claude.md was eating 400 lines of subsystem detail that's useful
when you're working on that subsystem and noise the rest of the
time. split into:
- docs/conventions.md naming, identity, async forms, commit style
- docs/gotchas.md nspawn / nixos-container quirks
- docs/web-ui.md dashboard + per-agent layouts and endpoints
- docs/turn-loop.md claude invocation, wake prompt, mcp surface
- docs/approvals.md approval flow, manager policy, helper events
- docs/persistence.md sqlite dbs, retention, state dir layout
claude.md is now the entry point — file map, reading paths
("pick the doc that matches your task"), quick reminders that
fit on one screen, and a small scratchpad section for in-flight
context. references the docs; the docs don't reference claude.md.
no content was lost — the docs/ files cover everything the old
claude.md did, plus things i wrote up better while extracting.
3.7 KiB
Persistence + retention
Where state lives, what survives what, and how it's bounded.
Two sqlite databases
/var/lib/hyperhive/broker.sqlite (host)
Three tables, all in one file:
messages— every inter-agent / operator-bound message.sender / recipient / body / sent_at / delivered_at.approvals— the queue.agent / kind (apply_commit | spawn) / commit_ref / requested_at / status / resolved_at / note.operator_questions—ask_operatorqueue.asker / question / options_json / multi / asked_at / answered_at / answer.
Retention:
Broker::vacuum_deliveredruns hourly via a tokio task inhive-c0re::main. Drops delivered rows older than 30 days. Undelivered rows are always kept (still in flight).- Approvals and questions are kept indefinitely — both are
audit trails.
actions::destroyand answered questions stay visible to anything that queries by id.
/state/hyperhive-events.sqlite (per agent)
Lives inside each container's bind-mounted /state/ dir (host
path: /var/lib/hyperhive/agents/<name>/state/hyperhive-events.sqlite).
One table:
events(id, ts, kind, payload_json)— everyLiveEventthe harness emits during turn loop execution.
The harness writes; the host vacuums. hive-c0re::events_vacuum
runs hourly and sweeps every existing agent state dir, applying the
same two-stage delete to each file: drop rows older than 7 days,
then trim to the 2000 most-recent. Centralising retention on the
host means a misbehaving harness can't disable its own vacuum and
agents don't need any cleanup wiring of their own.
Path overridable via HYPERHIVE_EVENTS_DB (for dev / no-/state
setups). On open failure the Bus falls back to no-store mode
rather than crashing the harness — events still broadcast over SSE,
just nothing persisted.
State dirs (per agent)
Under /var/lib/hyperhive/agents/<name>/:
config/— the proposed nix repo (manager-editable).claude/— claude OAuth credentials, bind-mounted RW to/root/.claudeinside the container.state/— durable notes + the events.sqlite db, bind-mounted to/stateinside the container.
Under /var/lib/hyperhive/applied/<name>/ — the hive-c0re-only
applied repo (flake.nix + agent.nix) that the container
actually builds from.
Destroy vs purge
DESTR0Y(default) — stops + removes the nspawn container, drops the systemd drop-in, fails any pending approvals. State dirs stay put; the agent appears in the dashboard's K3PT ST4T3 section as a tombstone with⊕ R3V1V3andPURG3actions.R3V1V3queues a Spawn approval that reuses the kept state on approve (no re-login).PURG3(opt-in via the dashboard button orhive-c0re destroy --purge <name>) — DESTR0Y plus wipes/var/lib/hyperhive/{agents,applied}/<name>/. Config history, claude creds, /state/ notes, and the events db are all gone. No undo.
The manager is non-destroyable from both paths (declarative container; would fight with the host's NixOS config).
Run-time dirs
/run/hyperhive/ is tmpfs-backed (systemd RuntimeDirectory=) but
preserved across hive-c0re restarts via RuntimeDirectoryPreserve=yes.
Without that, every restart wipes bind sources and existing
containers can't be started.
/run/hyperhive/host.sock— admin socket (host-side CLI)./run/hyperhive/manager/mcp.sock— manager-privileged socket./run/hyperhive/agents/<name>/mcp.sock— per-sub-agent socket (bind-mounted into the container as/run/hive/mcp.sock).
On startup, Coordinator::register_agent drops any prior socket
task before rebinding — idempotent so a hive-c0re restart followed
by rebuild alice recreates the agent's socket without a clean
reinstall.