Every comment that invoked a 'law' (50 word-boundary sites across 28
tracked files) now states what is going on and why, in terms that
transfer to any project: gate twins drift until one side greenlights
what the other refuses; a tag re-points while a digest pins; a
restrictive engine behavior belongs to the runtime that imposed it and
must be re-tested, not inherited; a speculative head is tensors in the
file, not a flag; snapshot links dangle where the container resolves
them; exit 0 is a clean stop to systemd, so a self-exiting daemon on
on-failure goes dark reporting success. Event narratives and dates are
gone from these comments; the mechanics carry the argument.
Behavior-identical: bash -n, py_compile, yaml parse, full bats suite
408/408 green. One symbol rename rides along (stack script local
scale_law -> scale_contract, with its log text).
frank-dragoon's health gate never checked WHO answered :7770 — the
false-green the fleet learned about on 2026-09-26 (a stray probe holding
the port satisfies a bare curl while the unit is stopped). The other two
handlers carried that check as inlined copies; all three now call
assert_unit_owns_port, and dragoon gets the protection it was missing.
The seam follows: the endpoints' text-grep deployer tests are deleted,
because tests/llm_deploy_gates.bats EXECUTES the same handlers end to end
(stub systemctl/podman/sudo/ss/curl) and asserts refusals, restarts, unit
links, the pending marker, and the MainPID hardening. GATE_PREFIX is
exported at each handler for the same reason the serve scripts export it.
deploy_llm_dragoon/zealot/arkon now call require_image / require_bytes /
require_min_mib / require_file / require_dir_files, so the deployer and the
serve scripts refuse the same missing payload with the same words — the
2026-10-01 crash-loop law, enforced by construction instead of by duplicated
shell. require_exec joins the library for the native-runtime gate (a
compiled tree that lost its +x refuses like a missing one). relink_unit
takes SYSTEMD_SYSTEM_DIR so a handler can be driven end to end in a sandbox.
The library's own refusals now carry their status: a bash function that
ends inside an if returns the CONDITION's status, so a gate whose last
statement is its refusal printed the message and returned SUCCESS — the
new seam caught it, and the gate tests pin it.
New seam tests/llm_deploy_gates.bash + tests/stubs/: deploy-remote.sh's LLM
handlers EXECUTED against stub systemctl/podman/sudo/ss/curl, asserting
exit status, refusal text, no restart, and the pending state marker.
The hand-written image/ck/tokenizer gates are require_image, require_bytes and
require_dir_files from scripts/lib/llm-gates.sh. The serve seam is unchanged
and still green (its podman stub now models `podman image exists`, the
primitive the gate uses). Behaviour preserved: every refusal names the
artifact, the endpoint and the fetch script.
The serve scripts and the deployer each hand-wrote the same missing/truncated
artifact gates; the 2026-10-01 crash-loop was those twins disagreeing
mid-cutover. scripts/lib/llm-gates.sh is the single place the refusal lives:
require_file / require_bytes / require_min_mib / require_dir_files /
require_image, each returning 1 and naming the endpoint, the artifact and the
remedy. New seam tests/llm_gates.bats pins the contract at the arguments-in /
status-and-stderr-out boundary.
Frank