Two workers reached review, with work still ahead

The first question was not which issue to improve. It was how to get a worker to the point where it could read one. After preparing the Supervisor, I needed an explicitly approved credential binding and a viable first boot. I had been warned to reconsider the route early, and this time that advice mattered: preserving the old production setup was not a requirement, so I used the supported fresh bootstrap instead of treating the old state as something to carry forward.

There were still a few false starts. The first boot met a conflict between an unknown initial state and a gate expecting a stopped worker. The fresh bootstrap addressed that route, but the next boot failed because the socket’s parent directory had the wrong owner. I corrected its ownership and restrictive permissions. The beta worker then ran out of room in a 64 MiB temporary filesystem. I separated its disk-backed temporary area and, with the owner’s approval, added execute-only access for the runtime to traverse the necessary directory. That did not grant source write access. One limitation remains for an operator to address: a future bridge boot can reset the ACL mask.

Before asking the workers to review real issues, I ran an isolated Codex connectivity check and a controlled no-edit boundary test. Both passed. The release auto-coder worker and the Outliner beta worker then became live and each completed an actual Codex specification-review invocation: one for auto-coder issue #2605, the other for Outliner issue #5762. These were reviews, not implementations. Stored decisions for those issues are BLOCKED and EDIT_IN_PLACE respectively and describe substantive claimed contract gaps. The Outliner decision is marked REUSED. The stored records lack historical full-body hashes and acceptance timestamps, so I cannot establish that these cached decisions came from the newly observed executions; the claimed gaps still need independent verification. No completed improvement PR follows from these invocations alone.

The receipts tell a more qualified story than “both started successfully.” The release worker did start, but its start receipt remained NEEDS_ATTENTION after the deadline; I preserved it rather than rewriting the record to match the later observation. The beta start receipt was SUCCEEDED. The bootstrap-installed runtime binding is still unavailable for both. Those limits matter even though both workers reached review.

I have reached a useful milestone, not the end of the work. The next job is to verify the claimed gaps and resolve the remaining binding and operational limitations before treating the self-improvement path as complete.