unfinished attribute. Plain text does not acquire that bound. Arbitrary envelope tags, encoded markup and unseen text beyond an existing source extraction bound are outside this correction's claim.

Amended 2026-10-06: native command field boundaries are captured before the observer's early scrub. Each field is masked before extraction; missing closing tags remain source cuts, and malformed overlaps use the whole-record scrub. Observer packets, first prompts and copied-correction matching then use the existing safe renderer and bounds. This changes no credential pattern or content class. Separating those fields also removes an accidental mask: a closing tag formerly made a short word after a colon look like a credential. At the end of native arguments, a short word with no digit or symbol can now survive after a colon (password: correcthorse) or a strict token/secret assignment (CLIENT_SECRET=staging, API_TOKEN=next); a bare bearer value shorter than 16 characters can survive too, as can a value shorter than three characters after another cued assignment (password=ab, API_KEY=xy). Any may be a real secret. These are the cued rule's documented exceptions, not evidence that the values are harmless; this filter does not identify every secret. The command-boundary rationale owns the ordering and the existing fact-identity consequence.

The card, the browser notification body and the native popup are pixels, and a screenshot is what each of them risks. Two of the things carrying this text are files. The first is the observer sidecar under ~/.compass/observer/, one JSON file per session holding the derived goal, which is the operator's own words. Since goal provenance landed it holds two such lines rather than one: the published goal and the pre-model deterministic_goal the model arm would otherwise have overwritten. They are the same class of text and carry the same risk, so the count changes and nothing else does. Both are redacted on the way in like everything else, and the file is written owner-only through a temp file and a rename, so a reader mid-write sees the old file or the new one and neither is ever briefly world-readable. The mode is advisory and Windows ignores it, the same caveat the state file and the dismissal store carry.

The second is the prototype's semantic-history store, ~/.compass/semantic-work-history.json. It holds the operator's own directive as well as the assistant's answer, it is redacted on the way in and again on every read, and it is written owner-only through a temp file and a rename like the sidecar above. The Operator-cockpit prototype section has its fields and its deletion behaviour, including that --forget does not reach it.

This reduces the exposure and does not close it, and both directions of error are real. A shape list covers the formats it was measured against, so a credential in a format nobody has seen goes through unmarked. A control character struck through the middle of a key defeats the match on the whole key, and what follows is worse than nothing being published: the substitution that scrubs the character turns it into a space, so the head in front of it still matches and redacts while the tail behind it publishes beside the marker, 75 characters of key on a probe. A run longer than any key its format issues is cut at the cap, and the characters past the cap publish. And the AWS secret access key is matched only when one of three spellings of its key name sits in front of the value, because a bare 40-character base64 run cannot be told apart from a hash or a diff.

In the other direction a genuine instruction line can be altered: 20 of 22,120 real prompts in the local corpus, 18 on Claude and 2 on Codex. That rate was re-measured when the filter was widened to cover a key with a character in front of it, a URL credential clipped short of its @, capped bodies, lin_api_ API keys and the cued AWS secret, and it did not move on any of them. Nothing here changes the rule outside the software, which is not to paste a credential into a prompt, and to rotate one that was.

--host hands that same access to a network. --host 0.0.0.0 is the operator saying the machine's network may read the board, and there is no second gate behind it: everything the paragraph below grants another account on the machine, a non-default bind grants anything that can reach the port. Reading /api/data is the whole board: every session's titles, prompts and project paths. Writing is the twenty-three POST routes enabled without terminal registration, /api/shutdown and /api/answer among them, so a reachable dashboard can be killed, and a question a session is waiting on can be answered by somebody other than you. Three of the twenty-three store nothing durable of their own: POST /api/direction returns the whole text of a direction a session's user gave, which /api/project-context names by its first sentence, POST /api/correction returns the goal and outcome lines a reader saved, composed as Steer back's correction, and, for a claim of the agent's the record contradicts or does not show, that one agent message's published title of at most 112 characters, and POST /api/live-monitor holds the Live monitor's lease in memory only. All three answer only a loopback peer, so a non-default bind does not widen them; the first two have their bounds in Analyze drift, Cancel and copied corrections. There is nothing to authenticate with on twenty-one of them, for the reason the ask-lane paragraph below gives: the page is served as fixed bytes with no per-run secret in them. Two carry a capability and they are not worth the same. POST /api/events/<harness> takes a per-run token published only in the state file at mode 0600 and never served to the page, so a client holding only the board cannot post events at all; that boundary survives a non-default bind intact, and Event ingress below is where it is stated. POST /api/focus's capability buys less: the token is injected into the served document, so anything that can load the board under a non-default bind can also ask for a raise, and /api/data names which rows would answer it. What that second gate actually separates is a page from a document navigation and from a local process that never fetched the board, which is the exposure the focus section states. POST /api/live-monitor holds an in-memory lease for a Claude Code session and writes nothing; it answers only a loopback peer that is not a document navigation, and start is the one action that begins to spend.

What the non-default bind does not spend is the rebinding defense. The Host and Origin gate widens to addresses and never to names. Under 0.0.0.0, that means any address a client could arrive on. A page on http://evil.example:4553 whose DNS points at the machine is refused in both modes, and the Sec-Fetch-Site cross-site check runs unchanged. The gate tells a name from an address; it cannot tell one remote client from another. So the honest scope is: use --host on a network you would hand the transcripts to, and reach a dashboard over ssh -L otherwise.

Loopback is not a per-user boundary. Any other account on the same machine can GET /api/data and read every session's titles and prompts, or forge a POST /api/notify. The Host, Sec-Fetch and Origin checks defeat browser-based DNS rebinding, but they do not defeat a local process. This matters more on a shared Linux host than on a personal laptop. Please report a bypass of the checks that do exist. The absence of per-user isolation is documented here rather than treated as a new finding.

A browser will not frame the board, and the header that stops it is narrower than it looks. Every response the server composes carries Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'none', with the three exceptions named below, because the request gate does not close framing on its own: every port on this machine is the same site, so a page served from another local port frames the board under a same-site label that never reaches the cross-site check, and a frame navigation carries no Origin for the check below it. That is worth closing because the served document holds the focus capability, so a framed board is one lured click from raising a terminal, and /api/data names which rows would answer. The attack it stops is blind: the framer cannot read the frame, since a fetch from another local port carries an Origin and is refused, and no Access-Control-Allow-Origin is ever sent, so the framer must guess that a question is outstanding and where its control landed.

What the header does not buy is the local-process exposure above. A local process the attacker controls can open a socket to the port carrying no Origin and no Sec-Fetch headers at all, pass every check, and answer or raise directly. frame-ancestors is not a defense against that attacker and does not narrow what this section already accepts. The one case it does defend is a loopback page whose process the attacker does not control: a stored cross-site scripting flaw, or an HTML-rendering endpoint, in some other local development server the operator already runs. It is delivered as a header rather than in the document because CSP ignores frame-ancestors in a <meta http-equiv>, and it is the only directive in that policy because frame-ancestors has no fallback to default-src, so it restricts framing and nothing else. Three responses are outside it, deliberately, and none of them is a page: /api/stream writes its own headers and an event stream has nothing to click; a send_error body is the standard library's error template, which carries no control and no capability; and the 204 a poll of /api/ask/<id> returns while no answer has arrived carries no body at all, so a frame navigated to it renders nothing. The stream and that poll are both reachable from a frame on the same terms the board is, because each route takes the plain local check.

A reading spends the reader's own capacity, and any local process that can reach the port can spend it. POST /api/reading carries no capability token. The precedent is the quota fetch rather than the event ingress: the harm is a side effect on the operator's Codex balance rather than a forged claim about a session, and what holds it is the same-origin check and the refusal of a document navigation, neither of which a local process sends headers for. A local process can grant the remembered answer too, and can start a call without a prior Allow. A Claude Code reading sends checks only where Compass names the configured destination, with its notice. The rolling cap of 100 attempts across tabs and processes bounds that exposure. One reading per session may be in flight, and the explicit model off switch refuses all calls. The route reads nothing back to the caller beyond the job it started or found running, which the payload already publishes: an unknown session answers 200 with no job, never a 404, so the route tells a caller nothing about which sessions exist that GET /api/data does not. The same local process can cancel an analysis through POST /api/reading/cancel and spend an attempt; the Cancel paragraph above states it.

Having nothing to click is not the whole question for those two, because both hold a socket open, and that half was measured on 2026-09-07 in Chrome. Eight frames pointed at /api/stream from a page on another loopback port took six sockets, not eight: a browser caps concurrent HTTP/1.1 connections per origin at six, so the eight-slot stream budget was never drained and a seventh client still received a 200. stream_max_clients sitting above the browser's six is why, and the reason it was chosen that way is recorded beside it in config. What the six frames did drain was Chrome's own connection pool for that origin, and the board then would not load at all in the same browser: the navigation sat pending and committed the instant the frames were removed. So the resource a framed long-lived route can deny is the browser's, not this server's, and the server cannot arbitrate it.

Both routes therefore refuse a frame navigation outright, on Sec-Fetch-Dest, which the same measurement confirmed a framed request carries: iframe, alongside Sec-Fetch-Site: same-site and no Origin at all, which is how such a request passed the checks above. That buys one thing, which is that the request is refused before it can hold a socket rather than holding one for as long as the framer likes. It is worth exactly what frame-ancestors is worth and no more, and for the same reason stated above: a local process the attacker controls sends no Sec-Fetch headers at all. A curl caller sends none either and is unaffected, since the refusal fires only on a header a browser sets.

Event ingress is the exception, and it is narrow. POST /api/events/<harness> requires a per-run capability, because a general lifecycle overlay is more powerful than the side state /api/notify sets: a forged session_ended can suppress a permission alert, and a looped turn_started can mask a blocked session. The server generates one secret per process, derives one token per harness from it, and publishes only the derived tokens in the state file, opened 0600 with the mode in the open call so the token is never briefly world-readable. A token from one adapter cannot post as another harness, and a token recovered from an old state file is useless against the next run. The comparison is constant-time.

What that does not buy: the file mode is advisory, exactly as the state directory's 0700 is. It does not apply to a directory that already exists, Windows ignores it, and root reads it either way. Any process running as the same user can read the token and post events, and that stays inside the trust boundary for the same reason the rest of this section does, since such a process can read the user's secret material directly. An overlay may also only ever patch a row a collector produced; it can never create or delete one, and it can only write these ten fields: state, state_detail, active, blocked_since, wait_unconfirmed (whether a repeating-source wait exceeded its evidence lease), acquisition, finished_at (the stamp of the turn's last observed stop), ended_at (the stamp of the session id's own end), and dirty with changed (the end-of-session git reading). --no-events turns the whole path off for a run.

The event envelope is allowlisted at both ends. Each adapter builds the fourteen permitted fields one at a time across the ordinary and command-report variants; no variant carries all fourteen. The prompt, the tool input and the tool output stay dropped in the hook and never reach a socket. That is the hook: the bounded tool output a Claude Code transcript recorded is a separate read, governed by Tool output in a Claude Code reading. Ordinary lifecycle envelopes still drop the tool name. Command reports carry only the six fields listed in Irreversible actions above, with an allowlisted tool name and pattern identifier. The server validates independently because a hook's output is untrusted. Ordinary cwd and transcript_path matching hints are never echoed to /api/data; command reports carry neither. statusline_hook.py shapes /api/usage down to the quota block alone. The count here, config.py's reason for event_body_cap_bytes, and events.ALLOWED_FIELDS move together; test_documentation.EventEnvelopeEnumerationTest binds both prose counts.

One published field is derived from a transcript filename, and the sentence above is the one it has to be read against. resume_id carries the session id a harness's own CLI takes to re-enter that session, so the board can hand a reader the command rather than the hunt. It is the transcript's stem and never its path: no directory, no home, nothing a filesystem could be walked from, and the first eight characters of that same stem are already published as Claude's sid. cwd is not read for it and would not help if it were. Two harnesses fill it, Claude Code and Codex, and the other eight publish null, which is what stops the page offering a command nobody has verified.

The value is checked against ^[A-Za-z0-9_][A-Za-z0-9_-]{0,63}$ before it is published and again in the page before a command is built from it, and that grammar is the guard rather than any quoting: this is the one string on the board that becomes a shell command in the reader's own terminal, and it is read off a filename in a store the harness owns. Two shapes are refused, and quoting would have covered only the first. A token a shell would split, or one carrying a separator, substitution or newline, is dropped and the row shows no control. So is a token starting with -: a shell reads that as one word, but the CLI reads it as a flag. claude --resume takes an optional value and therefore never consumes a --leading token, and both harnesses ship a valueless flag that turns their permission checks off, so a transcript named --dangerously-skip-permissions.jsonl would otherwise reach the clipboard as a permission bypass with the session id dropped. Publishing a value that fails that grammar, or building a command from one, is a security bug.

The ask lane inherits the loopback exposure above, and it is the first place where that exposure reaches beyond what a reader sees. Any local process that can reach the port can answer a question a session is waiting on. Two things keep this narrow rather than solved. An answer selects an option by index from a list the asking agent wrote, so a forgery cannot introduce text into an agent's context, only choose badly among choices the agent already offered. And a session is only ever waiting because it asked, so there is no question to answer unless an agent raised one. A per-reader authentication would be the real fix, and it is not available: the dashboard page is served as fixed bytes with no per-run secret in it, and a local process could read such a secret anyway.

A question's attribution is unverified, and this is the second half of that exposure. harness, session_id and project are taken from the registration body and bounded, and nothing checks that the named session exists or that the caller is it, so any local process that can reach the port can put a card on the board that reads as coming from a specific session in a specific repository. Two things bound the damage. The card is its own band and touches no collector-measured session state, so a forged attribution cannot alter a row, a state, a count or a dismissal (docs/design-ask-lane.md records why the band is separate); and answering the card still only selects among options its own registrant wrote, so the forger gains nothing from being answered. What a forgery does buy is plausibility, at the one place in the dashboard where a reader makes a decision, which is why it is named here rather than left implicit in the loopback paragraph above. That plausibility now reaches a reader with no tab open, because the question also raises a notification. The title renders the display label of the harness key the registration claimed, and neither the key nor the claim is verified. A registration that inherits or forges the harness environment variable titles the banner with that harness. What the registry lookup does buy is that the title is a name the registry carries or nothing at all, so a 120-character agent-authored string cannot reach it, and an unattributable question is announced as "An agent" rather than under a borrowed name. Verifying it would need a per-session secret that the sessions do not have and that the loopback boundary could not keep.

--diagnose runs the same collection a served page does, so unless --no-git is given it may run the read-only git commands of the committed-file read for a Claude Code session's project. It still writes nothing and transmits nothing.

--diagnose output is sensitive. It prints the home directory, the interpreter path, the values of the store relocation variables, every candidate store path, and per-path read errors. A recorded store error may include a store or prompt excerpt, even when SQLite raised it. The shared formatter keeps the exception type plus at most 1,024 Unicode characters of its message, including ... [truncated] when clipped; clipping does not redact sensitive content. Nothing is transmitted, but redact it before pasting it into a public issue.

A release is pushed by a deploy key that bypasses the branch and tag rulesets, so the workflow keeps that key away from dependency code. The release target is fixed once, before anything is built. The frontend is then installed, rebuilt and tested in jobs that have a read-only token, a checkout without persisted credentials and no secrets; the repository validation suite runs in a second job with the same limits, because it starts node whenever node is on the path. The one job that holds the key and the write token installs and runs no Node, pnpm, npm or frontend dependency, refuses to continue unless its checkout is the exact commit both verifiers saw, and proves the archive of the release commit before it pushes, moves the tag or advances stable. The Python in that job installs from wheels only, into an environment it calls by path, and runs no build script.

What it still runs beside the key: first-party Python from the verified tree (the release scripts, the archived launcher and the validator), as the same operating-system user, with an empty path and a throwaway home. That keeps Node out of reach and is not credential isolation. A change that reaches main through the normal review and checks is the accepted trust boundary; the workflow does not defend against a reviewed commit that is hostile. The release publishes the tree that was verified, never a newer main, and a stable that has already moved forward is not moved back. Whether the ruleset bypass, the key handling of actions/checkout and the runner image behave as described can only be shown by a real run.

The standalone compass binaries are built the same way: by four jobs with a read-only token, no secrets and a checkout without persisted credentials, under an exactly pinned PyInstaller toolchain installed from wheels only. A third-party build dependency runs there, so what those jobs produce is treated as data. It never reaches the job that holds the key. A separate job that holds only the repository write token downloads the archives, checksums them and uploads them to the release, and never unpacks or runs one. That job cannot push to main or move a tag. The checksums file lives beside the archives, so it detects a corrupted download and not a hostile release; the binaries carry no signature of their own, and on macOS no developer identity or notarization.

Please do not open a public issue for security problems. Instead:

• Use GitHub private vulnerability reporting, or
• Email dev@reccehq.com with a description and reproduction steps.

You can expect an acknowledgment within a few days. Please allow time for a fix to land and release before public disclosure.

Only the latest released version of the plugin receives security fixes.