# Remote Agents and Their Management: A Formal Specification

`draft`

## Abstract

This document specifies the protocol by which Buzz Desktop delegates the
execution of a managed agent to a **remote substrate** — any compute
environment other than the local machine — through a **backend provider
binary**, and specifies the lifecycle contract every provider and every
remotely-run agent must satisfy. It covers three layers:

1. **The provider protocol** — a zero-registration plugin contract between the
   desktop and any executable named `buzz-backend-<id>`: discovery, the `info`
   and `deploy` operations, payload schema, and the security obligations on
   both sides of that boundary.
2. **The remote lifecycle model** — how a remote agent is started, observed,
   stopped, and reaped, given the deliberate design constraint that **the
   desktop holds no management channel to the remote process**. Relay
   presence is the sole status signal; shutdown is a relay message; liveness
   bounds are enforced by the agent harness itself, not by the desktop.
3. **The Kubernetes binding** — the first conforming provider,
   `buzz-backend-kubernetes`, which realizes the contract as a bare Pod
   running the `sprig` image.

We state five invariants — **identity fail-closed**, **no secrets in
configuration**, **presence-is-status**, **at-most-one-live-instance**, and
**intentional-termination-is-final** — and argue each from the protocol
rules.

A scoping note that governs the whole document: the desktop is **one
launcher among many**. What makes a process a live Buzz agent is a keypair,
a NIP-OA auth tag, and a relay URL, handed as environment to the `buzz-acp`
harness; anything that can set that environment and exec the harness — a
bash script, a systemd unit, a CI job, or this document's provider protocol
— is a conforming launcher. §Launchers states which obligations bind whom.

As with the git
specification (`git-on-object-storage.md`), naming the trust boundary is part
of the claim: a provider binary is arbitrary code that is handed an agent's
private key, and this document states exactly which properties hold *despite*
that, which hold only if the provider is honest, and which are explicitly the
user's acceptance.

## Scope and Non-Goals

This specification defines **management-plane behavior**: how agents get to a
substrate, how their state is observed, and how their lifetime is bounded. It
deliberately does **not** specify:

- **Agent conversational behavior.** What the agent does with events is
  governed by the ACP harness (`buzz-acp`) and the NIPs it implements
  (NIP-OA, NIP-AE, NIP-AA, …), unchanged by where the harness runs.
- **Malicious-provider containment.** A provider binary receives the agent's
  `nsec` by design — that is its job. The protocol *bounds the desktop's
  exposure* (discovery-only resolution, output caps, secret redaction,
  anti-secret config validation, an explicit UI trust warning) but cannot make
  a hostile provider safe. Choosing to run a provider is a trust decision the
  UI surfaces to the user; this document does not claim otherwise.
- **Substrate security.** Kubernetes RBAC, namespace isolation, and secret
  encryption at rest are cluster-operator concerns. The Kubernetes binding
  states its residual exposure (§K8s Secrets) rather than claiming isolation
  it does not provide.
- **Liveness of the substrate.** That a pod schedules, that an image pulls,
  that a cluster is reachable — empirical, not formal. The protocol specifies
  only how such failures are *reported* (structured error, redacted,
  fail-closed).

## System Model

Five principals:

- **Desktop** `D` — the Buzz Desktop app. Holds the agent's identity (nsec in
  the OS keyring), its configuration record, and the only UI. Trusted.
- **Provider** `P` — an executable `buzz-backend-<id>` on `D`'s machine.
  Invoked one process per operation: JSON request on stdin, JSON response on
  stdout, exit code carrying one bit (zero = output trustworthy, nonzero =
  failure regardless of stdout — §Invocation). **Untrusted by `D`** for everything except
  the job it is explicitly given (deploying the agent, which requires the
  key). All of `P`'s output is treated as hostile (§Provider Output).
- **Substrate** `S` — the remote compute environment `P` deploys into (a
  Kubernetes cluster for the binding in this document). Opaque to `D`;
  `D` never talks to `S`.
- **Agent** `A` — a `buzz-acp` harness process (plus the ACP agent under it)
  running on `S`, holding the nsec it was given, connected to the relay.
- **Relay** `R` — the Buzz relay. The *only* channel that connects `D` to a
  running `A`. Everything `D` knows about a live remote agent, it learns
  from `R`.

The defining constraint, stated as a design axiom:

- **(M1) No management channel.** After a successful `deploy`, `D` holds no
  **persistent management session** to `A` on `S`, and the desktop↔provider
  protocol contains **no substrate API**: no status query, no exec, no log
  fetch, no kill. All post-deploy observation and control flows through `R`:
  status is relay presence (kind:20001), stop is a relay message
  (`!shutdown`), and reconfiguration is a future re-deploy. The reduction M1
  buys is **protocol surface, not credential absence**: ambient substrate
  credentials may well exist on `D`'s machine (the Kubernetes binding uses
  the user's kubeconfig by design), and `D` can always re-invoke `P`. What
  M1 guarantees is that nothing in *this protocol* — its persisted records,
  its wire operations, its stored `backend_agent_id` — constitutes or
  requires a channel to the substrate. The price is the staleness bounds in
  §Presence.

An agent's identity is a Nostr keypair. The **agent record** on `D` carries:
`name`, `relay_url`, the nsec (keyring-hydrated), the NIP-OA `auth` tag
attesting owner authorization, `agent_command`/`agent_args` (the ACP agent the
harness spawns — `goose`, `claude-agent-acp`, `codex-acp`, `buzz-agent`, or
any user-supplied command: this is the **configurable harness** requirement),
effective `system_prompt`/`model`/`provider`, timeout and parallelism knobs,
the `respond_to` gate, merged `env_vars`, and a `backend` discriminator:
`Local` or `Provider { id, config }`.

### Launchers {#launchers}

The five principals above describe the **provider-managed** launch path.
That path is not the definition of a remote agent, and this section states
the actual layering, because the obligations in this document do not all
bind at the same layer. Three contracts, nested:

1. **The agent/harness contract — binds every launcher.** A live Buzz agent
   is a `buzz-acp` process holding a keypair, a NIP-OA auth tag (or resolved
   owner pubkey), and a relay URL, delivered as environment. The relay
   authenticates the keypair and the auth tag — never the launcher. At this
   layer live: fail-closed identity (I1's property, enforced wherever the
   env is assembled), presence publication (I3), owner-verified `!shutdown`,
   and **intentional clean exit is terminal to automatic supervisor
   restart** (I5). A bash script that exports `BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY`,
   `BUZZ_RELAY_URL`, `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG` and execs the harness is a conforming
   launcher at this layer — today, with no code change.
2. **The provider/deployer contract — binds provider-managed launches
   only.** The two operations (`info`/`deploy`), the reconciliation loop,
   and at-most-one-live-instance *per deploy scope* (I4). Hand-launched
   agents sit outside it by construction: a launcher that bypasses the
   provider protocol takes on the uniqueness discipline itself, exactly as
   the cross-scope boundary in I4 already states. The protocol cannot and
   does not promise a global singleton across unrelated launchers of the
   same nsec.
3. **The binding policy — per substrate.** Fingerprints, fenced deletes and
   409 discrimination, restart-policy selection, the default idle bound,
   and the grace budget are Kubernetes-binding policy (§The Kubernetes
   Binding). A different substrate (the systemd/SSH deployer of PR #3449 is
   the live example) conforms to layers 1–2 and writes its own layer 3; it
   is not "non-conforming" for lacking pods.

The desktop is therefore one launcher among many, and the provider protocol
is the *desktop's* door to substrates, not the only door. §Conformance
carries one checklist per layer.

## Invariants

The protocol maintains five invariants. Each is stated with the mechanism
that enforces it and the boundary beyond which it does not hold.

A design obligation governs the whole list: **the complexity budget is
spent in this document, not in the code**. Every guarantee here was chosen
because its enforcing mechanism is one small, boring thing — a refusal at
payload construction (I1), a key-shape validator (I2), an ephemeral event
the agent already publishes (I3), a deterministic name plus one annotation
compare (I4), a timer that fires an existing shutdown channel (I5). The
same rule holds below: the deploy state machine is one loop over seven
ordered rows; the Secret scheme is "unique name, write first, reference
exactly"; GC is one label-select with two filters (annotation, same-clock
age). Where
a richer property would have demanded machinery — Leases, controllers,
ownerReferences, a management channel — the spec either found a
name-and-timestamp argument that makes the machinery unnecessary or
dropped the property and said so (§Non-Goals, M1). A conforming
implementation that is not small is evidence of a spec bug; report it as
one.

- **(I1) Identity fail-closed.** No agent is ever launched with an empty or
  missing private key: whatever assembles the harness environment — desktop,
  provider, bash script — MUST refuse rather than launch identityless
  (§Launchers, layer 1). In the provider path this is enforced at payload
  construction: if keyring hydration left the nsec empty,
  `build_deploy_payload` refuses (mirroring local spawn's
  `spawn_key_refusal`), so no deploy request is ever emitted with an empty
  key. Boundary: a provider that *discards* the key and launches an
  identityless pod is a broken provider; the payload rule governs what `D`
  sends, not what `P` does with it — which is why the property also binds
  at `P`'s env assembly and at every non-provider launcher.

- **(I2) No secrets in configuration.** `provider_config` — the persisted,
  schema-rendered, UI-visible settings object — MUST NOT carry secrets.
  Enforced by validation: flat object, scalar values only, ≤20 fields, ≤64KB,
  and any key whose word-split contains `secret|password|token|key|credential`
  is rejected. The match is against key *names*, so it is a lint with false
  positives: a field like `ssh_key_path` holds a path, not a credential,
  and is refused anyway — a provider author hitting this MUST rename the
  field (e.g. `identity_file`), not weaken the validator; the rule's job is
  making "put the secret in config" fail closed, and cheap false positives
  are the accepted price. Secrets flow exclusively inside the `deploy` payload
  (`private_key_nsec`, `auth_tag`, `env_vars`), which is never persisted by
  `D` and never rendered. Corollary for providers: cluster credentials MUST
  come from ambient substrate config (e.g. kubeconfig resolution), never from
  `provider_config`.

- **(I3) Presence is the status.** `D` derives a remote agent's live state
  exclusively from relay presence events self-signed by the agent key:
  `online`/`away`/`offline` (kind:20001, ephemeral, WS-published). The
  deployment axis (`deployed`/`not_deployed`, from the stored
  `backend_agent_id`) is bookkeeping, not liveness. Staleness bound: presence
  can be wrong for the window between an abnormal agent death (SIGKILL, node
  loss) and the relay's presence expiry — **180 seconds**
  (`PRESENCE_TTL_SECS`, `buzz-pubsub/src/presence.rs:16`; the vision's
  "a bounded wrong dot, never an indefinite one"), the accepted
  cost of M1. The specific number is a relay-wide constant, not a
  remote-agent choice: #3783 raised it from 90s to keep a three-heartbeat
  expiry window after the desktop heartbeat moved to 60s. What I3 promises
  is that the window is *bounded*, not its width.
  The Kubernetes binding minimizes the *avoidable* part of that window by
  sizing the termination grace period to the harness's full graceful-shutdown
  path (§K8s Grace). Two consequences the bound imposes: (a) the harness's
  presence-suppression knob, `BUZZ_ACP_NO_PRESENCE`, MUST join
  `RESERVED_ENV_KEYS` — locally the knob is cosmetic (the process and UI
  remain visible), but remotely M1 makes presence the *only* signal, so an
  unreserved user env var would convert "wrong for ≤180s" into "wrong
  indefinitely" and silently disarm the one bound in print; (b) presence is
  scoped to a **community**: the relay derives community from its host, so
  the deploy-time `relay_url` binds the body to one community for its whole
  life, and a workspace observing through a different community sees the
  agent offline while a deploy against it correctly no-ops — a known UX
  boundary (the cross-scope boundary I4 admits, seen from the status side),
  stated here so the two honest-but-conflicting readouts are diagnosable.

- **(I4) At most one live instance per agent key per deployment scope.**
  Within one provider's deployment scope (for Kubernetes: one namespace),
  there is never more than one Running instance of a given agent pubkey.
  Enforced by the deploy reconciliation loop (§Deploy State Machine):
  deploy is keyed on the derived pubkey, a live instance maps to strict
  no-op, and — because two deploys can race — create/delete conflicts MUST
  converge (re-read and return the winner) rather than fail; deterministic
  instance naming makes the substrate itself reject a second live instance.
  Boundary: the protocol cannot prevent the same nsec being
  deployed to two different scopes (two namespaces, two clusters, or remote
  + local simultaneously) — the relay tolerates multiple connections per key,
  and preventing this would require the global registry M1 forbids. Deploying
  one key twice is user error with confusing-but-safe results (both instances
  answer), not a safety violation.

- **(I5) Intentional termination is final.** A remote agent **stops when
  told, stays down when it stops, and is never silently resurrected**: an
  instance whose harness is live terminates on owner `!shutdown` or when a
  configured inactivity bound expires, and no supervisor restarts an
  instance that exited *intentionally*. "Final" means **terminal to
  automatic supervisor restart** — the owner may always issue a fresh
  Start; that is resurrection working as designed, not a violation.

  **Lifetime is owner policy, not law.** The inactivity bound is the
  harness's opt-in self-stop (§Auto-Stop, default disabled). An owner may
  always choose **no inactivity bound** — declaring an indefinitely-lived
  agent. How that choice is expressed is per-binding: the Kubernetes
  binding opts in with a 2h schema default because a pod is metered
  compute with nobody watching it, and spells "no bound" as its
  `inactivity_seconds: 0` field (§Pod shape); a hand launcher simply never
  sets the reaper env. Either way it is
  a legitimate, explicit choice, not a conformance failure: the invariant
  was never "every instance terminates" (a continuously active agent is
  intentionally unbounded — that is the product); it is "termination, once
  intended, sticks".

  **Restart policy follows lifetime policy.** The distinction that makes
  indefinite agents safe is *intent vs accident*: dying on purpose
  (`!shutdown`, inactivity reap) is final; dying by accident (node
  eviction, OOM) may restart the body — same key, same agent, the
  resurrection story working *for* the owner. Stated launcher-neutrally:
  **if a supervisor exists, its restart policy MAY revive an abnormal
  death and MUST NOT revive an intentional clean exit.** A launcher with
  no supervisor at all — a hand-launched process on a VPS — satisfies
  this vacuously: nothing restarts anything. How bounded vs indefinite
  lifetime maps onto a concrete supervisor policy is binding policy
  ([L3]), realized and documented by each binding — this binding's
  mapping lives in §Pod shape; a systemd binding's in its unit
  directives. Any revive-on-abnormal-death policy carries a universal
  precondition: the supervisor can distinguish intent from accident only
  if the harness formally promises *clean exit = exit code 0* on every
  intentional path and nonzero otherwise, pinned by test. At `28ae6cd21`
  that property is emergent, not defended (Known Defect 6);
  restart-on-failure before the pinned contract is how a refactor
  silently converts every clean stop into a restart loop with no failing
  test. Ordering is normative: exit-code contract first,
  restart-on-failure second — the identical seam in every supervisor that
  offers the distinction. An always-restart policy remains non-conforming
  at any layer: it resurrects after a *clean* exit, defeating
  `!shutdown`.

  Enforcement: the self-stop lives *inside the harness* (the only place
  that can see activity, per M1) (§Auto-Stop), and each binding makes it
  effective on its substrate by requiring that harness exit terminates
  the substrate's unit of execution (this binding's realization — the
  harness as the container's signal-receiving process — is §Pod shape,
  [L3]) and that any supervisor's restart policy respects intent as
  above.
  Boundaries: (a) the guarantee is conditional on a live harness event
  loop — a wedged process that cannot run its reaper timer cannot reap
  itself, and M1 means nothing else will (the mitigation is the substrate
  operator's, e.g. a namespace-level TTL policy, out of scope per
  §Non-Goals); (b) restart policy prevents resurrection, it does not prove
  process exit; (c) I5 bounds *agent* lifetime, not substrate residue —
  residue (in this binding, a Completed pod object) persists for
  forensics until the next deploy's GC (§K8s GC).

## Provider Protocol

### Discovery

`D` scans, in order: the directory containing the desktop executable, every
entry of `PATH`, and `~/.local/bin`, for executables named
`buzz-backend-<id>`. The suffix after the prefix is the provider id and MUST
match `[a-z0-9][a-z0-9_-]*`. On Windows, an `.exe`/`.bat`/`.cmd` extension
MUST be stripped before the id is derived (see §Known Defects — as of
`28ae6cd21` it is not, so Windows providers probe but cannot deploy). First
hit per filename wins. Discovery executes nothing.

**Shadowing and invalid candidates are diagnosable, not silent.** First-hit
wins is the right selection rule (it is kubectl's), but kubectl also warns
when a later-PATH plugin is shadowed, and Docker's CLI reports invalid
plugin candidates with reasons. Discovery MUST retain, and the UI and
deploy-time errors MUST be able to surface: the selected binary's full
path, any shadowed candidates for the same id (later-PATH duplicates), and
candidates rejected for malformed names. A deploy error that names which
binary ran answers the first question a user with two copies of
`buzz-backend-kubernetes` will ask. (At `28ae6cd21` discovery records only
the winning path — a desktop change alongside Known Defect 3's.)

**Resolution rule.** Every subsequent operation resolves the provider id
against the *current* discovery set. A stored binary path on an agent record
is a cache, revalidated against both the current candidates and the recorded
id before every use. A record edit can therefore never redirect an operation
to a binary discovery would not have found.

**Pre-secret negotiation gate (normative).** Declaring `protocol_version`
is worthless if nothing checks it before the nsec crosses the trust
boundary — and at `28ae6cd21` nothing does: `provider_deploy` invokes
`deploy` directly, so a stale UI-time probe (or a binary replaced on PATH
since that probe) can receive `private_key_nsec` unchecked (Known Defect
5). The deploy path MUST: resolve the provider id **once**; copy the
resolved candidate into a desktop-owned, private, non-writable **staging
file**, computing its digest during the copy; invoke `info` **on the
staged artifact**; validate an explicit, supported `protocol_version`
(§Info — absence is an error); invoke `deploy` on the **same staged
artifact**; delete it afterward. Staged bytes are what "same executable
identity" means here: the nsec goes to the exact bytes that answered
`info`. Path-plus-metadata comparison (dev/inode, size, mtime) is NOT an
acceptable substitute for this guarantee — unchanged metadata can miss an
in-place content rewrite, and a pathname can be swapped between the check
and the moment `Command` opens it, which is precisely the
check-then-exec race the gate exists to close. A UI-time probe result
MUST NOT satisfy this gate. If a platform makes staged execution
impossible for some provider (e.g. an executable that only runs from its
install location due to relative dependencies or signing constraints),
the implementation MUST NOT silently fall back to metadata and still
claim this gate: it degrades explicitly to *accidental-replacement
detection* (path + file-identity compare), surfaces that weaker level in
the deploy diagnostics, and the spec text for that platform carries the
narrower claim. Remembered digest-based approval (Terraform-lock style)
is a stronger follow-up, not a v1 requirement.

### Invocation

One process per operation. `D` spawns `P` with cwd = the agent workdir,
writes exactly one JSON object to stdin, closes stdin. `P` writes exactly one
JSON object to stdout and exits. Requirements on `D` (all implemented):

- Bounded reads: stdout capped (1MB), stderr capped (64KB), no `read_to_end`
  on pipes a daemonizing child could hold open; deadline polling with
  `try_wait`.
- **Non-zero exit is failure even if stdout parsed.** Partial output from a
  crashed operation is never trusted.
- `{"ok": false, "error": …}` is the in-band failure form.
- **Environment**: `P` inherits `D`'s environment. On macOS a GUI launch
  means launchd's minimal PATH; providers whose substrate credentials invoke
  helper binaries (kubeconfig `exec` plugins) MUST self-augment their PATH
  (§K8s Auth) rather than assume a login shell.

### Provider Output Is Untrusted

Everything `P` emits — stderr, error strings, the response object — is
scrubbed before storage or display: every value from the request's
`env_vars` (longest-first, length ≥4) and every `nsec1…`/`sprt_tok_…` token
is redacted. Rationale: `P` legitimately holds secrets during deploy; `P`
echoing them (in a stack trace, a kubectl error, a debug line) must not
propagate them into `D`'s persisted `last_error` or logs.

### `info`

```
request:  {"op": "info", "request_id": "<uuid>"}
response: {"ok": true, "name": str, "version": str,
           "protocol_version": int, "description": str,
           "config_schema": <JSON Schema>}
timeout:  10s
```

`version` is the provider's *software* version — useful in error reports,
useless for compatibility. `protocol_version` (this document: `1`) is the
wire-contract version, following the pattern Docker's CLI plugins
(`SchemaVersion`) and HashiCorp go-plugin (negotiated protocol version) both
converged on: the desktop rejects a provider whose `protocol_version` it
does not speak, with an error naming both versions and the binary path,
instead of failing later inside a half-understood `deploy`. A missing
`protocol_version` is an **error, not a presumed `1`**: there is no
deployed provider population to grandfather, and a gate that infers
compatibility for exactly the class of binary that never declared any
defeats its own pre-secret guarantee (§Discovery). Fail closed — it is
also simpler: no migration clock, no "major cycle" to define.

`config_schema` drives the UI form: `properties[*].default` prefill,
string/number/boolean coercion, `required` gating. A provider MAY compute
defaults freshly per call (the Kubernetes binding generates a random
namespace default this way — §K8s Namespace). The schema's fields are
subject to I2 validation when the user's values come back in `deploy`.

### `deploy`

```
request:  {"op": "deploy", "request_id": "<uuid>",
           "agent": <payload>, "provider_config": {…}}
response: {"ok": true, "agent_id": str}
timeout:  600s
```

The agent payload (field list per
`commands/agents_deploy.rs: deploy_payload_json` at `28ae6cd21`; the
`launch` block is a normative addition not yet emitted — Known Defect 3):

| field | meaning |
|---|---|
| `name` | display name |
| `relay_url` | concrete WS URL (workspace fallback materialized — the remote side has no workspace notion) |
| `private_key_nsec` | **the identity** (I1: never empty) |
| `auth_tag` | NIP-OA owner attestation |
| `agent_command`, `agent_args` | the ACP agent under the harness (configurable-harness support). At `28ae6cd21` these are raw record bytes — see Known Defect 3: the normative source is the resolved descriptor in `launch` |
| `system_prompt`, `model`, `provider` | effective values, live-persona-first resolution |
| `turn_timeout_seconds`, `idle_timeout_seconds`, `max_turn_duration_seconds` | harness timeout knobs |
| `parallelism` | concurrent-turn bound |
| `respond_to`, `respond_to_allowlist` | inbound author gate |
| `env_vars` | merged user env: global < persona < agent |
| `launch` | **normative addition** (§Launch data): the desktop-resolved launch contract — `command` (name, not path), normalized `args`, layered `env`, overridable `policy_env`, and `owner_pubkey` |

**Reserved-key rule (normative for providers).** `D` strips
`BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY`, `NOSTR_PRIVATE_KEY`, `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG`, `BUZZ_RELAY_URL`,
and the other reserved keys from `env_vars` before merge. A provider MUST
construct the agent environment's identity variables from the **top-level**
payload fields (`private_key_nsec` → `BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY`/`NOSTR_PRIVATE_KEY`,
`auth_tag` → `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG`, `relay_url` → `BUZZ_RELAY_URL`); reading
`env_vars` for them yields an identityless agent. A related hardening `D`
performs is part of the contract's rationale: env keys are validated as
POSIX-shaped names before merge, because a key like `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG=x`
smuggled through `Command::env` would bypass the reserved-key strip
entirely. A provider materializing `env_vars` into a substrate object
(e.g. a Kubernetes Secret) MUST likewise never let a user-supplied key
collide with or reconstruct a reserved key.

`agent_id` is `P`'s stable handle for the deployment (the Kubernetes binding
returns the pod name). `D` stores it as `backend_agent_id`; its presence is
the `deployed` axis of I3.

**There is no `undeploy` op in v1.** Deletion of a remote agent from `D`
orphans the substrate objects; the UI therefore requires an explicit
`force_remote_delete` confirmation, and the binding's GC + I5 bound the
orphan's cost (the agent self-stops; the pod residue is reaped on the next
deploy of the same key, or manually).

### Launch data (`launch`) {#launch-data}

Reproducing the local spawn's launch semantics requires state only the
desktop can resolve: the runtime-metadata table (`model_env_var`,
`provider_env_var`, `provider_locked`, `default_env` —
`discovery.rs:75-207`), the six-layer env resolution, harness-definition
command/args fallback, team instructions, session title, the respond-to
gate's legacy owner fallback, and the mesh rewrite. A provider MUST NOT
reimplement that derivation — it would be a second copy of desktop runtime
discovery, drifting from the first. Instead the payload carries a typed
`launch` block that `D` resolves with **the same code paths as local
spawn**, and the provider applies it mechanically.

```
"launch": {
  "command":      str,          // command NAME (e.g. "goose"), never a host path
  "args":         [str],        // normalized args, definition fallback applied
  "env":          {str: str},   // layered env: baked → runtime metadata →
                                // definition → global → persona → agent
                                // (resolve_effective_harness_descriptor)
  "policy_env":   {str: str},   // overridable behavior defaults (tier 1, below):
                                // runtime default_env (e.g. GOOSE_MODE=auto),
                                // BUZZ_ACP_RELAY_OBSERVER, BUZZ_ACP_LAZY_POOL=true,
                                // BUZZ_ACP_SESSION_TITLE (resolved),
                                // BUZZ_ACP_TEAM_INSTRUCTIONS, BUZZ_ACP_MODEL,
                                // MCP_HOOK_SERVERS=* (mcp_hooks runtimes only)
  "owner_pubkey": str | null    // resolved workspace owner (hex) — legacy
                                // BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_OWNER fallback, non-secret
}
```

`launch.command`/`launch.args` come from
`resolve_effective_harness_descriptor` (`readiness.rs:125`) — the same
resolver local spawn uses — which fixes two silent divergences the raw
record fields carry: a persona-derived `agent_command` is a blank record
byte, and definition-provided `agent_args` are lost when the instance's own
args are empty. `launch.env` is that descriptor's layered env, which is
where per-runtime model/provider injection lives (`GOOSE_MODEL`/
`GOOSE_PROVIDER` for goose; nothing for `provider_locked` runtimes like
Claude; `BUZZ_AGENT_MODEL`/`BUZZ_AGENT_PROVIDER` for buzz-agent). A fixed
`provider → BUZZ_AGENT_PROVIDER` mapping is wrong for three of the four
built-in runtimes and is why this block exists.

**What `policy_env` carries — and deliberately does not.** Its irreducible
wire fields are exactly three scalars plus the metadata-derived defaults —
plus the four record-derived behavior knobs that would otherwise be
mis-tiered (below):

- `BUZZ_ACP_TEAM_INSTRUCTIONS` — the only truly non-reconstructible policy
  value: `effective_team_instructions` (`spawn_hash.rs:41-52`) needs the
  desktop's `TeamRecord` store, which no pod can reach.
- `BUZZ_ACP_SESSION_TITLE` — sent **resolved** (`resolve_session_title`,
  `runtime/metadata.rs:45`), not as its `display_name`/`name` inputs. The
  resolution strips control characters, and that property transfers: an
  interior NUL fails a local spawn at the env boundary, and would make the
  Kubernetes apiserver reject the whole pod spec — a rename must degrade,
  not turn into a deploy failure.
- `owner_pubkey` (block-level, not env) — the respond-to gate is otherwise
  fully reconstructible from payload fields (`build_respond_to_env`,
  `runtime.rs:380-421`); this is its one irreducible input.
- Runtime `default_env` (e.g. `GOOSE_MODE=auto`) — computed **from the
  runtime metadata table only, unconditionally**. The local spawn applies
  each default only `if std::env::var(key).is_err()` (`runtime.rs:733-737`)
  — a test of the *desktop's own* ambient environment. That makes "the
  resolved local env" not a pure function of the record; serializing it
  verbatim would bake a host accident into the pod. Launch data MUST be
  computed from record + config alone.
- `BUZZ_ACP_LAZY_POOL=true` — a **deliberate pick, not a transcription**:
  the two local paths disagree (manual Start is eager, `runtime.rs:1001`;
  launch restore is lazy, `restore.rs:333`, precisely to avoid "N idle
  brains on every launch"). Remote pods take the lazy arm: an idle LLM pool
  in a cluster is billable waste with no user watching it warm up.
- `MCP_HOOK_SERVERS=*` when the resolved runtime has `mcp_hooks`
  (`runtime.rs:594-598`; buzz-agent only at `28ae6cd21`) — gates the
  `_Stop`/`_PostCompact` hook tools.
- `BUZZ_ACP_SYSTEM_PROMPT`, `BUZZ_ACP_IDLE_TIMEOUT`,
  `BUZZ_ACP_MAX_TURN_DURATION`, `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS` — resolved by the desktop
  from the record's `system_prompt` / `idle_timeout_seconds` /
  `max_turn_duration_seconds` / `parallelism` (each omitted when null,
  matching the local spawn's conditional emission). `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS` is
  the **effective** parallelism: `min(record.parallelism, harness_cap)`
  where the cap is harness-specific (e.g. OpenClaw is capped at 5). These
  are **tier-1 control-plane** keys: `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS` is in
  `RESERVED_ENV_KEYS` (`env_vars.rs`) so the desktop-resolved effective
  value cannot be overridden by a definition env var; the others are
  tier-1 by local fact (written before the user env layer). A provider
  that independently mapped the top-level payload copies after `launch.env`
  would invert the precedence for those remaining keys — the structured
  field silently defeating an override that works locally — which is why
  the provider MUST NOT remap them (§Entrypoint mapping table).

`BUZZ_ACP_DEDUP` and `BUZZ_ACP_MULTIPLE_EVENT_HANDLING` are **deliberately
unset**: the local spawn writes `queue`/`steer` (`runtime.rs:730-731`), and
those are exactly the harness's clap defaults (`config.rs:344,356`) — a pod
that omits both is behaviorally identical, and adding rows for them would
imply a divergence that does not exist. `BUZZ_MANAGED_AGENT` is likewise
deliberately absent remotely: it brands local harness processes so the
desktop's orphan sweep and instance reaper can prove ownership by scanning
process env (`orphan_sweep.rs`, `instance_reaper.rs`) — there is no local
process to sweep.

**Environment precedence (normative) — three tiers, later wins:**

1. **Overridable behavior defaults** — `launch.policy_env`. Most keys here
   are deliberately non-reserved (`env_vars.rs` documents the narrow set
   that IS reserved): power users may bypass the dedicated UI fields for
   system prompt, model, idle timeout, etc. Locally the user env is written
   after them (`runtime.rs:860` and its comment). A policy-wins order here
   would make remote agents ignore overrides local agents honor.
   **Exception — `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS`:** this key IS reserved
   (`env_vars.rs:RESERVED_ENV_KEYS`) so the desktop-controlled effective
   parallelism (applying any per-harness cap) cannot be bypassed by a
   user-supplied definition env var. The reserved-key strip removes any
   user copy before serialization, so the tier-1 value survives.
2. **User/layered env** — `launch.env`. User `env_vars` need no separate
   slot: the descriptor's layering already merged them (global < persona <
   agent), so a provider applies `launch.env` and MUST NOT re-merge the
   legacy `env_vars` field on top.
3. **Authoritative** — unoverridable at every layer, written last and
   backed by the reserved-key strip: the identity variables from top-level
   payload fields (§Reserved-key rule), the respond-to gate values,
   `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_OWNER`, the inactivity bound, `BUZZ_ACP_MCP_COMMAND`,
   and `BUZZ_MANAGED_AGENT_START_NONCE`. For the nonce, the provider MUST
   set it to the attempt's **generation token** (§K8s Secrets): the harness
   stamps it into every observer lifecycle frame (`buzz-acp/lib.rs:1501`),
   so the Secret generation and the lifecycle correlator become one
   identity instead of an empty string.

**Host-resolved values MUST NOT be forwarded and MUST be re-derived
in-image.** The local spawn sets several variables to absolute paths on the
desktop's filesystem; forwarding them into a container is a guaranteed
failure. The provider/image re-derives:

- the harness and agent binaries: `launch.command` is a *name*, resolved
  against the image's own `PATH` (`BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_COMMAND`), and
  `BUZZ_ACP_MCP_COMMAND=buzz-dev-mcp` likewise;
- `CLAUDE_CODE_EXECUTABLE` — a `resolve_command()` host path
  (`configure_runtime_cli`, `runtime.rs:424-446`), same class as the
  command paths: image-local resolution or unset;
- `PATH` itself (the desktop's augmented PATH is meaningless in the image);
- git credential/signing helper locations — the relay-URL *scoping* of the
  credential config is normative (never a global helper), the helper *path*
  is image-local (§Image);
- `BUZZ_ACP_SETUP_PAYLOAD` is desktop-computed readiness state and MUST NOT
  appear in a remote pod.

**Owner resolution (normative):** the provider MUST have either a non-null
`auth_tag` (→ `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG`) or a non-null `launch.owner_pubkey`
(→ `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_OWNER`) before any mutation; if both are null it MUST
refuse the deploy. Without an owner the harness cannot match `!shutdown`
(`buzz-acp/src/lib.rs: resolve_agent_owner`, main-loop owner check) and the
agent answers its own stop command conversationally — §Stop would be
describing a mechanism that does not work. `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_OWNER` is a
reserved key, so this value can only arrive as authoritative launch data,
never through user env.

**Buzz shared compute (relay-mesh) is non-deployable, and this is forced,
not chosen.** The mesh rewrite resolves to an OpenAI-compatible transport at
`http://127.0.0.1:9337/v1` (`relay_mesh.rs: RELAY_MESH_API_BASE_URL`) — a
loopback proxy on the desktop. Serializing that policy into a pod points the
agent at its own localhost, where nothing listens. `D` already rejects
mesh-configured creates on non-local backends
(`agents.rs: normalize_relay_mesh`); the deploy path MUST equally fail
closed — before any mutation — when the effective provider resolves to
`relay-mesh`, rather than passing `relay-mesh` through as if it were a
runtime provider. Remote mesh transport is a possible v2 (an in-image mesh
client), not a v1 silent breakage.

**The governing invariant:** a remote agent's environment differs from the
same record's local spawn **only where the substrate forces it** (paths,
PATH, readiness). Anyone adding a local behavior knob adds it to the shared
resolver, and both spawn paths inherit it; there are not two derivations to
keep in sync.

### Deploy State Machine

`start` on any non-Local agent unconditionally issues `deploy` — the desktop
does not track substrate state (M1). Deploy is therefore **not** "create": it
is *converge to at-most-one-live-instance* (I4), implemented as a
**reconciliation loop** keyed on the agent's identity within the provider's
scope.

**Step 0 — derive and verify identity.** The payload carries the nsec, not
the pubkey. Before any substrate read or mutation, the provider MUST parse
`private_key_nsec` and derive the public key from it; a malformed or
undecodable key is an immediate in-band error. Every selector, name, and
comparison below uses the *derived* pubkey — never a caller-supplied one.

**Step 1 — select and authenticate candidates.** Candidate objects are
selected by the (truncated) identity label, then each candidate's
**full-pubkey annotation MUST be compared against the derived pubkey**
before it is treated as belonging to this agent. Truncated selectors are
collision-*resistant*, not collision-*free*: the annotation check is what
makes them safe. An object whose annotation does not match MUST NOT be
no-op'd against, deleted, GC'd, or have its Secret touched; the provider
MUST either ignore it or fail with an explicit collision error. Only
annotation-verified objects proceed.

**Auto-repair is fenced to Buzz-authored, positively identified residue
(normative).** The destructive rows below (delete residue, replace a
never-started body, GC a Secret) are legitimate *only because* every object
they touch carries positive **protocol ownership evidence** — and identity
evidence alone is not ownership evidence. The identity label, the
full-pubkey annotation, and the create-intent fingerprint prove "matches
our schema for this public identity"; all three are public, so any cluster
writer can reproduce them on an object this provider never created. Every
object this provider creates therefore also carries an explicit
management marker — `app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: buzz-backend-kubernetes`
plus a binding schema-version label (§Pod shape) — and **no destructive
repair or GC action fires unless the marker is present**, on top of the
annotation check and the UID+`resourceVersion` fence every delete already
requires. This is protocol evidence, not cryptographic proof: a cluster
writer can forge metadata by definition, and an actor with write access to
the namespace can already delete the pod outright — the marker's job is
making *accidental* schema collisions and third-party objects fail closed,
not defeating a hostile admin. The vision's rule that a never-started body
is substrate-operator residue survives with one qualifier: *Buzz-authored*
create-state (a Secret our provider wrote, a pod carrying our verified
annotations and marker) is the reconciler's to clear, because it is state
the user cannot reasonably clear themselves; *substrate* wreckage —
anything unowned, unmarked, unannotated, or ambiguously identified — still
fails closed to the operator. A provider that cannot positively identify an
object as its own output does not repair around it; it reports it.

**Step 2 — reconcile.** Ordered rules, evaluated against the verified
observation; on any conflict, *re-enter from step 1* rather than fail:

| observed | action | rationale |
|---|---|---|
| instance marked for deletion (`deletionTimestamp` set, any phase) | wait for actual disappearance, then re-enter | the user pressed Start and the old instance is unrecoverable; returning the dying instance's id records a success that evaporates. **Note: in Kubernetes there is no `Terminating` phase — a pod being gracefully deleted stays in phase `Running` for its whole grace period.** The deletion mark MUST be checked *before* phase, or this row is mistaken for the no-op row |
| no instance | create, then verify startup (below) | first deploy / after GC |
| terminated (Succeeded/Failed) | delete residue, wait for disappearance, re-enter (→ create) | the **normal restart path**: how a user revives a reaped or shut-down agent |
| live and **started** (harness container running) | **strict no-op; return existing `agent_id`** | Start must never silently kill a live agent mid-turn; "already running" is the honest answer, consistent with I3 |
| exists but **never started**, provably non-recoverable — referenced Secret confirmed absent (by a consistent read, below), or invalid image reference | delete (preconditioned, below), wait for disappearance, re-enter (→ create) | a pod whose harness never ran is not a live agent: nothing can be killed mid-turn (I3), it never held the identity (I4), auto-stop cannot bound it (I5's reaper lives in the harness), and no-op'ing it would return a permanently inert instance as success on every future Start. "Provably" means the provider verified the referenced object's absence or the spec-level defect itself — never a reason string alone |
| exists, **never started**, recoverable, **fingerprint matches** current desired create intent (below) — self-healable startup states: `Unschedulable` (scale-from-zero autoscaling), image pull / `ImagePullBackOff`, transient `CreateContainerConfigError` | observe until started or the operation deadline expires, then return the latest redacted condition — **never delete, on this call or any later one** | these states routinely self-heal — an autoscaler provisions the node, the pull retries, the kubelet re-resolves the Secret (it retries a never-created container regardless of `restartPolicy`). And recoverable-timeout MUST stay observational *across calls*: any finite pod-age threshold can collide with the cluster's own pod-age thresholds (Cluster Autoscaler's `--new-pod-scale-up-delay` / per-pod `pod-scale-up-delay` annotation — the FAQ's example is `"600s"`), and delete-recreate resets exactly the age the autoscaler keys on, converting a slow cold start into a livelock in which every individual decision is correct. A later deploy re-reads: started → strict no-op; still recoverable and same intent → observe under the new call's deadline without resetting pod age; provably non-recoverable → the non-recoverable row. Repeated **identical** Starts can therefore never delete anything, whatever the pod's age — a genuinely slow cluster persists until it heals or an operator acts, and M1 already makes substrate residue the operator's boundary |
| exists, **never started**, recoverable, **fingerprint differs or absent** — the recorded create-intent fingerprint does not match what *this* deploy would create | delete (preconditioned, below), wait for disappearance, re-enter (→ create) | this is not the same generation the user is waiting on — it is a pod built from configuration the user has since *changed*, and without this row the change can never materialize: the pod name is deterministic, GC only reaps terminated pods, Stop needs a live harness, I5's reaper lives in the harness, and there is no `undeploy` — so a never-started pod wedged by its own config (a `memory_request` no node satisfies, a quota-blocked namespace) would swallow every future edit while reporting only "startup not confirmed", indistinguishable from a slow cluster. Divergence is evidence, not a clock — but it has **two** sources, not one: a user config change, and a provider upgrade that moves the baked default image digest (§K8s image; the default is compile-time provider state, so upgrading the provider changes the computed intent with no user action). Both are deliberate: the second is the *only* escape from a wedge caused by a bad baked default (unpullable digest, wrong arch) — a fingerprint blind to the default resolution would hand that wedge back to exactly the population that cannot override `image`. The accepted cost is that a provider upgrade mid-cold-pull discards in-flight startup progress; neither source is clocked to anything the cluster keys on, so no threshold exists to collide with the autoscaler. A **started** pod is never touched by this row: live → strict no-op regardless of divergence (edits reach it via the documented next-generation consequence) |

**Startup is part of create — phase is not readiness.** `Pending` (and even
`Running` at the pod level) does not mean the harness started: a pod can sit
in `ImagePullBackOff`, `CreateContainerConfigError` (e.g. a missing
`envFrom` Secret), or unschedulable `Pending` forever, and I5's inactivity
reaper cannot bound a harness that never began. Therefore `deploy` MUST NOT
report success at pod acceptance: it succeeds only when the harness
container has actually started (container `state.running`), bounded by the
operation deadline. On failure or deadline expiry it MUST return an in-band
error carrying the actionable condition (the container waiting `reason` /
pod condition), not a generic timeout. "Live" in the no-op row above means
**started**, for the same reason — this is the lesson ephemeral-runner
controllers learned upstream (inspect container state, not pod phase).
Classification MUST combine container state, pod conditions,
referenced-object existence, and the recorded create-intent fingerprint —
**reason strings alone are not a
stable fatality taxonomy**, and pod age is never one (age triggers nothing
destructive; see the recoverable rows and the controlled-view rule below).
In particular, `Unschedulable` is not fatal: a
scale-from-zero pod reports it while the autoscaler provisions capacity,
and the kubelet retries a container that never got a container status
regardless of `restartPolicy: Never` (`ShouldContainerBeRestarted` returns
true for a nil status *before* the restart-policy check —
`kubelet/container/helpers.go`), which is exactly why a briefly-missing
Secret self-heals. `restartPolicy: Never` suppresses restarting a container
that ran and died; it says nothing about one that never started.
A consequence to state plainly: once success includes container start, the
600s operation deadline **is** the cold-start budget — image pull on a
fresh node, scale-from-zero scheduling, all of it. But the deadline bounds
**how long one Start waits synchronously**, nothing more. Deadline expiry
on a still-progressing startup is reported as "startup not confirmed within
the deadline", and MUST NOT trigger cleanup or forced recycle — on this
call *or any later one* (the recoverable rows above — what replaces a
never-started pod is a *config change*, never a deadline): the next deploy's
reconciler observes whatever the startup became and takes the matching row,
preserving the pod's `creationTimestamp` for whatever cluster machinery
keys on it. Whether ten minutes fits the intended cluster class is a
product ruling,
not a correctness one.

**One create attempt per call (normative).** The replacement rows above —
terminated, never-started provably broken, never-started divergent — exist
to clear residue from a *previous* life. Once a deploy call has created its
own pod, a classification that would replace that pod means the attempt this
call just made has already failed: the harness started, rejected its
configuration, and exited (the deterministic startup failure), or the pod
was proven broken. Re-running the identical create against the same cluster
inside the same call cannot produce a different outcome; what it produces is
a hot delete/mint/create cycle every poll interval for the whole operation
deadline, one immutable Secret per cycle (measured live: 107 Secrets in a
single 600s call), every one younger than §K8s GC's orphan age gate — a
bounded-call resource DoS and nsec-bearing-Secret amplifier. A binding MUST
NOT delete-recreate a pod created by the same deploy call: it MUST return
the in-band error carrying the latest condition (for a terminated container,
the exit code and reason — never the terminated `message`, which is
process-composed output under the same redaction rule as pull messages).
The failed attempt's pod and Secret are deliberately left in place: the pod
is terminated, so the *next* Start's preflight GC collects the pod and its
referenced Secret together before that call's own single attempt — retry is
thereby gated on fresh owner intent, and litter is bounded at one pod plus
one Secret per press, not per poll. This bounds attempts, not observation:
the recoverable rows still observe a slow startup for the full deadline, and
residue from previous lives is still replaced exactly once on the way to
this call's attempt.

**Destructive decisions come from views you control — reads and writes
both (normative).** This is one rule with three instances, stated once so
nobody optimizes an instance away. §K8s GC's same-clock rule is the time
instance. The other two live here:

- *Reads*: every read whose result can authorize a deletion — the
  Secret-absence confirmation above, and the candidate list the GC pass
  filters — MUST use most-recent semantics (`resourceVersion` **unset**,
  a quorum read). `resourceVersion: "0"` is served from the watch cache,
  which the Kubernetes API contract explicitly allows to be much older
  than anything the client has already observed; a stale
  Secret-absence read would delete a pod whose Secret exists and whose
  container was about to start — the GC race again, arriving through read
  consistency instead of a clock.
- *Writes*: a fresh read is necessary but not sufficient — the kubelet can
  start the container between observation and delete. Every DELETE
  authorized by a classification MUST carry `preconditions.uid` **and**
  `preconditions.resourceVersion` from that exact observation
  (`metav1.Preconditions` supports both), making the edge a
  compare-and-delete. A failed precondition is neither an error nor
  permission to retry the delete: re-enter from step 1 and classify the
  object that exists now. The full-pubkey annotation check remains — the
  precondition pins *when*, the annotation pins *whose*.

**The 409 discriminator is `Status.reason`, never the status code
(normative).** Two rules in this section require *opposite* actions on
the same HTTP status: a failed delete precondition and a create-conflict
are **both 409** (`NewConflict` and `NewAlreadyExists` each carry
`Code: http.StatusConflict` — `apimachinery/pkg/api/errors/errors.go`).
The discriminator is the Kubernetes API `Status.reason` field:
`Conflict` → abandon the delete and re-enter from step 1;
`AlreadyExists` on create → the convergence rule below (clean up only the
losing attempt's Secret, re-read, adopt the winner). An implementation
that branches on the code alone will eventually take the adoption path on
a failed delete or vice versa. This does not contradict the
reason-strings warning above: API `Status.reason` is a machine-readable
contract token defined by `metav1.Status`; *container waiting* reasons
are kubelet-produced strings with no such contract — the spec distrusts
the latter, not the former.

**Create-intent fingerprint (normative).** The divergence discriminator
in the never-started rows is a recorded annotation,
`buzz.block.xyz/create-intent`, written at pod create — the same shape as
the image-reference and pubkey annotations the pod already carries. Its
value is an **unkeyed SHA-256** over a canonical serialization of the
provider's **non-secret create-intent template**, computed *before* the
create call. The scope rule that makes a plain hash safe: the input
covers exactly the provider-controlled fields that can affect scheduling
or container creation — resolved image reference, resource
requests/limits, service account, PodSpec command/args, volumes/mounts,
security context, and the provider's other pod-shape knobs — and **never
Secret data or attempt identity**. Secret *values* cannot cause the
never-started wedge this discriminator exists to clear (scheduling reads
pod fields, not Secret values; a bad launch value produces a started
container that fails at the relay — a different row), so hashing them
buys nothing and a plain hash over low-entropy secrets published in a
world-readable annotation would be a dictionary oracle; excluding them
removes the oracle and with it any need for an HMAC key or nsec-derived
key material. Two normalization requirements, or every attempt diverges
by construction: the per-attempt Secret *name* in `envFrom` MUST be
replaced by a fixed placeholder (or the pre-binding template serialized
instead of the concrete PodSpec), and API metadata / server- and
admission-produced output (UID, `resourceVersion`, timestamps, defaulted
fields, the fingerprint annotation itself) is excluded structurally —
the serializer never sees it, an invariant checkable by inspection.
Comparison is always recorded-annotation vs freshly-computed intent,
**never** a diff against the live pod spec: admission defaulting and
mutation would make every pod look divergent, which is why the
fingerprint is computed pre-create. A missing referenced Secret stays
handled by the most-recent absence check (the non-recoverable row), not
by fingerprint divergence; and divergence authorizes deletion only
through the never-started recoverable row — a started pod is strict
no-op whatever its fingerprint says.

**No-op means zero mutation.** The live-instance row MUST NOT replace or
patch the Secret, patch metadata, or delete anything belonging to the
observed live generation. Configuration and environment edits apply only to
the *next* fresh generation (see the documented consequence below).

**Conflicts converge, never fail.** Two provider processes can concurrently
observe "no instance" or "terminated" — the deterministic instance name
prevents two live instances, but one caller loses the race. The provider
MUST treat create-conflict (already exists) by re-reading and, if the winner
is an annotation-verified live instance, returning it as the no-op row
would — cleaning up only its own losing attempt's residue, never the
winner's (the Kubernetes binding makes this concrete via per-attempt Secret
names, §K8s Secrets); it MUST treat delete-not-found as success; and it
MUST loop until a
stable outcome or the operation deadline (600s) expires. One deliberate
asymmetry: the **create loser does not apply the fingerprint-divergence
row to the pod that just beat it**, even when the winner's fingerprint
differs from its own intent — it adopts or reconciles the elected winner.
Two contenders with different payloads would otherwise ping-pong deletes
through the conflict path. A *subsequent* deploy that walks in and
observes that never-started divergent winner replaces it normally.
Without this rule,
"two deploys return an `agent_id`" (the idempotency claim below) is false
under concurrency.

**Documented consequence.** Because live → no-op, configuration edits to a
running remote agent do not take effect until it next exits (unlike local
agents, which re-resolve on every spawn). This is an accepted v1 tradeoff;
a deliberate "recycle" affordance (stop-then-start) is the v2 path to
immediate application. [DECISION E, ruled: per-binding policy — this
binding keeps no-op; the universal property is that no sequence of Starts
yields two live instances in one scope.] Note the asymmetry is deliberate and points the
right way: an edit *cannot* reach a started pod until it exits, but it
*can* reach a never-started one immediately (fingerprint divergence) —
the never-started pod is the one the user is editing *because* it did not
start.

Idempotency in the protocol sense: any number of concurrent or sequential
`deploy`s with the same payload converge to one live instance, and every
non-erroring call returns an `agent_id` naming it; no sequence of `deploy`s
can yield two live instances in one scope.

### Stop and Delete

- **Stop** is not a provider operation. `D` publishes `!shutdown` mentioning
  the agent on `R`; the harness verifies the sender is the owner and exits
  through its graceful path: agent-pool shutdown, drain of in-flight turns,
  publish presence `offline`, close relay connection. **The spec does not
  derive an upper bound for this path from its segment timeouts, because
  review proved that arithmetic wrong twice**: the visible constants (30s
  drain, 2s presence, 5s relay close) omit terms that are *variable*, not
  constant — at `28ae6cd21` the post-drain reap segment
  (late-arriving reap `lib.rs:2664`, idle-slot reap loop `:2670`, respawn
  drain `:2684-2688`) runs *outside* the 30s drain timeout (opened at
  `:2636`, closed at `:2657`) and serially awaits a 5s post-SIGKILL wait
  per occupied pool slot (`acp.rs:436`). **That segment alone can reach
  `30 + 5×parallelism + 7` — ~87s at the desktop's default parallelism
  of 10** (`DEFAULT_AGENT_PARALLELISM`, `types.rs:814`; lowered from 24 by
  #3038), ~197s at the harness cap of 32 (`config.rs:293`) — already
  exceeding a 60s grace. And it is a *lower* bound on the tail, not the
  worst case: the same path runs earlier segments before the prompt drain
  even opens — a separate 30s wake-task drain (`:2612`) followed by
  serial shutdown of any awakened pools (`:2620-2624`), whose per-slot
  `acp.shutdown()` loop (`:3747-3751`) has no timeout of its own. The
  total tail is not bounded by today's segment timeouts at all.
  The requirement is therefore stated as a budget, not a sum (Known
  Defect 7): **the harness MUST bound its total shutdown tail — every
  post-signal segment, including per-slot reaping — under one shared
  deadline no greater than the declared grace budget**, and the budget
  MUST include a **reserved finalization slice** held back for presence
  `offline` publish and relay close, **no smaller than those finalizers'
  declared bounds — currently 2s + 5s = 7s** — which child cleanup may
  never consume: child reaping degrades first (skip remaining per-slot
  waits, force-kill), because a shared deadline without the reservation
  can legally spend all 60s reaping children and hit SIGKILL before the
  one action the grace period exists to protect. The binding declares the
  budget (§K8s Grace: 60s); anyone re-deriving "~37s" from the segment
  constants is reading numbers without their variables. The desktop's
  local stop command rejects remote agents.
- **Delete** with a live `backend_agent_id` requires `force_remote_delete:
  true` from the UI's orphan-warning confirmation — a buggy IPC caller
  cannot silently orphan substrate objects.

### Auto-Stop (Inactivity Self-Termination)

I5's enforcement point. A new harness knob:

```
--exit-after-inactivity <secs>   /   BUZZ_ACP_EXIT_AFTER_INACTIVITY
```

- **Default 0 = disabled.** The flag ships in the harness every *local*
  agent also runs; a reaper bug must not be able to kill a laptop agent.
  Remote providers opt in (the Kubernetes binding's `inactivity_seconds`
  config field, schema default 7200 = 2h, feeds this env var directly).
  **`inactivity_seconds: 0` is likewise a legal, blessed value meaning "no
  inactivity bound"** — the explicit opt-in to an indefinitely-lived agent
  (I5's lifetime-is-policy rule); it is not a misconfiguration and MUST NOT
  be rejected by provider-side validation.
- **"Inactivity" is defined as**: no events dispatched to the agent and no
  turns in flight. Raw relay traffic does not count — an agent lurking in a
  busy channel it never answers is exactly the waste this bounds.
- **Mechanism**: on expiry of the bound, the harness fires the same shutdown
  channel `!shutdown` uses — so inactivity exit gets in-flight drain,
  presence→offline, and graceful relay close identically to an owner stop.
  **The expiry check MUST NOT depend on pool readiness.** This is a design
  constraint learned by inspection, not a transcription: the harness's
  existing 30s maintenance tick is gated on `pool_ready` (`lib.rs:1743`),
  which under `lazy_pool` starts false (`:1320`) and flips true only on a
  wake (`:2570`) — and wakes require pending work (`pool_lifecycle.rs:42`).
  A reaper riding that tick composes with the mandated
  `BUZZ_ACP_LAZY_POOL=true` (§Launch data) into a deadlock in I5's single
  most important case: a never-mentioned lazy pod never runs the tick, so
  the idle agent the reaper exists to kill is exactly the one it can never
  evaluate. The reaper therefore runs on its own timer, independent of pool
  state (an idle-pool check needs no pool). Check granularity makes the
  effective bound `t ∈ [T, T+interval)`, immaterial at T=7200.
- **Reserved keys**: `BUZZ_ACP_EXIT_AFTER_INACTIVITY` MUST join
  `RESERVED_ENV_KEYS` (`env_vars.rs`) when it lands — it is tier-3
  authoritative (§Launch data), and without reservation a user env var
  could disable the reaper and reopen unbounded lifetime through the front
  door. `BUZZ_ACP_NO_PRESENCE` (`config.rs:378`) MUST join in the same
  change, for the same shape of reason at I3 instead of I5: unreserved, it
  lets user env silently defeat the 180s presence bound (I3). One knob
  guards "knows when to leave", the other "you can see that it left";
  both are promises users must not be able to un-make by typo.
- Distinctness note: this is a **fourth** timeout concept, deliberately named
  away from the existing three (`--idle-timeout` = per-turn ACP wire silence,
  900s; `turn_timeout`; `max_turn_duration` = 7200s — numerically equal to
  the default inactivity bound and semantically unrelated). Sharing a flag or
  env name with any of them is how the bug ships.

The harness exiting MUST terminate the substrate's unit of execution, and —
equally load-bearing — the substrate's termination signal MUST reach the
harness process itself; any wrapper MUST forward it. A wrapper that runs
the harness as a child without forwarding signals silently voids both I5's
substrate half *and* the graceful-shutdown budget: the termination signal
lands on the wrapper, the harness never learns to shut down, and the
force-kill leaves presence stale-online — exactly the staleness window the
grace period exists to close. This binding's realization — the harness as
the container's signal-receiving process (PID 1 or the signal target) — is
§K8s Entrypoint's `exec` rule and §Pod shape ([L3], L1 item 3 for the
universal form).
With the supervisor policy that matches the lifetime policy (this
binding's [L3] mapping — bounded → `Never`, indefinite → `OnFailure`
after both prerequisites, §Pod shape; the universal rule is I5's),
harness exit completes the pod on every intentional path — turning
agent-level I5 into substrate-level I5.

## The Kubernetes Binding (`buzz-backend-kubernetes`)

The first conforming provider: a Rust crate in `block/buzz`, distributed as a
standalone binary. Everything above is the contract; this section is its
realization.

### Cluster auth {#k8s-auth}

Standard kubeconfig resolution (`$KUBECONFIG` → `~/.kube/config`) via
`kube-rs`. `provider_config` carries **`context`** and **`namespace`** only
(I2: credentials never transit config). Because kubeconfigs at Block
near-universally use `exec` credential plugins (`aws eks get-token`,
`gke-gcloud-auth-plugin`) that resolve via PATH, and the provider inherits a
Finder-launched desktop's minimal PATH, the provider MUST prepend
`/opt/homebrew/bin`, `/usr/local/bin`, and `~/.local/bin` to its own PATH
before building the client, and on exec-plugin failure MUST name the missing
plugin binary in the error rather than surfacing a kube-rs stack.

### Namespace {#k8s-namespace}

One stable namespace per user-visible choice; the provider emits a freshly
generated `buzz-agents-<rand6>` as the `namespace` field's schema *default*
on every `info` call, so the UI prefills a visible, editable random name with
zero UI changes ("random default" satisfied at the schema layer). If the
namespace does not exist the provider attempts to create it; on RBAC denial
it MUST fail with the literal `kubectl create namespace <name>` command to
run — it MUST NOT fall back to `default`.

### Image

`ghcr.io/block/buzz-sprig`: Alpine base + `bash` (required by the dev-MCP
shell tool) + `git` + CA certificates + the static musl `sprig` multicall
binary with its personality links (`buzz-acp`, `buzz-agent`, `buzz-dev-mcp`,
`rg`, `tree`, `buzz`, `git-credential-nostr`, `git-sign-nostr`) + a baked
system gitconfig wiring the nostr signing and credential helpers. The baked
credential-helper config MUST be scoped to the relay's git URL — mirroring
the local spawn's `credential.<relay-url>/git.helper` scoping — never a
global `credential.helper`: a global nostr helper would answer for every
remote, including github.com. ~15–25MB;
not FROM-scratch (bash and git preclude it). Sprig-only: alternate-harness
dependencies (node for Claude Code / Codex) come via the `image` override
field, not a fatter default. Tagging follows the relay image's matrix —
`sha-<short>` on main, semver on `sprig-v*` tags (the sprig tarball's
`+git.<sha>` version string is not a legal Docker tag). **The default image
reference MUST be pinned by digest, not tag**: the provider bakes, at
compile time, the multi-arch manifest digest of the image built from its
own commit and defaults `image` to
`ghcr.io/block/buzz-sprig@sha256:<that-digest>` — a `sha-<git-sha>` *tag*
is traceable but still movable (registry tags are mutable pointers;
Kubernetes distinguishes movable tags from immutable digests for exactly
this reason), and the object holding it runs with an nsec. The provider
records the reference it used in a pod annotation, and rejects `:latest`.
User `image` overrides accept tag, digest, or full custom registry
reference — visibly the user's trust decision, with the resolved image ID
recorded in the same annotation for post-hoc attribution.
**An image override MUST contain the runtime ABI** — the `buzz-acp`
entrypoint and everything §Entrypoint and launch ABI requires — not merely
alternate-harness dependencies. A conforming custom image is "buzz-sprig
plus your tools", never "your tools instead".

### Entrypoint and launch ABI {#k8s-entrypoint}

Two conforming implementations must produce interchangeable pods, so the
launch contract is normative.

**Entrypoint.** The container runs the harness as its signal-receiving
process. Sprig is a multicall binary with no supervisor personality —
nothing reaps children or forwards signals — so the entrypoint MUST end in
`exec`:

```bash
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# nest scaffolding, if DECISION A lands, goes here
exec buzz-acp   # exec, not a call — buzz-acp must be PID 1
```

`bash -c "setup && buzz-acp"` (no `exec`) is non-conforming: bash becomes
PID 1, and a PID-1 bash with no trap never delivers SIGTERM to the harness
(PID 1 receives kernel-level default-handler signal immunity), so the pod
rides out the entire grace period and is SIGKILLed with presence still
online — voiding I5's substrate half and the very staleness window
`terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 60` was sized to close. The entrypoint
shape and the grace period are one requirement, not two.

**Payload → environment mapping.** The provider builds the pod environment
(via the per-agent Secret, §K8s Secrets) by applying the §Launch data
three-tier precedence — `launch.policy_env` (overridable defaults), then
`launch.env` (user/layered), then the authoritative tier from top-level
fields per the reserved-key rule. Only the
non-`launch` scalars and the substrate-forced re-derivations are mapped
individually:

| source | env var |
|---|---|
| `relay_url` | `BUZZ_RELAY_URL` |
| `private_key_nsec` | `BUZZ_PRIVATE_KEY` and `NOSTR_PRIVATE_KEY` (the git helpers read the latter) |
| `auth_tag` | `BUZZ_AUTH_TAG` (omitted when null; then `launch.owner_pubkey` → `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_OWNER` is REQUIRED — §Launch data owner rule) |
| `launch.command` | `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_COMMAND` — the *name*, resolved against the image's own PATH; never a forwarded host path |
| `launch.args` | `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_ARGS`, comma-joined |
| `launch.env`, `launch.policy_env` | verbatim, at their precedence tiers |
| generation token (§K8s Secrets) | `BUZZ_MANAGED_AGENT_START_NONCE` — the lifecycle-frame correlator and the Secret generation are one identity (§Launch data tier 3) |
| `system_prompt`, `idle_timeout_seconds`, `max_turn_duration_seconds`, `parallelism` | **not mapped by the provider** — the desktop resolves these into `launch.policy_env` (`BUZZ_ACP_SYSTEM_PROMPT`, `BUZZ_ACP_IDLE_TIMEOUT`, `BUZZ_ACP_MAX_TURN_DURATION`, `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS`). `BUZZ_ACP_AGENTS` carries the **effective** parallelism (`min(record.parallelism, harness_cap)`), is reserved (`env_vars.rs:RESERVED_ENV_KEYS`), and cannot be overridden by user env. The remaining knobs are tier-1 by local fact (written before user env); a provider that mapped the top-level copies after `launch.env` would silently defeat local overrides. The top-level fields remain as display/bookkeeping inputs only |
| `turn_timeout_seconds` | not mapped — deprecated upstream and ignored; the local spawn also does not emit it |
| `respond_to` | `BUZZ_ACP_RESPOND_TO` |
| `respond_to_allowlist` | `BUZZ_ACP_RESPOND_TO_ALLOWLIST`, comma-joined |
| — | `BUZZ_ACP_MCP_COMMAND=buzz-dev-mcp` (image-local; the dev-MCP requirement) |
| `provider_config.inactivity_seconds` | `BUZZ_ACP_EXIT_AFTER_INACTIVITY` (schema default 7200; the I5 opt-in, §Auto-Stop — the config field and this env var are one knob, not two) |

The top-level `model`/`provider` payload fields are display/bookkeeping
inputs; the *environment* consequence of model and provider selection
(per-runtime vars, `provider_locked` suppression, `BUZZ_ACP_MODEL`) arrives
resolved inside `launch.env`/`launch.policy_env`. A provider MUST NOT map
`provider` to any env var itself — that mapping is per-runtime and lives in
the desktop's resolver (§Launch data).

**Encoding honesty note.** `BUZZ_ACP_AGENT_ARGS` is comma-delimited by the
harness's CLI parser, and the desktop's *local* spawn performs the same
comma-join — an argument containing a comma is unrepresentable in both
paths. This is a harness interface limitation the binding inherits and
matches, not one it introduces; a provider MUST NOT invent a private
escaping scheme the harness would not decode.

**Working directory.** `HOME` is set to a writable path backed by the
workspace `emptyDir` (e.g. `/home/agent`), and the harness runs with cwd =
`HOME` — mirroring the local spawn's agent-workdir convention. The baked
system gitconfig references the nostr helpers by absolute path so it works
regardless of `HOME`.

### Pod shape

- **Bare Pod; `restartPolicy` follows lifetime policy (I5).** No Job, no
  controller — controller-grade restart machinery (`Restart=always`-shaped)
  would resurrect what `!shutdown` and auto-stop terminate, violating I5.
  Within the bare pod, the policy is selected from `inactivity_seconds`:
  - **Bounded lifetime (`inactivity_seconds > 0`, the default): `Never`.**
    The reaper's clean exit must complete the pod; any restart would undo
    the reap. Accidental death is handled by *intent*, not machinery:
    eviction → presence `offline` (I3) → user hits Start → the
    reconciler's terminated arm re-creates. That sequence is
    rescheduling-after-accident gated on a fresh owner intent — apt for an
    agent whose owner already accepted "not running" as its default state.
  - **Indefinite lifetime (`inactivity_seconds: 0`): `OnFailure`** — once
    the harness exit-code contract is pinned (I5 ordering rule; until
    then the provider MUST refuse the combination rather than ship
    `OnFailure` against an undefended exit convention). `OnFailure`
    restarts the *in-place* abnormal deaths — process crash, container
    OOM-kill — and honors the intentional ones (clean exit completes the
    pod): I5's intent-vs-accident distinction, realized. **Second
    prerequisite — reconciler classification:** `OnFailure` introduces a
    pod state the deploy state machine's rows do not cover — a
    crash-looping harness sits in phase `Running` with
    `state.waiting{reason: CrashLoopBackOff}`, `restartCount > 0`: not
    deletion-marked, not terminated (the kubelet keeps restarting it),
    not "live and started" (`state.running` is false), and not
    never-started (it started, repeatedly) — and it fails the startup
    success criterion while the kubelet is actively reviving it. Before
    the binding ships `OnFailure`, the state machine MUST gain a
    crash-loop classification row and the started-criterion's treatment
    of `restartCount > 0` MUST be specified; the exit-code contract alone
    is *not* the green light. **Honest
    limit:** `restartPolicy` is
    kubelet-level and cannot survive *node-level* loss — a drain or
    API-initiated eviction deletes a bare pod outright, and no
    restart policy reschedules a deleted pod. Full "continuous need"
    across node loss requires controller-grade machinery this binding
    deliberately does not use in v1 (the same machinery I5 distrusts);
    the v1 promise for indefinite agents is restart-on-crash, with
    node loss surfacing as presence `offline` awaiting a fresh Start.
- **Naming/labeling — the exact contract** (63-char label-value limit; a hex
  pubkey is 64 chars, one over):
  - pod name: `buzz-agent-<first-12-hex-of-pubkey>` — also the returned
    `agent_id`
  - label `buzz.block.xyz/agent-pubkey: <first-32-hex>` — the selector key
    for reconciliation and GC. 128 bits is collision-*resistant*, not
    collision-free, which is why the annotation check below is normative,
    not decorative
  - label `app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: buzz-backend-kubernetes` and label
    `buzz.block.xyz/binding-version: <schema-version>` — the **management
    marker** (§Deploy State Machine auto-repair fence): present on every
    pod and Secret this provider creates, and **required before any
    destructive repair or GC action**. Identity labels/annotations prove
    identity; the marker asserts protocol ownership — without it, an object
    that merely matches our schema fails closed to the operator
  - annotation `buzz.block.xyz/agent-pubkey-full: <full-64-hex>` —
    **load-bearing**: per §Deploy State Machine step 1, every label-selected
    object's annotation MUST equal the derived pubkey before the provider
    no-ops against it, deletes it, mutates its Secret, or returns its name
  - annotation `buzz.block.xyz/create-intent: <sha256-of-intent-template>` — the
    recorded create intent (§Deploy State Machine, create-intent
    fingerprint), written at pod create; the divergence discriminator for
    never-started pods
  - Secret name: `buzz-agent-<first-12-hex>-<gen>`, where `<gen>` is a random
    per-create-attempt **generation token** — unique, never reused, carrying
    the same labels (identity + management marker) and annotation. The
    pod's `envFrom` references this exact
    Secret name. Deterministic pod name + unique Secret name is what makes
    payload and Secret atomic at the pod-spec boundary (§K8s Secrets)
- **Deletion semantics the reconciler must respect.** A Kubernetes `DELETE`
  returns success immediately while the object still exists; the name stays
  taken until the kubelet finishes the grace period. Two consequences:
  (a) a pod being gracefully deleted has `deletionTimestamp` set but remains
  in phase `Running` — the reconciler MUST check the deletion mark before
  phase (there is no `Terminating` phase to match on); (b) after deleting a
  live pod, a naive immediate create gets AlreadyExists for up to the full
  grace period — the reconciler MUST poll for actual disappearance (GET →
  404) before creating. The delete call MUST use the object's own grace
  period (kube-rs: `DeleteParams { grace_period_seconds: None, .. }`); the
  tempting shortcut of passing `0` to skip the poll is a **force-kill** that
  discards the 60s shutdown grace pinned below — the poll is mandatory
  precisely because the fast path is wrong. For *terminal*
  (Succeeded/Failed) pods — and for **unscheduled** pods (no assigned node:
  unschedulable or quota-blocked `Pending`, a state users hit while setting
  up a namespace) — the apiserver
  zeroes the grace period and deletes immediately, so the normal restart
  path needs no meaningful wait — do not add a fixed sleep, and do not use
  zero-grace cleanup as a reason to skip the poll in the live-pod arm.
- **`terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 60` — a declared budget the harness
  MUST honor, not a sum the spec derived.** Kubernetes' default 30s grace
  would SIGKILL the harness mid-drain, leaving presence stale-online — the
  avoidable half of I3's staleness window — so the binding declares 60s.
  But the shutdown tail is *variable*, not constant (§Stop: the post-drain
  reap segment alone reaches ~87s at default parallelism at `28ae6cd21`,
  and earlier untimed segments precede it — the total is not bounded by
  today's segment timeouts), so no fixed grace can be proven
  sufficient by adding segment timeouts. The two halves of the requirement:
  the binding *declares* the budget here, and the harness *enforces* it —
  one shared deadline across the entire post-signal path, with a reserved
  finalization slice (≥ the finalizers' declared bounds, currently 7s) for
  presence `offline` and relay close, child cleanup
  degrading first (§Stop, Known Defect 7). Until the harness enforcement
  lands, 60s is an operational margin that the tail can exceed.
- **Hardening defaults (normative).** The workload is a prompted coding
  agent running repository and tool code while holding an nsec; the pod MUST
  NOT hand it ambient cluster credentials or kernel privilege on top:
  `automountServiceAccountToken: false` (Kubernetes mounts a ServiceAccount
  token unless told otherwise — an API-stealable credential the agent never
  needs), `runAsNonRoot: true` with a fixed nonzero UID/GID,
  `allowPrivilegeEscalation: false`, capabilities drop-all,
  `seccompProfile.type: RuntimeDefault`; never privileged, `hostPID`,
  `hostNetwork`, or `hostPath`. `readOnlyRootFilesystem` is *not* required
  in v1 — the sprig toolchain writes outside the workspace mount — but is a
  named candidate once the image's write surface is mapped. The
  `service_account` config field selects an identity for scheduling/RBAC
  purposes only; it MUST NOT silently re-enable token mounting — API-token
  access, if ever wanted, is a separate explicit opt-in, not a side effect
  of naming an SA.
- **Resources**: requests 1 cpu / 2Gi, limits 2 cpu / 4Gi, all four
  configurable (`cargo build` in an agent workspace makes 500m/1Gi requests
  unrealistic).
- **Workspace**: `emptyDir`. Checkouts and scratch die with the pod; agent
  memory is relay-persisted (NIP-AE) and unaffected. PVC support is a
  deferred knob. [DECISION A — how remote pods get the nest workspace
  (AGENTS.md etc.) that local agents get from the desktop's `ensure_nest`;
  current recommendation is a desktop-stated protocol field, not
  image-side scaffolding — §Open Decisions.]

### Secrets {#k8s-secrets}

Per-agent `Secret` containing the identity variables (built from top-level
payload fields per the reserved-key rule) plus `env_vars`; consumed via
`envFrom`.

**Secret creation is per-attempt, immutable, and uniquely named**
(`buzz-agent-<first-12-hex>-<gen>`, §Pod shape). The rationale is a
concurrency race a deterministic shared Secret name cannot survive: two
concurrent deploys carrying *different* payloads would both write the shared
Secret, the loser's write could land last, and the winner's pod —
deterministic name, winner's spec — would resolve the **loser's**
identity/config through `envFrom`. The losing caller would have mutated the
winning generation despite strict no-op. Unique names close this: each
create attempt writes its own Secret first, then attempts the deterministic
pod create with a spec referencing exactly that Secret. Pod creation elects
the winner; payload and Secret are atomic at the pod-spec boundary, with no
Lease or CAS machinery.

Lifecycle rules that follow:

- **Winner**: pod + its referenced Secret live together; GC deletes them
  together.
- **Losing contender** (create-conflict): annotation-verify the winning pod,
  return its `agent_id` per the convergence rule, and delete **only its own
  now-unreferenced Secret** — never the winner's, never any Secret
  referenced by an *existing* pod. "Existing" deliberately includes
  not-yet-started pods: an `envFrom` reference from a pod still pulling its
  image is exactly as load-bearing as one from a running pod.
- **Live no-op arm**: no Secret is written at all (zero mutation).
- **GC**: also deletes annotation-verified **orphan Secrets** — those whose
  generation token no existing pod references — covering contenders that
  crashed between Secret create and their conflict cleanup. But only when
  **age-eligible**: see the normative age gate in §K8s GC — "unreferenced"
  is not "orphaned" while a concurrent attempt may still be between its
  Secret create and its pod create.

Fresh configuration therefore materializes exactly when a fresh generation
does. Residual exposure, stated: any principal with
pod-exec or secret-read in the namespace can read the nsec. This is the
substrate-security boundary from §Non-Goals — the namespace is the isolation
unit, and users deploying to shared namespaces accept its ambient RBAC. The
in-pod narrowing that sprig's dev-MCP shim performs (strips the key from its
own env, re-materializes as a 0600 keyfile for the git helpers) limits
accidental leakage into subprocess environments, not hostile cluster access.

### Garbage collection {#k8s-gc}

A **generation** is one pod-create attempt and the uniquely-named Secret it
references; the Secret's generation token is the generation's identity, and
the *current* generation is the one referenced by the existing pod's
`envFrom`.

GC is a **preflight reconciliation pass**, not a post-deploy afterthought:
on every deploy, after identity derivation and before the state transition,
the provider deletes terminated pods (and their referenced Secrets) that
match the pubkey label, **pass the full-pubkey annotation check, and carry
the management marker** (§Pod shape; the auto-repair fence applies to GC
identically), plus
annotation-verified, marker-bearing orphan Secrets whose generation token
no existing pod
references (§K8s Secrets). It never touches the current generation.
Mismatched annotations are never GC'd (§Deploy State Machine step 1), and
an unmarked object is never GC'd regardless of its labels.

**Orphan-Secret age gate (normative).** An unreferenced Secret is
GC-eligible only when its server-assigned `creationTimestamp` is older than
**twice the deploy operation deadline** (2 × 600s). Rationale — without the
gate, GC composes with per-attempt Secrets into a legal interleaving that
strands a deploy: attempt A creates Secret A; concurrent attempt B runs its
preflight GC *before A creates its pod*, sees Secret A unreferenced, and
deletes it as an "orphan"; A's pod is then accepted referencing a missing
Secret and sits in `CreateContainerConfigError` until a later deploy
repairs it by delete-recreate (§Deploy State Machine never-started rows) —
a stranded deploy either way. Unique Secret
names made payload↔Secret atomic *at the pod-spec boundary*, but
Secret-create→pod-create is not atomic against an independent GC pass —
the standard controller lesson that observations may be stale and
reconciliation must tolerate in-flight peers. The age bound makes
"unreferenced" mean "provably abandoned": any attempt that could still
reference the Secret has exceeded its own deadline. A losing contender's
immediate cleanup of **its own** Secret is exempt — ownership, not age, is
its safety argument. (A Lease per agent identity would also close this
race; the age gate achieves the same with no extra machinery.)

**Same-clock rule (normative).** The age comparison has two operands and
both MUST come from the apiserver's clock. `creationTimestamp` is
server-assigned; the comparison instant MUST be derived from the HTTP
`Date` response header on the very list/get call the GC pass performs
(RFC 9110 §6.6.1 — origin-server message-origination time), never from the
provider's local `now()`. The provider runs on a user's desktop, and a
local clock fast by more than the margin doesn't *race* — it
deterministically computes every in-flight Secret as expired and deletes
them all, silently, on every pass, reopening exactly the interleaving the
gate exists to close. With both operands from one clock, skew cancels.
(`kube`'s `Client::send` returns the raw `http::Response` with headers, so
this costs one header read, not a departure from the typed API.) If the
`Date` header is absent or unparseable, the provider MUST **skip
orphan-Secret GC for that pass** — never fall back to local time. A
deferred cleanup is free; a wrong deletion is not.

**Alternative considered — `ownerReferences`, omitted in v1.** Kubernetes'
native GC (a Secret owned by its attempt's Pod is deleted when the owner is
verified absent) cannot *replace* the age gate: an ownerReference needs the
owner's UID, which exists only after pod create, so primary reliance on it
would flip the ordering to Pod-first-then-Secret. The reason that flip
loses is **diagnostics, not repairability**: a never-started winner is
recoverable (the kubelet retries a config-failed container indefinitely,
and the amended no-op rule lets a later deploy delete-and-recreate it with
its own payload), but Pod-first routes *every healthy deploy* through
`CreateContainerConfigError` — the exact condition the startup classifier
treats as an actionable failure signal — so the classifier could no longer
believe that reason without waiting out the deadline, on every deploy.
That trades away normative diagnostics for a cleanup the age gate already
provides. A *supplementary* post-create attachment (patch the Secret with
the winning pod's UID; Secret metadata stays patchable when `immutable` and
`data` are untouched) is sound but adds no required property: the pre-pod
crash window still needs the age-gated sweep as backstop, so v1 omits it
under the complexity budget. Any future implementation that adds it MUST
set `blockOwnerDeletion: false` explicitly (true requires `update` on
`pods/finalizers` — an RBAC verb nothing else here needs — and a Secret
should never delay its pod's deletion), MUST keep owner and dependent in
the same namespace (a cross-namespace owner is treated as *absent*, turning
the safety net into an immediate-delete instruction), and MUST treat
attachment failure as non-fatal cleanup, never a deploy error.

Running GC first
gives concurrency and Secret ownership one unambiguous order: reconcile
always observes a world with at most one candidate generation *older than
the gate*. Completed
pods from the *current* generation are left in place — their logs are the
only forensics M1 permits. That forensic window is deliberately fragile:
next-deploy GC, node loss, or namespace deletion erases it, and M1 means
there is no log operation to reach for. **Cluster-native log shipping is
therefore a production prerequisite, not an optional nicety** — the
ephemeral-runner lesson: disposable generations still need durable
diagnostics, forwarded off the pod by the cluster operator's stack. The
binding's contribution is correlation, not transport: the pod carries the
full-pubkey annotation, the generation token (doubling as
`BUZZ_MANAGED_AGENT_START_NONCE`, so lifecycle frames and pod logs share a
correlator), the provider version, and the resolved image reference
(§Image) — enough to attribute any shipped log line to an exact identity,
generation, and binary, with no secret in any of it. GC on next-deploy
also self-heals the missing
`undeploy`: delete-then-recreate converges, and a deleted-forever agent's
residue is one Completed pod that never restarts (I5) plus one Secret,
removable with `kubectl delete`.

### `provider_config` v1 fields

`context`, `namespace`, `image`, `cpu_request`, `memory_request`,
`cpu_limit`, `memory_limit`, `inactivity_seconds`, `service_account` —
9 of the 20-field validation cap. Node selectors, tolerations, and PVCs are
deliberately baked out of v1 to preserve budget.

### Distribution

Its own release workflow (macOS arm64/x64 + Linux musl; the sprig workflow's
ubuntu × musl matrix cannot produce the laptop-side binary), artifacts
attached to releases, installed to `~/.local/bin` (already on the discovery
path). v1 ships no Windows binary [DECISION B]; desktop bundling into the
.app (discovery already prepends the bundle dir) is deferred [DECISION D].

## Conformance

Obligations are split by layer per §Launchers: the **[L1] agent/harness
contract** binds every launcher; the **[L2] provider/deployer contract**
binds provider-managed launches; the **[L3] binding policy** here is the
Kubernetes binding's own. A non-provider launcher (bash script, systemd
unit) owes only the L1 items; a provider on a different substrate owes
L1 + L2 and writes its own L3 realization of the generic L3 property.

### [L1] Launcher conformance — every launcher

A launcher — desktop, provider-deployed pod, systemd unit, bash script —
is conforming iff:

1. It launches the harness with a **valid, nonempty identity**: a
   parseable private key, a relay URL, and an auth tag or resolved owner
   pubkey — refusing to launch rather than launching identityless (I1's
   property, enforced wherever the env is assembled).
2. It does not suppress the harness's promises on a remote agent:
   presence stays enabled (`BUZZ_ACP_NO_PRESENCE` never set — remotely,
   presence is the only signal, I3), and the inactivity knob
   (`BUZZ_ACP_EXIT_AFTER_INACTIVITY`) carries the owner's *deliberate*
   lifetime policy, never an accidental passthrough of user env (I5; the
   reserved-key rule is the provider path's realization of this).
3. The substrate's **termination signal reaches the harness process**,
   with enough grace for its full graceful shutdown before force-kill (I3
   staleness minimization). "Allows" is not enough — a wrapper that
   swallows the signal conforms to nothing.
4. Intentional termination (owner `!shutdown`, inactivity reap) exits
   through the harness's graceful path under the **pinned clean-exit
   contract** (intentional exit ⇒ exit code 0 — Known Defect 6 until the
   contract lands).
5. Any supervisor the launcher configures **never restarts an intentional
   clean exit** (I5). `Restart=always` and equivalents are non-conforming
   at this layer no matter what the substrate calls them.

### [L2] Provider conformance — provider-managed launches

A provider is conforming iff, in addition to deploying only L1-conforming
invocations:

1. `info` and `deploy` implement the wire contract (§Provider
   Protocol), including one-JSON-in/one-JSON-out and in-band
   `{"ok": false}` errors. **Exit codes carry exactly one bit** — zero =
   the operation's output is trustworthy, nonzero = failure regardless of
   stdout (§Invocation's rule restated from the provider's side): a
   provider MUST exit nonzero on any crash path and MUST NOT encode
   structured meaning in nonzero values, because `D` discards partial
   output rather than interpreting codes.
2. It never requests or accepts credentials through
   `provider_config` (I2).
3. It builds agent identity env from top-level payload fields, never
   from `env_vars` (reserved-key rule), applies §Launch data mechanically —
   three-tier precedence, host-resolved re-derivation, no re-merge of
   legacy `env_vars`, no provider-side model/provider mapping — and refuses
   a deploy that resolves neither `auth_tag` nor `launch.owner_pubkey`, or
   whose provider is `relay-mesh`.
4. `deploy` implements the reconciliation loop (I4), stated
   substrate-neutrally: identity derived from the nsec before any
   mutation; candidates verified by **full-identity evidence** before any
   action; live (= **started**: the harness process confirmed running, not
   merely the body accepted) → strict no-op (zero mutation); never-started
   states classified by evidence, not by substrate status strings
   (provably-broken → fenced replace; recoverable + same recorded create
   intent → observe, never delete, on this call or any later one;
   recoverable + divergent intent → fenced replace); every read that can
   authorize a destruction uses most-recent semantics; every destructive
   write is **fenced to the exact observation that authorized it**
   (compare-and-delete — the write fails if the object changed since the
   read) and touches only objects carrying the provider's **management
   marker** (the auto-repair fence, §Deploy State Machine);
   same-status-code conflicts discriminated by a **machine-readable
   conflict discriminator**, never the status code alone; success only on
   confirmed harness start; conflicts converge by re-entry;
   delete-of-absent is success.
5. It emits no secret material in any output (belt to `D`'s
   redaction suspenders).
6. **Generic L3 obligation:** its binding *documents* how it realizes each
   L2 term on its substrate, and how the owner's lifetime policy (bounded
   vs indefinite) and clean-exit restart behavior are realized there —
   stating the properties in its own vocabulary, not skipping them.

### [L3] Kubernetes binding conformance — this binding

The realization the two lists above require, in this binding's vocabulary:

1. Each L2 item-4 term maps to the mechanism in §Deploy State Machine:
   full-pubkey annotation for identity evidence, container `state.running`
   for "started", `resourceVersion`-unset quorum reads for most-recent
   semantics, UID+`resourceVersion` delete preconditions for fencing,
   `Status.reason` as the 409 discriminator, and the
   `app.kubernetes.io/managed-by` + binding-version labels as the
   management marker.
2. The deployed invocation realizes the lifetime policy the owner chose
   (I5) through this binding's `inactivity_seconds` field: `> 0` →
   a working inactivity bound and `restartPolicy: Never`; `0` (the
   blessed indefinite opt-in) → no bound and `restartPolicy: OnFailure`,
   **only after both prerequisites land** — the pinned exit-code contract
   (I5 ordering rule) *and* the crash-loop classification row (§Pod
   shape); until then the provider MUST refuse the combination.
3. The harness is the deployed container's **signal-receiving process**
   (PID 1 or the target of the pod's termination signal — §K8s
   Entrypoint's `exec` rule), and `terminationGracePeriodSeconds` carries
   the declared grace budget (§Pod shape).

Conformance is testable without mechanization: a fake-provider harness can
exercise L2 items 1–3 and 5 over the wire contract — including the pre-secret
negotiation gate (§Discovery): an incompatible **or absent**
`protocol_version` MUST be rejected before any request carrying
`private_key_nsec` is sent; a **same-inode content rewrite** of the
resolved binary after resolution MUST NOT reach the deploy invocation
(the staged artifact still carries the bytes that answered `info`); and a
**pathname swap after validation** — the resolved path re-pointed at a
different file between the gate's checks and process spawn — likewise
MUST NOT redirect the nsec (both cases are exactly what path+metadata
comparison misses) — and an envtest/kind suite
can drive L2 item 4's reconciler against a real apiserver — concurrent
deploys, a deletion-marked pod, terminal restart, an annotation-mismatch
collision, and SIGTERM→presence-offline for the L3 items. Three families of
cases are mandatory because they were the review-found failure modes:
**startup discrimination** (slow-but-valid scheduling → poll-then-succeed;
`Unschedulable` during scale-from-zero → observed until the autoscaler
provisions capacity, then success — never delete, **including when
provisioning completes only after the 600s deadline**: the original pod
identity and `creationTimestamp` survive the expired call and become the
no-op winner on a later deploy, the case that pins the anti-livelock rule;
a label-and-annotation-matching object **without the management marker** →
never deleted, never GC'd, reported (the auto-repair fence under test);
referenced Secret *confirmed absent* → preconditioned delete-recreate or
actionable error, never silent success or no-op; a **never-started winner
is repairable** — pod exists, Secret absent, container never started: a
later deploy MUST delete-and-recreate rather than no-op, the test that pins
started-not-phase as the no-op criterion; and the **classification→DELETE
race** — the container transitions to running between the classifying read
and the delete: the UID+resourceVersion precondition MUST fail and the
live agent MUST be preserved) and the **GC/attempt interleaving** (attempt B's
preflight GC running between attempt A's Secret create and pod create MUST
NOT delete Secret A — the §K8s GC age gate under test; provider death after
Secret create → the age gate protects, then a later GC reaps; and a
**provider local clock fast beyond the margin** MUST NOT delete an
in-flight Secret — cheap with a fake clock, and the same-clock rule's
skip-on-absent-`Date` arm is exercised by stripping the header). A third
family pins the **divergence discriminator and the 409 split**: a failed
delete precondition (code 409, reason `Conflict`) → re-read and
re-classify, never the create-conflict cleanup/adoption path; a create
conflict (code 409, reason `AlreadyExists`) → loser-Secret cleanup and
winner adoption, never treated as a failed delete; identical desired
intent + permanently-Pending pod → no delete across arbitrarily many
Starts, regardless of age; a resource/image correction against a
never-started pod → fingerprint differs, preconditioned
delete-and-recreate (the wedge-escape case); same user config but the
provider's **baked default image digest** changed (provider upgrade)
against a never-started pod → divergence, replace (the second intent
source — the only escape from a bad-default-image wedge); the same correction against
a **started** pod → strict zero-mutation no-op; admission
defaulting/mutating the live pod → no false divergence (the comparison
uses the recorded annotation); the fingerprint serializer property,
asserted structurally — changing only Secret *values* or the generated
Secret *name* leaves the fingerprint unchanged, changing any
fingerprinted pod-create field changes it (equivalently: the serializer
has no access to Secret data or attempt identity); and the
conflict-path asymmetry — two no-instance contenders with different
payloads: the create loser adopts the elected winner rather than
deleting it for divergence, while a subsequent deploy observing that
never-started divergent winner replaces it. A model checker is
the wrong tool here: the failure modes found in review were wrong
*abstractions of Kubernetes* (a nonexistent `Terminating` phase, non-atomic
delete, phase-as-readiness, non-atomic Secret→pod against GC), which a
hand-written model would have reproduced convincingly.

## Known Defects (at `28ae6cd21`)

**Citation pin:** every `file:line` reference in this document was verified
against `28ae6cd21` — the commit at which this spec merged to `main`.
References are to that tree; a later commit may offset them.

Desktop- and harness-side, discovered during this design:

1. **Windows discovery id pollution**: the `.exe` suffix survives into the
   provider id, which then fails id validation at deploy — dropdown-visible,
   probe-fine, deploy-broken. Fix is a suffix strip in discovery. (v1
   provider scope is macOS+Linux regardless — [DECISION B].)
2. **Provider env inheritance**: `invoke_provider` passes the desktop's
   environment through unmodified; combined with launchd's minimal PATH this
   breaks kubeconfig exec plugins. Mitigated provider-side (§K8s Auth);
   a desktop-side PATH augmentation would fix the class.
3. **Deploy payload bypasses the launch resolver** (the prerequisite this
   spec names for §Launch data — a desktop code change, not spec text).
   At `28ae6cd21`, `deploy_payload_json` serializes raw record bytes and a
   three-layer `merged_user_env` where the local spawn uses
   `resolve_effective_harness_descriptor`'s six-layer resolution. Concrete
   consequences, each verified in review: (a) no per-runtime model/provider
   env — a remote goose agent silently ignores the user's model choice, and
   `provider_locked` runtimes would receive vars the desktop deliberately
   withholds; (b) persona-derived `agent_command` and definition-provided
   `agent_args` serialize as blank/empty — a different command line than the
   identical local agent; (c) no `owner_pubkey` — a null-`auth_tag` agent
   cannot match `!shutdown` (it *answers* it), stranding §Stop; (d) spawn
   policy (`BUZZ_ACP_RELAY_OBSERVER`, runtime `default_env` such as
   `GOOSE_MODE=auto`, team instructions, session title, lazy-pool selection)
   is absent — remote pods run different observer/approval semantics
   (`BUZZ_ACP_DEDUP`/`BUZZ_ACP_MULTIPLE_EVENT_HANDLING` are *not* on this
   list: the local writes match the harness defaults, §Launch data); (e) a
   mesh-provider agent deploys pointed at a loopback URL that cannot exist
   in the pod instead of being refused. Until `deploy_payload_json` emits
   the `launch` block, no provider can conform to §Launch data, and the
   current payload MUST be treated as insufficient for a
   semantics-preserving remote launch. **Security follow-through:** once
   secrets can arrive via `launch.env`, desktop redaction MUST collect
   candidate values from `launch.env` (and `launch.policy_env`) as well as
   legacy `agent.env_vars` — at `28ae6cd21`, `env_secrets_from_request`
   reads only `agent.env_vars` (`backend.rs`), leaving a
   definition/persona-layer secret outside the literal-value scrub.
   Conformance: a provider that echoes a launch-only secret into an error
   must come back redacted.
4. **The I5 reaper does not exist, and its natural home is a trap**
   (harness code prerequisite). `BUZZ_ACP_EXIT_AFTER_INACTIVITY` appears
   nowhere in the harness at `28ae6cd21`; §Auto-Stop is a design, not a
   description. Worse, the obvious attachment point — the existing 30s
   maintenance tick — is gated on `pool_ready` (`lib.rs:1743`), which under
   `lazy_pool` only becomes true when work arrives, so a never-mentioned
   lazy pod would never evaluate the bound: I5 dead in its most important
   case (§Auto-Stop mechanism rule). The implementation MUST run the expiry
   check on a pool-independent timer and MUST add the env var to
   `RESERVED_ENV_KEYS` in the same change.
5. **The deploy path never checks `protocol_version`** (desktop code
   prerequisite). `provider_deploy` (`backend.rs`) sends the nsec-bearing
   `deploy` request without any preceding `info` on the same resolved
   executable; §Discovery's pre-secret negotiation gate is a design, not a
   description, until the deploy command performs
   resolve-once → stage-and-digest → `info` → explicit-version check →
   `deploy`, both invocations running the staged bytes.
6. **The clean-exit contract is emergent, not defended** (harness code
   prerequisite; gates `OnFailure`). At `28ae6cd21`: the graceful path
   returns `Ok(())` (`lib.rs:2723`), and owner `!shutdown` (`:2045`),
   Ctrl-C (`:1635`), and
   SIGTERM (`:1644`) all route into the same shutdown channel — so clean
   stops exit 0 *today*, but no distinguished exit code exists and no test
   pins "intentional exit ⇒ 0"; every `process::exit(1)` in the crate is a
   startup failure. Until a
   pinned, tested exit-code contract lands, no supervisor restart policy
   (`restartPolicy: OnFailure`, systemd `Restart=on-failure`) may be
   deployed against the harness: a refactor returning `Err` from a drain
   timeout would silently convert every clean stop into a restart loop —
   I5 defeated with no failing test (I5 ordering rule).
7. **The shutdown tail overruns the declared grace budget at default
   config** (harness code prerequisite). At `28ae6cd21`: the post-drain
   reap segment
   (`lib.rs:2664-2688`) runs *after* the 30s drain timeout closes
   (`:2636,:2657`) and serially awaits a 5s post-SIGKILL wait per occupied
   slot (`acp.rs:436`) — that segment alone reaches ~87s at the desktop's
   default parallelism of 10 (`types.rs:814`; #3038 lowered it from 24),
   ~197s at the harness cap of 32 (`config.rs:293`), against the binding's
   60s grace; and it is not the whole tail — the wake-task drain
   (`:2612`) and awakened-pool shutdown (`:2620-2624`, per-slot loop
   `:3747-3751`, no timeout) precede it (§Stop), so the total is
   unbounded by today's segment timeouts. The fix is one shared deadline
   across the entire post-signal
   path with a reserved finalization slice (≥ the finalizers' declared
   bounds, currently 2s presence + 5s relay close = 7s) for presence
   `offline` and
   relay close, child cleanup degrading first (§Stop); natural home is the
   same harness change as the I5 reaper (defect 4).
8. **Cleared numeric config fields ship as strings** (desktop code
   prerequisite, raised by blessing `0`). `coerceConfigValues`
   (`desktop/src/features/agents/ui/ProviderConfigFields.tsx:6` at
   `28ae6cd21`) skips numeric coercion when the value is `""`, so a
   *cleared* numeric field reaches the provider as a JSON string instead
   of a number. Blessing `inactivity_seconds: 0` makes clearing that
   field a legitimate user action, so the empty-string arm now sits on a
   documented path: the provider receives `""` where the schema says
   integer, and "0 MUST NOT be rejected" cannot protect a value that
   never parses as 0. Fix is desktop-side (map cleared numeric →
   omit-or-default, never `""`); provider-side, a non-numeric value for a
   numeric field is an in-band error, not a silent default.

## Implementation Correspondence

| spec concept | code |
|---|---|
| Discovery, resolution rule | `desktop/src-tauri/src/managed_agents/backend.rs` (`discover_provider_candidates`, `resolve_provider_binary`) |
| Invocation, output caps, exit rule | `backend.rs` (`invoke_provider`) |
| Pre-secret negotiation gate | *to be added*: `backend.rs` deploy path — resolve-once → stage-and-digest → `info` → explicit-version check → `deploy` on the staged bytes (Known Defect 5) |
| Redaction | `backend.rs` (`redact_secrets_with`) |
| I2 validation | `backend.rs` (`validate_provider_config`) |
| I1 refusal, payload | `desktop/src-tauri/src/commands/agents_deploy.rs` |
| Launch resolver (shared with local spawn) | `desktop/src-tauri/src/managed_agents/readiness.rs` (`resolve_effective_harness_descriptor`); `launch` block emission *to be added* to `agents_deploy.rs` (Known Defect 3) |
| Mesh rewrite (why relay-mesh is non-deployable) | `desktop/src-tauri/src/managed_agents/relay_mesh.rs`; create-time rejection in `commands/agents.rs` (`normalize_relay_mesh`) |
| Reserved-key strip | `desktop/src-tauri/src/managed_agents/env_vars.rs` (`RESERVED_ENV_KEYS`) |
| Unconditional deploy on Start | `desktop/src-tauri/src/commands/agents.rs` (`start_managed_agent`) |
| Presence publish / offline-on-exit | `crates/buzz-acp/src/lib.rs` (`publish_presence`, shutdown path) |
| `!shutdown` owner check | `crates/buzz-acp/src/lib.rs` (main loop) |
| Graceful shutdown path (budget enforcement *to be added* — Known Defect 7) | `crates/buzz-acp/src/lib.rs` (pool shutdown, then drain / reap / presence / relay close) |
| Clean-exit exit-code contract | *to be added*: `crates/buzz-acp` distinguished exit codes + pinning test (Known Defect 6; gates `OnFailure`) |
| Auto-stop flag | *to be added*: `crates/buzz-acp/src/config.rs` + a pool-independent timer (NOT the `pool_ready`-gated maintenance tick — Known Defect 4) + `RESERVED_ENV_KEYS` entry |
| Kubernetes binding | *to be added*: `crates/buzz-backend-kubernetes` |
| Sprig image | *to be added*: `Dockerfile.sprig` + workflow |

## Open Decisions

Marked `[DECISION]` inline; consolidated:

- **A. Nest scaffolding** — should the image entrypoint scaffold the agent
  workspace (AGENTS.md, RESEARCH/, …) that the desktop's `ensure_nest`
  provides locally? Recommendation (revised): **workspace becomes a
  protocol field the desktop states**, not an image-baked behavior — the
  desktop resolves the nest content it would have written locally and
  carries it in the launch data, so every substrate materializes the same
  workspace from the same source of truth and the image stays
  scaffold-free. An image-side template crate was the earlier
  recommendation; it loses because it forks the nest definition into a
  second implementation that drifts from `ensure_nest`.
- **B. Windows scope** — fix the `.exe` discovery bug in the desktop now;
  ship Windows provider binaries only on demand. Recommended as stated.
- **C. Config budget** — the 9-field v1 set above. Recommended as stated.
- **D. Desktop bundling** — `~/.local/bin` install only for v1. Recommended
  as stated.
- **E. Running-pod semantics** — no-op (recommended, both reviewers) vs
  forcible recycle on Start. Ruled: **per-binding policy**, with one
  universal property every binding must preserve — no sequence of Starts
  yields two live instances in one scope (I4). The Kubernetes binding
  keeps strict no-op in v1; a recycle affordance, if a binding adds one,
  is stop-then-start, never delete-under-a-live-agent.
- **F. Mesh deployability** — the spec refuses relay-mesh agents
  pre-mutation in v1 (§Launch data: the transport is desktop loopback;
  serializing it fails identically but invisibly). Reviewer consensus is
  refusal; ratification requested because it makes a visible product cut
  (shared-compute agents are local-only until an in-image mesh client
  exists).
- **G. Remote override semantics** — the spec keeps local semantics: user
  env continues to beat Buzz behavior defaults remotely (three-tier
  precedence, §Launch data), because the alternative is a quiet behavior
  fork between local and remote spawns of the same record. Flagged because
  it is a policy statement about what power users may do to remote pods.
- **H. Startup budget** — with deploy success now requiring container start
  (§Deploy State Machine), the 600s operation deadline is the de facto
  cold-pull / scale-from-zero budget. The spec fixes the semantics
  narrowly: the deadline bounds how long one Start waits synchronously —
  never when anything is destroyed (recoverable startup is observational
  across calls, so a cluster whose autoscaler `new-pod-scale-up-delay`
  exceeds 600s degrades to "Start reports unconfirmed, a later Start
  adopts the now-running pod", not a livelock). The remaining SLO ruling
  is UX-only: is ten minutes of synchronous waiting the right ceiling for
  the intended cluster class?
- **I. Never-started escape hatch** — the create-intent fingerprint
  (§Deploy State Machine) lets a config *change* replace a never-started
  pod, closing the config wedge. Ruled on the vision-consistency half:
  Start-time auto-repair of never-started bodies is legitimate, **fenced
  to Buzz-authored, positively identified residue** (§Deploy State Machine
  auto-repair rule) — the vision's "never-started body is operator
  residue" line gains that qualifier rather than being waived. The
  remaining product question: does v1 owe users an explicit in-product
  "clear this stuck deployment" affordance for a never-started pod whose
  config they have *not* changed (a genuinely slow or broken cluster)?
  Both reviewers agree on the mechanism; this is the remaining product
  question layered on top of it.

## Summary

Remote agents extend Buzz's managed-agent model across a deliberately thin
boundary: one untrusted binary, two JSON operations, and a relay. The
desktop's obligations end at a well-formed, fail-closed deploy payload; the
provider's obligations are convergence and honesty about state; the agent's
obligation is to honor its owner's lifetime choice — bounded by default,
indefinite by declaration, and in either case final when told to stop.
Everything else — status, control,
memory — was already on the relay, which is why the design holds: the relay
was the management plane all along, and the desktop was only ever one of
its doors.