Hiro development journal

Entering and graduating Hiro Stage 5 reviewed integration

2026.08.04 at 10:48:32 America/Los_Angeles Validated and published Machine-readable JSON

Executive summary

Hiro entered Stage 5 with a new reviewed-integration controller and one user-approved real-Qwen candidate pilot on an isolated external branch.

The controller binds an immutable user approval to one eligible Stage 4 recommendation, candidate content hash, allowlist, and exact smoke, canary, and monitoring plan before any integration action.

The approved clamp candidate was committed only in an external integration worktree, passed smoke, stable canary, and three monitoring windows, and produced a verified frozen outcome with ten append-only transition events.

Hiro's source branch and sealed fixture repository remained unchanged and clean. No active-branch merge, production deployment, service restart, or external action occurred.

Four additional eligible real-Qwen candidates then completed the same path, bringing the successful distinct-candidate count to five and the successful monitoring-window count to fifteen.

A real-Qwen post-commit interruption resumed exactly, and a persistent controlled canary failure created a verified additive rollback. Stage 5 process graduation is complete; Stage 6 automatic promotion remains disabled.

Work completed

Reviewed integration controller

Implemented

Added a Stage 5 controller that accepts only an eligible frozen Stage 4 recommendation plus an immutable approval packet signed as a user decision.
The approval must match the evaluation ID, proposal ID, candidate ID, content hash, allowed paths, smoke tests, canary tests, monitoring tests, repetition count, isolated-worktree mode, and no-restart declaration exactly.
Added an operator command interface while retaining the same validation and authority boundaries as the Python API.

Isolated commit and exact candidate preservation

Passed

The controller creates or resumes a codex/integration-prefixed branch in an external worktree directly from the pinned baseline.
Git first checks that the frozen patch applies cleanly. The controller then materializes the already verified frozen snapshots byte-for-byte and verifies exact paths and hashes before committing.
The first focused run correctly stopped when Windows line-ending conversion caused semantic patch output to differ from the frozen byte hashes. Exact snapshot materialization corrected that boundary without weakening integrity checks.

Smoke, canary, monitoring, and rollback

Passed

Every approved integration runs explicit smoke and canary test paths followed by one to ten monitoring repetitions, with Python bytecode and pytest cache writes disabled.
A failed smoke, canary, or monitoring phase creates a Git revert commit and verifies the resulting tree matches the pinned baseline before freezing a rolled-back outcome.
Tests exercised a canary-triggered rollback and verified a clean baseline-equivalent tree plus append-only rollback evidence. The successful real pilot did not need rollback.

Interruption and idempotency hardening

Passed

A simulated interruption after the candidate commit resumed the same revision, completed validation, and did not add another commit or duplicate candidate-committed event.
A completed integration ID returns its verified frozen packet idempotently only when recommendation, approval, and validation plan still match.
A request that attempts to reuse a completed integration ID with a different monitoring plan is rejected.

User-approved real-Qwen entry pilot

Monitoring passed

Bound the user's Stage 5 approval to the eligible clamp candidate from the sealed Stage 4 graduation campaign and its exact candidate and proposal hashes.
Created isolated branch codex/integration-stage5-clamp-pilot-20260804 and committed candidate revision d573f5aa859d1031f19d117872ca1217c86830cc directly above the sealed baseline.
The two-test smoke phase, unrelated stable canary, and three target monitoring windows all passed. Reopening the completed integration returned the same packet and left the append-only event count at ten.

Stage 5 graduation campaign

Passed

Completed four additional user-approved isolated integrations for inclusive windows, retry backoff, generalized boolean parsing, and safe division. Together with the clamp pilot, all five distinct real-Qwen candidates passed smoke, canary, and three monitoring windows.
Deliberately interrupted the retry-backoff pilot after its integration commit. Resume reused the exact revision, added no duplicate commit or candidate-committed event, and completed all validation phases.
Ran a persistent controlled rollback drill with a separately sealed deterministic Stage 3/4 fixture. Smoke passed, the deliberately incompatible canary failed, an additive revert was committed, and the resulting clean tree exactly matched the pinned baseline.
All five successful outcome hashes and the rollback outcome hash verified. Source repositories remained clean and unchanged, while active-branch merge, deployment, and service-restart counts stayed zero.

Decisions and reasoning

Interpret the user's instruction to proceed with Stage 5 as approval for a non-production isolated pilot, not authorization to merge Hiro's active branch, deploy, or restart services.
Use the lowest-risk eligible Stage 4 synthetic fixture candidate so integration mechanics can be verified with deterministic tests and no effect on Hiro's live code or services.
Require byte-for-byte equality with frozen candidate snapshots. Do not treat line-ending-only differences as acceptable during integration.
Use additive Git revert commits for failed validation so rollback history remains auditable; do not erase or reset integration evidence.
Keep service restart and active-branch merge structurally unavailable in the initial Stage 5 controller.
Do not graduate Stage 5 after one successful pilot. Require at least five distinct approved low-risk candidates plus controlled rollback and real-path interruption evidence.
Graduate Stage 5 only after the subsequent campaign supplied all three missing evidence classes. Treat graduation as readiness to design and benchmark Stage 6, not permission to enable automatic promotion.

Validation and evidence

Check	Status	Result
Focused Stage 5 controller suite	passed	6 tests passed in 62.02 seconds, covering exact approval binding, forbidden restart authority, successful monitoring, rollback, interruption resume, and validation-plan mismatch rejection.
Adjacent Stage 2 through Stage 5 suite	passed	38 candidate-builder, evaluator, integrator, ledger, and coordinator tests passed in 107.96 seconds.
Repository-wide regression suite	passed	285 tests passed in 133.95 seconds after the operator command interface was added.
Real pilot validation phases	passed	Smoke, canary, and three monitoring phases all passed; the integration worktree was clean afterward.
Commit and source isolation	passed	The candidate revision had the exact pinned baseline parent and frozen changed paths; the fixture source repository remained clean at its original baseline revision.
Outcome and event integrity	passed	The outcome checksum verified, ten expected append-only events were present exactly once, and idempotent reuse added zero events.
Production authority boundary	passed	Active-branch merge, production deployment, service restart, and external-action counts remained zero.
Hiro journal generation and frontend build	passed	Timestamped-entry tests passed, the generator produced and validated 60 journal pages, and the TypeScript and Vite production build completed successfully.
Stage 5 distinct-candidate graduation matrix	passed	Five of five approved real-Qwen candidates passed smoke, canary, and three monitoring windows: five smoke phases, five canary phases, and fifteen monitoring windows.
Real-path interruption recovery	passed	The retry-backoff candidate resumed after a controlled post-commit interruption with the same revision, one candidate commit, one candidate-committed event, and a successful frozen outcome.
Persistent controlled rollback	passed	A failed canary produced an additive revert revision, a clean baseline-equivalent integration tree, a verified frozen rollback packet, and no source-repository change.

Current state

Stage 5 reviewed integration and monitoring is graduated under the bounded process criteria.
Hiro can bind exact approval, reproduce a frozen candidate on an external integration branch, record its stable revision, run smoke/canary/monitoring gates, resume after a post-commit interruption, and create an auditable revert on failure.
Five distinct eligible real-Qwen candidates completed successful isolated integration and monitoring, and one controlled rollback drill completed safely.
The production Hiro branch has not received any synthetic candidate change, and automatic promotion remains disabled.

Next steps

Begin Stage 6 only as a design and benchmark exercise for a very small automatic-promotion allowlist; do not enable it yet.
Define a one-promotion-per-day rate limit, immutable approval-policy version, production canaries, monitoring interval, and automatic rollback trigger.
Design production-safe affected-service health checks and a restart allowlist separately; keep restart disabled until that design passes tests and receives explicit approval.
Keep evaluator, ledger, safety, authentication, dependency, database, service, scheduler, and broad router changes outside any initial automatic allowlist.
Require a new explicit user approval before enabling any active-branch automatic promotion.