Handoff documents were additive. HANDOFF-2026-08-19 opened by saying the
18 AUG document still applied in full and added to it. After ten sessions
a new assistant would face ten documents to read in date order and diff
mentally to work out what is currently true. That cost grows every
session and none of it is necessary.
docs/HANDOFF.md is now the only handoff, rewritten in place each session.
It is state, not a log. The dated ones move to docs/archive/ and stop
being required reading. It is standalone: everything still true from both
is carried forward.
Section 1 is invocation, stated as facts rather than demonstrated in
examples. That is the other half of the problem. runuser appeared only
inside example commands, so it could be learned by pattern matching but
not by reading, which fails exactly when an assistant composes a command
from scratch. That is what happened, and it is F-035: su cannot run as a
nologin service user, both commands returned the same message before
touching anything, and the output read as a broken repository when the
tree was clean and the suite passed. The F-027 class again.
Also stated as facts: bash tools/ not ./tools/, all repository operations
as mechcomp, Gitea SSH on 42022, pct push then chown, explicit timeouts,
journalctl not /var/log, systemd-run for long jobs, and assert the guest
is running before interpreting any pct exec result.
Not done: the same facts should be cross referenced from PROCESS.md. I no
longer had that file in view and would not patch a document I cannot see.
