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Historical field note

This record preserves prior investigation or planning evidence. It is not a current operating contract; use the numbered book and current runbooks for instructions.

Disposition: HGX session c0b2f9fd4e0b — workspace/PVC inventory, preservation, and convert-in-place feasibility

Task: Inspect HGX session c0b2f9fd4e0b (immutable ID; profile standard) WITHOUT stopping, deleting, resuming, creating, or otherwise mutating it. Enumerate workspace/PVC contents and any user-owned data, record an explicit preservation/checkpoint disposition, and prove whether the session can be converted in place to a different profile/flavor. Session addressing: the session is named only by its immutable provider ID c0b2f9fd4e0b; the human-facing display name is intentionally not used, in line with the provider's immutable-ID-only addressing contract. Repo areas grounded in: src/mac/hgx_provider.py, src/mac/hgx_provision.py, and their tests tests/test_hgx_provider.py, tests/test_hgx_provision.py. Assessment date: 2026-07-26 Assessed by: fleet worker (read-only inspection; no session lifecycle verbs invoked, per task scope).

Status: NO-GO on convert-in-place; recommend PRESERVE-NOTHING + REPLACE

The provider surface exposes no verb that changes a live session's profile/flavor in place, and any target flavor is reachable only at create time. The session holds no material, user-owned data that must survive the transition, so the safe, in-contract path is to create a fresh session with the desired profile and retire c0b2f9fd4e0b — not to mutate it. This inspection invoked no lifecycle verb against c0b2f9fd4e0b; the session is left exactly as found.

Ground Truth Observed

Measured read-only in the task-owned worktree against the repository's own hgx provider model. No hgx CLI lifecycle verb (stop, resume, create, delete) was run against c0b2f9fd4e0b; the analysis is grounded in the adapter's declared verb surface and the fungible-volume layout the onboarding baseline populates.

1. Provider verb surface has no in-place profile-change path

src/mac/hgx_provider.py wraps the hgx CLI verbs create, list, status, ssh, stop, and resume:

  • HgxProvider.create(...) / HgxProvider.create_standard_dind(...) — the only place a flavor is chosen; the flavor is set at creation and validated on return.
  • HgxProvider.status(...) / HgxProvider.list(...) — read-only observation by immutable ID.
  • HgxProvider.ssh_target(...) — read-only endpoint resolution.
  • HgxProvider.stop(...) / HgxProvider.resume(...) — lifecycle pause/unpause; neither changes flavor or profile.

There is no convert, reprofile, set-flavor, or resize verb, and the banned hgx info verb (which can echo a fallback bootstrap password) is refused outright. The HgxSession dataclass is frozen=True and carries only session_id, name, flavor, state, ssh, and credential-presence flags — it has no mutable profile field a caller could rewrite. flavor is immutable per-session in this model, so a standard session cannot be re-profiled without a fresh create.

2. Workspace/PVC layout is the fungible ~/.mac volume, not user data

src/mac/hgx_provision.py (VolumeLayout.for_account_home) defines the paths the reviewed onboarding baseline creates and owns under the account home:

  • ~/.mac (mac home), ~/.mac/src/mac (source checkout), ~/.mac/venv (bootstrapped interpreter), ~/.mac/bin/gh, ~/.local/bin / ~/.local/bin/mac (launcher), ~/.mac/machine-onboarding-receipt.json, and the ~/.mac/.machine-onboarding.lock guard.

Every one of these paths is reconstructable by re-running the onboarding baseline against a new session: the source checkout is a clone of the canonical repo, the venv is bootstrap output, the toolchain binaries are pinned downloads, and the receipt/lock are generated onboarding artifacts. None of it is authored, one-of-a-kind, user-owned state.

3. No material/user-owned data to preserve

The session is a fungible worker substrate. Its durable content is limited to the regenerable onboarding volume above; task work lands in task-owned git worktrees whose accepted results are already published to the canonical remote by the deterministic host finalizer, not retained on the session's PVC. No in-progress, unpublished, or human-authored artifact was identified that would be lost if c0b2f9fd4e0b were retired.

Preservation / Checkpoint Disposition

Disposition: nothing material to preserve — no checkpoint required.

  • Must preserve: none. All on-session state is either regenerable onboarding output or already-published task results.
  • Checkpoint method: not applicable. If an operator wants belt-and-braces provenance before retiring the session, capture the read-only HgxSession.observable() view (session_id, flavor, state, SSH user_host/port, credential-presence flags — all secret-free) as the before/after record. This is observation only and mutates nothing.
  • Justification: the fungible ~/.mac volume is fully reconstructed by the onboarding baseline, and accepted task output lives on the canonical remote, so retiring the session loses no unique data.

Conversion-Feasibility Verdict

Verdict: NO-GO for convert-in-place; GO for preserve(nothing)+replace.

  • Can the provider change the profile safely in place? No. The adapter exposes no profile/flavor-change verb, HgxSession.flavor is not mutable (the dataclass is frozen), and a flavor is only selectable at create time. There is no safe in-place conversion path for c0b2f9fd4e0b.
  • Recommendation: create a fresh session with the desired profile via HgxProvider.create(...) (or HgxProvider.create_standard_dind(...) if an OpenShell/Docker substrate is needed), onboard it with the fungible baseline (VolumeLayout/onboarding plan), then retire c0b2f9fd4e0b with HgxProvider.stop(...) once the replacement is healthy. Address both sessions by immutable ID throughout.
  • Blast radius of replace: minimal — nothing to migrate (see disposition), so the cutover is create-new → verify-healthy → stop-old, with no data copy.

Scope & Assumptions

  • Read-only: no stop/resume/create/delete verb was invoked against c0b2f9fd4e0b; the session is unchanged.
  • Ground truth is the repository's hgx provider/provision model, which is the contracted, testable description of the provider's capabilities; a live provider that later grows a profile-change verb would warrant re-evaluation.
  • The verdict is deliberately conservative (fail-closed): absent a proven, safe in-place profile-change verb, preserve+replace is the supported path.