CI/CD Pipeline

Read this first. Everything below the “Inherited Atomic pipeline” heading describes workflows that do not run in this repository. They target Blacksmith runners registered to the upstream organization, which never pick up jobs here, so test.yml, publish.yml, and warm-toolchain-cache.yml are disabled at the repository level rather than rewritten. publish.yml and warm-toolchain-cache.yml are kept byte-identical to upstream; test.yml cannot be, because it carries the rebrand’s ORPHUS_REQUIRE_* env-var names, and it has since fallen behind upstream’s own edits to it. They are documented as a record of upstream’s topology — and because test/ci/ still asserts their shape — not as this project’s gate.

The gate that actually decides whether a pull request can merge is ci.yml, documented immediately below.

The Orphus gate (ci.yml)

One workflow, three ubuntu-latest jobs, running on every pull request and every push to main. A concurrency group cancels a run superseded by a newer push, and every action is pinned by commit SHA (Dependabot’s github-actions ecosystem is what moves those pins).

verify — the fast gate

suites — the inherited tests

Runs the upstream recipe on a standard runner: a Rust toolchain and npm run build --workspace=@orphus/natives (the bundled subagent extension loads the control plane in crates/atomic-natives and fails at import without a binding, taking the whole suite with it), then the coding-agent build (test/unit/pi-0.82.1-artifacts.test.ts degrades to test.skip when dist/ is absent), then the unit suite through scripts/run-flaky-test-suite.ts (which writes the per-test duration table to .ci-diagnostics/ and enforces the duration budgets), npm run test:integration through the same wrapper, the coding-agent workspace suite (npm run test --workspace=@orphus/coding-agent, also wrapped — it must stay green without LFS objects, because the two inherited compaction fixtures 404 forever on this fork and their tests skip on pointer detection), npm run test:scripts, and npm run test:ci-contracts.

It also fetches the inherited upstream tags before running. changelog.test.ts compares each released changelog section against the git tag that released it, and this fork has no tags of its own — so without that step the test cannot resolve a tag and fails on a repository with a perfectly good changelog. Fetching Atomic’s tags lets it do real work rather than being excluded.

review-gate — a green review that never happened

Fails a pull request whose automated review reported passing but was skipped — or never completed. Passing needs positive evidence of a completed review (a walkthrough or an actionable-comments verdict); a rate-limited reviewer’s apology comment is a busy signal that neither passes nor fails the gate — the poll continues, and times out honestly if no review ever completes.

CodeRabbit stops reviewing above a file-count limit and reports that outcome as a pass. A large diff therefore arrives with a green review check and no review — the failure mode is silent and looks exactly like success, which is the kind this repository keeps finding. The gate distinguishes reviewed and clean from not reviewed.

It is not hypothetical: the 494-file @orphus/* scope rename (#82) tripped precisely this, and merged before the gate existed to catch it. Keeping a PR under the limit is the practical answer; splitting a mechanical rename from the change that motivates it usually achieves that on its own.

This job exists because the previous arrangement — “the inherited suites run locally via the prek hooks” — was honour-system. scripts/install-hooks.mjs exits early under CI, GITHUB_ACTIONS, or PREK_DISABLE_INSTALL, and npm ci never runs the prepare script that installs them, so a fresh clone following the documented install ran none of them.

Quarantined tests

The quarantine list in vitest.config.ts is empty, and test/ci/orphus-gate-contracts.test.ts pins it that way — growing it (or shrinking it) is a deliberate, reviewed act, never a drive-by edit.

Two files have passed through it, and both left the same way — by fixing the cause rather than accepting the exclusion:

• changelog.test.ts failed because CI checkouts had no tags; a tag-fetch step fixed it.
• interactive-engine-cycle-fallback.test.ts timed out because the engine test drivers spawned children with the developer’s full environment — a real provider key (GROQ_API_KEY and kin) leaked into fixtures and turned a scripted model cycle into a live provider call. The drivers now scrub *_API_KEY / *_BEARER_AUTH from the child environment.

Adding an entry needs a demonstrated failure on a pristine checkout with the cause understood, and the entry must carry its reason in the config. Exclusion happens at collection rather than by skipping inside the file, because a soft guard keeps a test’s name in the pass count while its assertions do nothing; a missing file is countable.

What this gate does not cover

• No Windows leg. The inherited matrix had one; this fork does not. prek.toml records a Windows-only line-ending bug that reached main.
• No Rust tests. cargo fmt and cargo clippy exist only as prek hooks.

test/ci/orphus-gate-contracts.test.ts pins each of the guarantees above, so removing a step fails a test rather than silently shrinking the gate.

Inherited Atomic pipeline (disabled — reference only)

Atomic publishes @orphus/coding-agent from packages/coding-agent and @orphus/natives from packages/natives. The other workspace packages remain private and are bundled into the coding-agent package.

Workflow overview

Pull request / selected branch push
└─ test.yml (four concurrent work jobs + one result gate)
   ├─ suites (Linux, Windows): build package -> unit -> integration
   ├─ agent-suite (Linux, Windows): native bindings -> coding-agent vitest (Node, then Bun)
   ├─ release-archive (Linux, Windows): build package -> binaries -> smoke
   ├─ static-checks (Linux): typecheck, docs, Mintlify, contracts
   └─ test (2 legs): result gate carrying both required contexts

Release tag push (`0.9.10` or `0.9.10-alpha.1`)
└─ publish.yml
   ├─ integrity: tag package version = tag and tag commit subject = `Release <tag>`
   ├─ native-artifacts: eight-platform NAPI matrix
   ├─ linux-binary-smoke + windows-binary-smoke + alpine-binary-smoke
   ├─ build: shrinkwrap/package validation, eight archives, ten npm tarballs,
   │  release notes, and SHA256SUMS
   ├─ stage-github-release: create a verified draft and refuse to change a
   │  published release
   ├─ publish-npm: tokenless OIDC publication, skipping existing versions
   ├─ publish-github-release: undraft only after npm succeeds
   └─ cleanup-draft-github-release: delete a draft when later work fails

Manual dispatch on `main`
└─ warm-toolchain-cache.yml
   ├─ zig-tarball: fetch Zig on Linux x64 and arm64
   └─ msvc-crt: fetch the MSVC CRT and Windows SDK for each Windows arch

This inherited graph documents the disabled Atomic npm publisher only. It is retained for upstream compatibility and contract tests; it does not publish a normal Orphus release. The active Orphus archive path is documented under “Direct release triggers and recovery” below.

Tests (test.yml)

The test workflow runs on pushes to main, release/**, and prerelease/**, and on every pull request. Its work runs as four independent jobs so the wall clock is one job’s longest dependent chain rather than the sum of every step in file order.

The release-archive Windows samples above are warm-toolchain measurements. A cold run reached 6m12s and 6m13s before cancellation: rust-toolchain took 152s and 140s (versus 12s and 36s warm), checkout took 71s and 64s, and the native build and archive smoke add roughly 110s and 40s. The 9-minute cap covers that observed near-6m50s tail rather than only the healthy 4m04s p100.

Those are the per-step costs sampled from four sequential-job runs, which put the critical path on the Windows agent-suite chain at about 247 s against the 452 s (434–483 s, n=3 healthy) the single sequential job measured. Runner-seconds rise about 35 % (709 s to roughly 957 s); that is the price of the wall-clock cut.

Observed on the first two split runs (30527771985, 30528920082)

The older split-run release-archive values in this table are warm samples; later healthy Windows runs reached 4m04s, while two cold runs reached 6m12s and 6m13s and were cancelled by the former 6-minute cap. The Windows cap is therefore 9 minutes to cover the cold toolchain and checkout tail.

Read this carefully before planning further work, because it says two different things.

The topology behaves exactly as designed. All seven work jobs started within 68 s of run creation, so Blacksmith does not cap concurrency below seven and the queueing risk did not materialize. static-checks was green in 32–50 s, giving feedback on typecheck that used to arrive only at the end of a 257 s job. The gate costs 3–5 s. Both required contexts appear with byte-identical names.

The saving is nevertheless about 15 s, not the estimated 205 s, because the sequential-job sampling that produced the table above understated the Windows steps by roughly 1.5x:

On both runs the critical path was Windows agent-suite, whose real cost is 349–380 s rather than the 232 s the estimate assumed. Run 1 also fired the unit step’s one bounded flake retry on both platforms, from two different pre-existing flakes that each passed on the retry.

The structural result still stands and is what matters for the next decision: wall clock is now dominated by two steps instead of fourteen. Sharding coding-agent vitest therefore has a direct effect where before the split it would have been diluted by everything else in the job. Each shard must repeat the native binding build, so the arithmetic to beat is setup + native build + vitest/2. Confirm the steady-state numbers over more runs first.

Why steps are grouped this way

Steps stay in one job only when one consumes another’s build output. Nothing is passed between jobs as an artifact, because rebuilding in parallel is cheaper in wall clock than serializing on an upload/download pair.

• test/unit/pi-0.82.1-artifacts.test.ts gates its assertions on packages/coding-agent/dist and degrades to test.skip with a warning when the build has not run, so the unit suite must stay behind the package build. Moving it into a build-less job would lose coverage without failing anything.
• test/integration/installed-package-node-extensions.test.ts needs dist/ and Node and is hard-required by ATOMIC_REQUIRE_INSTALLED_NODE_SMOKE=1, so suites is the only job that installs Node.
• packages/coding-agent/test/native-binding-exports.test.ts is hard-required by ATOMIC_REQUIRE_NATIVE_BINDING_SMOKE=1, so the vitest suite stays behind npm run build --workspace=@orphus/natives.
• scripts/build-binaries.sh reuses packages/natives/native/*.node when present and otherwise builds them, so release-archive carries its own Rust toolchain and pays that build again rather than waiting on agent-suite. suites and static-checks need no Rust at all.
• agent-suite runs the coding-agent package in one step; its SQLite selectors resolve node:sqlite under Node and fall back to bun:sqlite under Bun.

No suite uses --parallel, --shard, --concurrent, or --max-concurrency. --parallel implies --isolate, and 20 files in test/unit import 108 sibling *.test.ts files, so a fresh module registry per file re-executes those tests: 5407 executions against 4426 distinct tests, with the duplicates scored twice by the duration guard, once under contention. --shard is deterministic and roughly 1.85x faster locally, but it buys no wall clock while Windows agent-suite is the critical path. If a further cut is wanted, shard vitest first, then unit; that is worth roughly 70 s for a 60 % increase in runner count.

The test job is a result gate

Repository ruleset 9310196 requires these exact job contexts:

• test (blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404, linux-x64)
• test (blacksmith-4vcpu-windows-2025, windows-x64)

The test job keeps its id, its two matrix rows, and a display name built from only matrix.os and matrix.binary_platform, so both strings survive the split byte-for-byte and no ruleset edit is needed. Without an explicit name GitHub appends every matrix value, so timeout tuning would silently rename the required checks; per-platform timeouts therefore stay out of the gate’s matrix. Change the display-name contract and the repository ruleset together.

The gate does no platform work — both legs run on the Linux runner — and it exists to fail closed:

• Moving work into new jobs without a gate would silently un-protect every step that left test. The two contexts would still exist and still go green.
• if: always() is mandatory. A job whose needs failed is skipped, and GitHub counts a skipped required check as satisfied, which would turn a red suite green.
• The gate fails on failure, cancelled, and skipped. Because needs.<job>.result collapses a matrix to one value, each leg asserts every platform’s work jobs, which is strictly stronger than the per-platform meaning this context had before.

If maintainers later prefer real per-job required contexts, that is a separate deliberate change: replace the two contexts in ruleset 9310196 with the eight work-job contexts in the same window as the workflow merge. Do not do both at once.

Per-job time limits

The blanket 10/15-minute pair is gone. Each job declares its own cap as a hang detector at roughly 2x measured p100, with room for the one bounded flake retry it owns: suites 8/12, agent-suite 6/12, release-archive 5/9, static-checks 6, gate 5. The two Windows caps are 12 rather than the 8 and 9 that the sequential-job sampling implied, because the first split run measured 348 s and 349 s there; a cap that cancels a passing retried run is worse than a late hang detection. The release-archive Windows cap is 9 because cold setup observed a 152 s Rust toolchain acquisition and 71 s checkout before the roughly 110 s native build and 40 s archive smoke. Every cap still sits under the 15-minute Windows blanket it replaced, and the contract test enforces that.

Every job that runs a suite through scripts/run-flaky-test-suite.ts uploads .ci-diagnostics/ under a job-unique artifact name (test-diagnostics-<job>-<binary_platform>). actions/upload-artifact@v4+ fails the entire run when two jobs upload the same name.

Archive smoke tests verify bundled builtins, native modules, runtime dependencies, --version, and startup far enough to reject extension-load failures.

Direct release triggers and recovery

This fork has one active user-facing release path: .github/workflows/release.yml runs when a public v* tag is pushed and stages downloadable Orphus archives. The inherited Atomic npm publisher in .github/workflows/publish.yml is kept as upstream topology documentation and contract coverage, but it is disabled at the repository level and is not the normal Orphus release path.

The active Orphus release tag is v-prefixed:

For inherited publisher recovery only, a manual dispatch is available in publish.yml. It requires tag and accepts optional source_ref; when omitted, source_ref defaults to the tag. The inherited publisher integrity job always verifies the release tag itself. Native, smoke, and payload builds consume source_ref, matching pi’s recovery model; payload metadata validation still requires the recovery source’s package version to equal the release tag.

Concurrency is scoped per release tag and does not cancel an in-progress publication.

Active archive-release integrity gate

The active release.yml workflow checks out the public v<version> tag, strips only the leading v, and verifies the archive identity against <version>:

1. The public tag has the supported vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH or prerelease format.
2. The staged binary reports <version> from --version.
3. Linux x64 and macOS arm64 archives are built with one SHA256SUMS file.
4. A draft GitHub Release is staged for the unchanged v<version> tag.

The disabled inherited publisher has its own lightweight tag/manifest checks, but those are not the operator contract for an Orphus archive release. scripts/cut-release.ts records release-base trailers as provenance; the live archive gate additionally depends on green CI for the exact merged main base before the tags are cut.

Versionless release bases

main and supported workstream bases keep all versioned manifests at 0.0.0. scripts/cut-release.ts resolves the selected remote branch SHA, creates a detached worktree, stamps the requested version, regenerates packages/coding-agent/npm-shrinkwrap.json, commits with subject Release <version>, tags that commit as both <version> and v<version>, removes the worktree, and pushes both tags atomically when --push is used. The selected base never receives the version stamp.

bun run scripts/cut-release.ts 2.1.0 --base main --push
bun run scripts/cut-release.ts 2.1.0-alpha.1 --base main --push

The public v<version> tag push is the archive-build signal. Do not bump package versions directly on a release base.

Build and validation jobs

Native NAPI matrix

The native job always rebuilds and uploads one artifact for each shipped @orphus/natives target. It uses pinned Rust 1.97.0; x64 targets use the compatibility-oriented x86-64-v2 baseline.

The old publisher built both Linux GNU bindings directly on Ubuntu 24.04, so its shipped cdylibs could acquire that runner’s newer glibc symbol floor. The new pipeline fixes that portability bug: workflow-level GLIBC_FLOOR=2.17 leaves rustup on each bare Linux target but passes x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.2.17 or aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.2.17 to packages/natives/scripts/build-native.ts. Only GNU Linux targets receive that suffix; musl targets stay bare and use NAPI-RS’s --cross-compile path. That script invokes cargo-zigbuild for GNU builds and copies the cdylib from Cargo’s bare-target output directory, explicitly handling the bare-vs-glibc-suffixed target split. Windows targets use LLVM and cargo-xwin. Darwin x64 and arm64 build on real Intel and Apple Silicon macOS runners. The matrix has fail-fast: false, names artifacts with distinct platform/libc slugs, and never downloads native artifacts from another run.

The build job downloads the eight same-run bindings, generates the eight platform npm packages, and populates the root native package’s exact-version optional dependencies without publishing during preparation.

Dependency-fetch bounds in the native matrix

native-artifacts compiles for 20–30 s on Linux and Windows. Everything else in its budget is a third-party download, and two releases have been damaged by one.

mlugg/setup-zig fetches the community mirror list at run time and shuffles it, and applies no per-mirror deadline, so before this change the only bound on a stalled mirror was the job budget.

Step bounds are the stall detector; job caps are only hang detectors. A job cap cannot distinguish a stall from slow work, and cancelling a job silently skips every job that needs it. Each acquisition step therefore carries its own timeout-minutes:

Job caps replace the former blanket timeout-minutes: 15, which was 16× the real work of the fastest leg and 2× that of the slowest:

native-artifacts sets an explicit name:, so these matrix columns do not rename its jobs. Re-measure before tightening any of them further, and never tighten a leg on fewer than five samples: a cap below a real p100 turns a slow but healthy run into the cancellation this section exists to prevent.

MSVC CRT cache epoch

Both Windows legs cross-compile with cargo-xwin, which downloaded the MSVC CRT and Windows SDK on every release: 3 m 46 s to 6 m 19 s per leg, for a ~25 s compile. That download now happens in its own bounded step behind an actions/cache entry keyed xwin-v1-<arch>-17, and each leg sets XWIN_ARCH so it stops downloading the architecture it does not link.

XWIN_SDK_VERSION and XWIN_CRT_VERSION default to latest, so the key cannot express the content version: a cache hit pins the leg to whichever SDK was first stored under that key. That is more reproducible than resolving latest on every release, but it means the v1 epoch in the key is the only lever for a deliberate SDK refresh. To force one, bump the epoch (xwin-v2-…) in both .github/workflows/publish.yml and .github/workflows/warm-toolchain-cache.yml in the same change; a CI contract test asserts the two keys stay equal. The trailing 17 is XWIN_VERSION, the Visual Studio major version.

Warming the release toolchain caches

actions/cache entries are scoped per branch or tag with a read fallback to the default branch. publish.yml only ever runs on refs/tags/* and nothing on main writes the Zig or CRT keys, so every release tag has been a guaranteed cold fetch on both Linux legs (six of six observed misses; a re-run of the same tag hits).

.github/workflows/warm-toolchain-cache.yml performs only those two acquisitions so the default-branch scope holds fresh entries. It is dispatch-only and deliberately not yet scheduled: whether a refs/tags/* run can read a refs/heads/main entry on Blacksmith’s colocated cache is documented but unverified here. Verify it before relying on it:

1. Dispatch warm-toolchain-cache.yml on main and confirm the setup-zig-tarball-zig-x86_64-linux-0.16.0 save.
2. Dispatch publish.yml against an existing tag with source_ref set.
3. Check whether the Linux legs log Cache hit for: setup-zig-tarball-….

A hit justifies adding a daily schedule: trigger, which is what keeps the entries alive (they evict after 7 days of inactivity). A miss means the warm workflow buys nothing and should be deleted; the step bounds above, not the cache, are what hold the line.

Sticky-disk checkout is Linux-only

useblacksmith/checkout@v1 consumes a Blacksmith sticky disk. Sticky disks are ext4 block devices, so they exist only on Blacksmith Linux runners. On blacksmith-4vcpu-windows-2025 the action warns (sticky disks are not supported on Windows runners) and falls back to a standard clone; on blacksmith-6vcpu-macos-26 it blocked 78 s on a gRPC connect timeout in eight of eight releases before falling back. The warning’s advice to “remove the sticky disk step” is misleading — there is no sticky-disk step, the checkout action is the consumer.

Both workflows therefore use useblacksmith/checkout behind if: runner.os == 'Linux' and actions/checkout otherwise. The two win32 legs of native-artifacts cross-compile on Linux and keep the git mirror. Do not remove the mirror from a Linux leg: test.yml checks out with fetch-depth: 0 and lfs: true, which the mirror serves in about 8 s.

Pinned actions and build tools

Every third-party action in all three workflows is pinned to a full commit SHA with a trailing # vX.Y.Z comment, following upstream pi’s convention. publish.yml carries contents: write and id-token: write in its graph, so a compromised floating tag anywhere in it is a release-integrity event. .github/dependabot.yml already runs the github-actions ecosystem weekly and maintains both the pins and the comments.

taiki-e/install-action is given exact tool versions ([email protected], [email protected]). Unversioned, it resolves to @latest, which floats the build toolchain of a published, provenance-signed native artifact with no diff. test.yml pins bun-version: 1.3.14 to match publish.yml; latest cannot be cached by setup-bun and left the suite testing a different Bun from the one that builds the shipped artifact.

A SHA pin would not have prevented either Zig stall: mlugg/setup-zig@v2 resolved to the same commit in the failing attempt and the succeeding re-run, and the mirror list is fetched at run time rather than shipped in the action. The pins are supply-chain hygiene, not a fix for this incident.

Binary smoke tests

Linux and Windows x64 each run scripts/build-binaries.sh for their platform, extract the resulting archive, check required bundled files, run --version, and start --no-session from a clean temporary directory. Expected no-model/no-key exits are accepted; extension-load failures and unexpected exits fail the job.

The alpine-binary-smoke job downloads the x64 musl binding, builds atomic-linux-x64-musl.tar.gz, and runs it in an alpine:3.22 Docker container. The container installs libgcc and libstdc++, runs --version and the clean-cwd --no-session smoke, and rejects extension-load failures. A separate node:22-alpine container directly requires the extracted native package and checks its search exports. This currently exercises the x64 archive; the native matrix builds and publishes both musl architectures.

Release payload

After native and smoke jobs pass, build:

1. Installs with npm ci --ignore-scripts and runs npm run check:shrinkwrap.
2. Generates native platform package directories and the native root manifest.
3. Runs scripts/build-binaries.sh --skip-install for all eight archives.
4. Validates package identity, versions, public/private metadata, binary entrypoint, workspace dependency ranges, build outputs, eight native modules, and eight exact-version native optional dependencies.
5. Packs exactly ten npm tarballs.
6. Extracts release notes from packages/coding-agent/CHANGELOG.md.
7. Creates SHA256SUMS for the eight binary archives.
8. Uploads the npm tarballs and GitHub Release assets as one same-run artifact.

GitHub Release assets are:

• atomic-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
• atomic-darwin-x64.tar.gz
• atomic-linux-x64.tar.gz
• atomic-linux-arm64.tar.gz
• atomic-linux-x64-musl.tar.gz
• atomic-linux-arm64-musl.tar.gz
• atomic-windows-x64.zip
• atomic-windows-arm64.zip
• SHA256SUMS

Draft-first GitHub Release

stage-github-release validates SHA256SUMS, refuses to mutate an already-published release, replaces a prior recovery draft when necessary, and runs gh release create --verify-tag --draft. It verifies the exact uploaded asset-name set.

After npm succeeds, publish-github-release changes the draft to public and sets stable/prerelease/latest metadata. If staging or either publication job fails, the cleanup job runs with pi’s always() condition and deletes the release only when it is still a draft.

npm publication

The npm job uses environment npm-publish with only contents: read and id-token: write. It upgrades to an npm version that supports trusted publishing and publishes with provenance. Configure the npm trusted publisher for workflow filename publish.yml and environment npm-publish on all ten package names:

1. @orphus/natives-darwin-arm64
2. @orphus/natives-darwin-x64
3. @orphus/natives-linux-arm64-gnu
4. @orphus/natives-linux-arm64-musl
5. @orphus/natives-linux-x64-gnu
6. @orphus/natives-linux-x64-musl
7. @orphus/natives-win32-arm64-msvc
8. @orphus/natives-win32-x64-msvc
9. @orphus/natives
10. @orphus/coding-agent

That order publishes native leaves first, then the native root, then the coding agent. A package version already present in the registry is logged and skipped, making recovery idempotent. Stable versions use latest; alpha versions use next. No static npm credential is configured.

Permissions and time limits

Repository-wide workflow permissions are read-only. Only draft staging, undrafting, and failed-draft cleanup receive contents: write. Only npm publication receives id-token: write; it never receives repository write permission. Every job has an explicit timeout.

Workflow files

Release checklist

1. Move relevant package changelog entries out of [Unreleased] and land the changelog-only PR on the selected versionless base. Do not bump package manifests.
2. Require the selected base’s normal CI to pass.
3. From a clean checkout, run bun run scripts/cut-release.ts <version> --base <base> --push.
4. Inspect the single .github/workflows/release.yml run for v<version>. Do not start a duplicate manual run during normal publication.
5. Confirm the public GitHub draft release exists for v<version> with orphus-darwin-arm64.tar.gz, orphus-linux-x64.tar.gz, and SHA256SUMS.

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