Execution Log: channels — back-and-forth user communication, starting with a Slack bot

Append-only log of progress for the user's visibility.

Phase transitions

Phase	Entered	Reviewed/approved by	Notes
phase-selection	2026-08-17	@MadaraUchiha-314	Declared by the owner filing #245 and starting this cloud session on it. The ticket states the abstraction (channels), the first provider (a Slack bot, credentials in a configurable env var), both read transports (with and without polling), the source-of-truth rule and the magic-marker rule; the owner's comment adds "Use python SDK for slack". brainstorming skipped (the idea is not fuzzy); design-critic-review not selected (no critic configured in this repository). See Deviations from the standard gates.
requirements-definition	2026-08-17	pending — PR for this branch	requirements.md: six requirements; the inbound-authorization one (R5) written in formal register — it is the contract the security review gates on.
design	2026-08-17	pending — PR for this branch	Reuse-first: the issue-64/104 marker contract for loop prevention, reply_session's fail-closed delivery, the issue-242 redact helpers for the mirror, the self-diagnosis watcher shape for the poll transport. Six alternatives recorded as rejected. Risk tier 4 (schema touched; inbound text gains a path into sessions).
test-planning	2026-08-17	pending — PR for this branch	13 rows, 5 in scope; every n/a carries a reason; T4 (live Slack) and T11 (manual) deferred with reasons — no workspace in this environment.
tasks-breakdown	2026-08-17		12 tasks, two independent red roots.
implementation	2026-08-17		TDD: red captured before the code (evidence/red.md).
verification	2026-08-17		Every applicable activity ran; T4/T11 deferred with reasons (no Slack workspace here).
needs-review	2026-08-17
complete

Pull requests

PR	Scope / tasks	Status
#267	The whole work item — the spec chain and the feature.	open

Progress entries

2026-08-17 — mapped the seams before designing

• Phase: requirements-definition → tasks-breakdown
• Did: mapped every surface the ticket touches. Outbound today is one shape: integrations.slack post-message (incoming webhook) fired by the graph's notify hook — write-only, unconfigurable per event. Inbound is GitHub-only: poller + webhook router, both dropping SELF_COMMENT_MARKER bodies before authz (issue-64/104). the-loop ask posts to the work item and emits session.awaiting_input; reply_session delivers into the tmux pane fail-closed (never spawns, refuses paused) and is the delivery seam a channel reply needs.
• Found, and it decided the design: the poller's PollProvider seam looks like the obvious inbound port but synthesises GitHub-webhook-shaped payloads — a Slack reply forced through it would impersonate a GitHub comment (actor semantics, authz and reactions all read GitHub keys). So channels got their own inbound pipeline that converges on the existing reply path instead of the event path.
• Also decided: the mirror is composed by the-loop (quoting the reply), so it may and must carry the marker; the reply reaches the session via reply_session, so the marker never suppresses processing — it suppresses re-processing. That is the ticket's "not processed twice" rule, implemented with zero new marker machinery.

2026-08-17 — red first, then one package

• Phase: implementation
• Did: wrote the 36 guarding tests first and captured their failure as evidence/red.md; then the channels/ package (base, state, slack, broadcast, inbound, watcher), the ask_session broadcast seam, the two daemon wiring lines, the channels verb, the schema section (both copies, byte-identical), the six channel.* event types, the channels_dir state-layout entry and the docs pages.
• Two findings from the self-review rounds, both fixed before commit:
  1. eventlog.emit(event, ...) collides with a field named event — the exact issue-242 lesson; the broadcast events carry event_type instead.
  2. SlackBotChannel bound build_client at construction time, which would have defeated both the test seam and a late-set env var; the factory is now resolved at call time, matching the token rule. A third suspicion — the state file racing between poll and socket transports — was checked and accepted: both load-modify-save through atomic replace, and the two transports are documented as alternatives (read.mode), not simultaneous readers.
• Checkpoint/tests: 2369 passed, 1 skipped; make lint, make format-check, make typecheck, make validate clean. Evidence in evidence/.

2026-08-17 — verification executed the plan

• Phase: verification
• Did: ran T1 (29 passed), T2 (7 passed), the T8 security selection (11 passed — empty allow-list denial, own-message drop, marker on every mirror, defang, token hygiene, disabled-section inertness), T12 (the full suite with every parity gate) and T13. Results recorded in testing-plan.md § Verification results; T4/T11 (live Slack) deferred with the reason stated there and a first-live-run activity called out for the reviewer.

2026-08-17 — the owner converged Slack onto channels, in review

• Phase: needs-review (review feedback applied)
• Trigger: two review comments on PR #267 — "Why have slack related configs in multiple places?", then "converge right now. no one is using the webhook integration".
• Did: re-pointed the graph's notify hook through the channels broadcast (a notification is one more outbound event, filtered by each channel's events allow-list — so notifications gain the reply path); removed graph/integrations/slack.py and the integrations.slack schema/config/template sections; made resolve("slack", …) a named refusal pointing at channels.slack; added the versioned migration (0.4.0 → 0.5.0: needs_migration, assert_current refusal naming the replacement, migrate_cli_config removal with a bot-pointing note); passed channels + state through the graph bootstrap so hooks can reach the layer; amended R3.4, decision-094 (new D8, superseding decision-075) and every affected doc page. Deleted test_graph_slack_url_integration.py (the path it pinned no longer exists), rewrote the slack halves of test_graph_integrations.py / test_integration_contract.py, and added five migration tests plus a notify-through-channels scenario.

2026-08-17 — review round 2: a common definition for the subscribable events

• Phase: needs-review (review feedback applied)
• Trigger: review comment on PR #267 — "We should have a common definition of these events so that users configuring can configure it appropriately."
• Did: added channels/events.py — SUBSCRIBABLE_EVENTS, one catalog with a one-line meaning per name (the ask + the six graph notification events), consumed three ways: the config parser warns on unknown names (kept, not refused — a custom graph may fire a custom notify event; a typo would otherwise fail silently), the-loop channels status prints the catalog with subscription ticks, and channels-options.md carries the table. Three pinning tests: catalog ⊇ ask + notification events, catalog == the harness schema's notifications.events taxonomy (a new notification event cannot ship without joining the catalog), and every catalog name appears in the doc page.

Deviations from the standard gates

• phase-selection was answered by direct instruction, not by the checklist comment. This work started from the owner's cloud-session request on the ticket rather than from the-loop start, so no checklist was posted and no the-loop execute reply exists. The owner's filed ticket is the authorization; the spec chain exists in full rather than being skipped.
• The artifacts are in-review, not approved. Nothing here has been through a human gate yet; the pull request carries the whole chain for review in one place. No phase claims an approval it does not have.
• Risk tier 4 without a pre-implementation spec approval. autonomy.tiers["4"] is human-approves-pr, so the gate this work needs is the PR itself — and security.review.humanSignOffMinTier: 4 also applies: the PR briefing explicitly requests a named human security sign-off on the inbound-authorization and loop-prevention contracts (R4.5, R5.1, R1.3).
• No loop:<phase> label on #245 from the harness — the known #73 gap: a cloud session has no daemon. The phase state is this file.

Capability docs

• New: docs/capabilities/channels.md — the capability's current-behaviour contract, indexed in capabilities.md and the VitePress sidebar. Minted product-feature shaped: the behaviour is one coherent surface (filter → fan out → read back → mirror → deliver), not a slice of an existing doc.
• Updated: docs/capabilities/observability.md (history row: the six channel.* event types) and docs/capabilities/cli.md (history row: the channels verb).
• Decision: decision-094, indexed in decisions.md — the channels-vs-integrations split, the mirror-first rule and the recorded deferrals.

Documentation

• docs/config/cli/channels-options.md — the channels block, every leaf with Type and Default (P3–P5 gated), plus rows in docs/config/cli/index.md and docs/config/index.md.
• docs/cli/commands/channels.md — the verb (P1/P2 gated), its row in docs/cli/commands/index.md, and both VitePress sidebar lists.
• docs/cli/state.md — the channel conversation state: tree entry, classification row, its own section, and the .gitignore recipe line (mirrored into this repo's .gitignore, as the state-portability tests require).
• Skill/reference docs: reference/observability.md (the channel bullet in the event-log answers) and reference/collaboration.md § Where questions go (how channels compose with the interaction mode and the marker rule).
• README: one highlights line (the-loop channels poll) in the CLI section — the section is a deliberate highlights list, and a new conversation surface belongs in it the way events --follow does.
• Config instances: commented channels: blocks in .the-loop/cli-config.yaml and the shipped skills/the-loop/templates/cli-config.yaml.