pi-devbox-environment already warned that "a negative result is usually your
own filter" — baked, symlinked in at every container start, authored by an
earlier session. It survived every recreate, was available all of a later
session, and was violated five times anyway. So the gap was never persistence.
That section also closed with "a positive result needs no such scepticism — it
carries its own evidence." That is false, and it aimed the scepticism budget
one way only. Three of those five errors were positives:
- an SSH handshake SUCCEEDED and greeted me as joakimp while I believed I was
probing gitea.egl.lan — `Host gitea*` had rewritten HostName
- a 401 that was a genuine answer from an issuer which never minted the token
- a "regression" produced by diffing against a value my own -p 2222 flag set
Adds the three missing false-negative rows, replaces the false claim with the
"a positive result only proves what you actually asked" subsection, and records
the two habits that actually caught these: `ssh -G` to learn which rule
captured a hostname, and declaring the expected result before running a check.
The cross-cutting form goes in pi-global-AGENTS.append.md rather than in a
skill, because it has to fire without a task description matching it — being
loadable on demand is exactly what failed. Across all five errors, none was
caught by re-reading my reasoning; every one was caught by a second measurement
that disagreed.
The managed block already tells agents to load the mempalace skill, but said
nothing about the palace being shared with other machines. Three failure modes
observed tonight while onboarding tor-ms22's feeders, all of which do damage
rather than merely confuse:
- `mempalace sync` prunes drawers whose source files look gitignored, deleted
or moved. On a central palace that describes most of the content, including
every other machine's. Compounded by RFC-001 7.2: feeders now stage inside
the palace root, so a scoped sync can delete the drawers it just filed.
- A client-side timeout is not a failure. The palace is single-writer and one
large mine blocks every client for minutes, so
`[mempalace ext] feed (tick) failed: mine timed out after 30000ms` usually
means the mine COMPLETED. Verified: drawers from a timed-out tick were
present 35 s after the client gave up. A blind retry files a duplicate.
- The `mempalace` CLI has zero references to MEMPALACE_REMOTE_URL, so it always
opens a palace on local disk and can silently disagree with the MCP tools.
Orientation depth stays in the skill; only damage-prevention belongs here,
because this file is always read and the skill's later sections often are not.
Discoverability follow-up to baking agent-browser into the base: agents won't
reach for a browser they don't know they have (the exact gap that made this
capability easy to miss). Add a short pointer section to the pi-devbox managed
block — capability, the preset AGENT_BROWSER_EXECUTABLE_PATH, and
`agent-browser skills get core --full` for the command set. Pointer only; depth
stays in the skill. rootfs change → folds into the same base-<hash> rebuild.
CHANGELOG note updated.
Baking the mempalace fallback skill fixed *availability*, but mempalace had
no proactive-load directive anywhere (pi-toolkit's global AGENTS.md only
points to pi-extensions), so a new container would still surface it only via
description-matching — the same under-utilisation the pi-extensions directive
was created to fix.
Add a session-start pointer to the pi-devbox managed AGENTS.md block
(pi-global-AGENTS.append.md): gated to pi-devbox containers and conditional on
the MemPalace MCP tools being present. Memory continuity matters most in a
frequently-recreated container — the palace is its only cross-recreate memory.
- pi-global-AGENTS.append.md: '## Session start: load the mempalace skill'.
- smoke-test: assert the pointer merges into the global AGENTS.md at build.
- docs: VENDORED.md, README, CHANGELOG [Unreleased].
Now both skills are complete in pi-devbox: directive + skill file.
pi-extensions = directive (pi-toolkit) + baked skill; mempalace = directive
(this block) + baked skill.
Ship skills inside the image (independent of any mounted skillset repo):
- rootfs/usr/local/share/pi-devbox/skills/<name>/ symlinked into
~/.agents/skills/ by entrypoint-user.sh (foreign-link, survives volume
recreate, never clobbers a skillset/user skill of the same name).
- New pi-devbox-environment skill: persistence model, host/LAN SSH
reachability, split-DNS mechanisms, interactive-vs-tool-shell alias
gotcha, tmux 0-index, uv-first Python, pi-studio reachability. Agnostic
to host OS / hostnames / domains / nameservers (discovered at runtime).
- Dockerfile.variant appends pi-global-AGENTS.append.md onto pi-toolkit's
pi-global-AGENTS.md (single global slot) so the skill is loaded
proactively; gated on /usr/local/lib/pi-devbox/. Idempotent.
- smoke-test: baked-skill + append-snippet + merged-marker presence and a
runtime symlink assertion.
- docs: README 'Agent skills' section, AGENTS.md layout, DOCKER_HUB.md;
moved studio-tex roadmap to v1.3.0.
pi 0.79.7 -> 0.79.10 (auto-resolved from npm latest at build).
joakimp
Joakim Persson