ADR 0104: Clankie works where you launched him

Status: accepted (James, 2026-08-16). Gives the workspace scope of ADR 0032 a producer and a meaning; the transport, durability, and revision fencing that ADR decided are unchanged. Which of Clankie's own skills a service root contributes — product vs checkout-only — is ADR 0142.

Context

The clankie launcher is a symlink into this repository, so import.meta.dirname always resolves to the service repo no matter where the command was typed. That one value fanned out to four different meanings:

• the cwd the launcher spawns services in — correct, they are workspace scripts;
• the roots for config, the skill catalog, and console state — correct, they are Clankie's own;
• the console's banner, ! shell escape, and path completion;
• the cwd of the captain's pi session, which is where his read, bash, edit, and write tools land.

The last two are the operator's, not the service's. clankie typed in ~/dev/some-project opened a console that said ~/dev/clankie and handed the captain a shell rooted in his own body, so asking him to look at the project in front of you meant naming absolute paths every time.

The single shared daemon on port 4310 rules out simply tracking process.cwd(). The service starts once and every later console attaches to it; a per-attach cwd would either restart the daemon or silently retarget whichever console attached first.

Decision

The working directory belongs to the conversation, not to the process. OperatorConversationScope already carried a dormant workspace branch; its workspaceId is now the absolute directory the conversation's session works in. The captain builds that conversation's pi session with cwd = workspaceId — for createAgentSession, for the resource loader that picks up the project's own AGENTS.md and skills, and for the session header. Clankie's skills stay on the path from the service repo, and a global conversation still works there.

Plain clankie opens the main global conversation regardless of launch directory. /cd <path> moves to the newest retained conversation for that workspace (creating its first when none exists). Workspace paths resolve to the nearest ancestor holding .git, else the directory itself. /new creates a fresh conversation in the current scope. The console's banner, shell escape, path completion, and /status follow the selected conversation (ADR 0111).

Editable Turbopuffer tldraw source

A workspace is fixed for the life of a conversation. /cd switches rooms rather than repointing a live session, so a session's cwd never changes underneath a turn and no session has to be torn down to move.

The registry is the boundary that validates a workspace: it refuses any scope whose path is not absolute or does not already resolve to a directory on the machine, because that path becomes the cwd of an unsandboxed shell.

Consequences

• /cd selects a project room with the captain's tools and the console's ! shell both rooted there. Plain startup opens the main global room.
• Concurrent consoles share the main conversation by default. /new creates an independent context; --chat selects a particular retained conversation.
• The captain reads the project's own AGENTS.md and repository skills, so his instructions are the ones that repository publishes. Clankie's own skills stay on the service root: product skills in .agents/skills (shipped with a release) and checkout-only skills in .agents/dev-skills.
• Conversations created before this ADR carry a global scope and keep working in the service repo, unchanged.
• Discord text and voice lanes are unaffected: they have no workspace and continue to work in the service repo.