2026-09-15

A directory made durable, and a scheduled task in duplicate

On our installations, the agent's home directory became durable in August 2026, so that conversations survive an update. Two files became durable with it, whose disappearance at every update was, without anyone having written it down, what held the rest together. Found on 4 August 2026.

The scheduled-task register

The agent keeps its scheduled tasks in a file. Its add interface is a pure append, with no deduplication by name, and no path ever deletes an entry. Our orchestrator, for its part, re-registers the automation's schedule at every update. As long as the file disappeared with the directory, the re-registration started from zero. Once durable, it gained one identical task at every update: two runs, two reports, two emails to the client, double spend, silently, and never self-healing.

The credential pool

The second file is the agent's credential pool. When the spending ceiling is reached, the entry is marked exhausted and the agent falls back to the raw key from its environment, straight to the provider: a path that stays broken after the budget returns, and that bypasses the meter. The start-up command that used to erase this file no longer ran on our fleet; the only remaining cure was the volume disappearing.

The fix

Both files are now rewritten empty at every start, in the same package as the agent's configuration and personality, with the permissions the service expects in order to write them back. The truth is delivered every time, never inherited. The mechanism covers commissioning, update and partial update in one place.

The rule we keep

Making a directory durable changes the contract of everything in it. Before doing so, we list the files whose disappearance was holding something together, and we rewrite them explicitly at every start.

The truth is delivered at every start, never inherited: making a directory durable changes the contract of everything it holds.