Work log — 2026-03-31

What shipped today

The orchestrate loop underwent a complete architectural overhaul, moving from persistent tmux sessions to immutable jobs. The old model kept long-running Claude Code sessions alive for every project — 15+ tmux sessions accumulating context rot, each one slowly degrading until it confused itself or hit limits. The new model treats every piece of work as a subprocess: claude -p runs in the project directory, loads context from the repo’s CLAUDE.md and skills, executes, and exits. No session state survives between jobs. Knowledge lives in the repos, not in memory.

This required two passes. The first built run_job() around ephemeral tmux sessions — create, execute, kill. Paul correctly pointed out this was still tmux, not the immutable execution atom he’d described. The second pass replaced the tmux lifecycle entirely with subprocess.run(["claude", "-p", prompt]). Only Charlie (the paulos session) retains a persistent tmux session for interactive work. Everything else is a subprocess that starts, works, and dies.

Along the way, the Airtable backend was ripped out entirely (dead code since the newsletter project was shut down), and run_eod() and run_rollover() were converted to use run_job() for their per-project steps. The test suite grew from 31 to 40 tests covering the new subprocess-based runner, gate functions, timeout handling, and the persistent/ephemeral split.

Completed

• Immutable job runner (run_job + _run_cli) using claude -p subprocess
• Rewired run_cycle(), run_eod(), run_rollover() to use run_job()
• Removed Airtable backend (airtable_client.py, activity_log integration, tests)
• Removed newsletter workspace from workspaces.toml
• Added Charlie/Synaxis identity to CLAUDE.md (COO framing, org chart)
• Killed all 15 stale tmux sessions

Release progress

• March 2026: 24/24 closed (complete)
• April 2026: 2/2 closed

Carry-over

• Cron for nightly EOD: run_eod needs to run at 11pm on speedy-gonzales. Paul said “not yet” — revisit next session.
• Blog post “Kill your sessions”: draft in polymathic-h, needs Paul’s voice pass before publishing.
• Deploy to server: the new orchestrate code needs git pull on speedy-gonzales to go live.
• First real test: run paulos orchestrate run -p authexis to watch the claude -p lifecycle in action.

Risks

• The claude -p path is untested in production. First real run will validate that skills load correctly when invoked via -p flag in a project directory. If skills don’t load, we’d need to pass the skill content explicitly in the prompt.
• No automated EOD means work logs won’t be written unless someone runs /close manually or sets up the cron.

Flags and watch-outs

• PERSISTENT_SESSIONS = {"paulos"} is the kill switch. If another project needs persistence temporarily, add it to the set.
• The _inject_and_wait path still exists for Charlie’s tmux session — it’s not dead code, it’s the persistent-session path used by sum-up, reflect, and any direct paulos orchestrate work.

Next session

• Deploy updated orchestrate to speedy-gonzales (ssh paul@speedy-gonzales... && git pull)
• Test paulos orchestrate run -p authexis end-to-end with the claude -p runner
• Set up nightly cron for EOD when Paul gives the green light
• Review and publish the “Kill your sessions” blog post draft