The machine table said who owns a host, which team it belongs to and when it
was last seen, and nothing about how to reach it. Anything standing in front of
a host and authenticating browsers on its behalf could therefore authorise a
request perfectly and then have nowhere to send it.
Reported, never assigned. A host holds the secret half of this identity and is
the only thing that can know the public half first, so it rides on the beat it
already sends as itself. Omitting the field leaves the stored value alone --
an agent that does not mention where it is has not moved, and an absent field
must never read as "nowhere", which would take every host shipped before this
field off the map on its next beat.
Nullable, because "has never reported one" is a real state that every host
registered before today is in. Unique, because an endpoint id belongs to one
host: two rows claiming the same one would send a request addressed to one
machine to another machine's agent, which is the one mistake here that the
authorisation in front of it cannot catch.
Comments and served API descriptions here had grown references that only make
sense to someone with our internal notes: relative paths that escape this
tree, filenames and titles of documents nobody outside can open, quoted prose
from them, and the name of a component that has no public surface — once in an
OpenAPI description, which is published output rather than source.
None of it was load-bearing. Every case restates as what the code actually
requires, and every rewrite came out shorter: "in the words the host agent
reports" for a component name, "republished as addresses are discovered" for a
quoted phrase, "a size tier sets vCPU, RAM and the output geometry" for a
sentence that had been carrying a path.
Internal reasoning is now cited exactly one way, ref(d-NNNN) in a source
comment, with the rule that the sentence must still stand if the marker is
deleted. CLAUDE.md leads with it, because the previous version of this mistake
was made by people who knew the repo was public and it still took ten
occurrences to notice, so "be careful" is not a mechanism.
Commit messages get the stricter rule and carry no references at all: a
comment can be fixed by the next commit and a published message cannot be
fixed at all. Git hooks now enforce both halves.
The check caught a real one while being written: the CLAUDE.md table spelled
out the paths it was prohibiting, which discloses them to exactly the reader
it protects against.
138 tests, 0 fail.
`lastSeen` and `intervalSeconds` are the two field names neslet's plane.rs
reads out of the reply, and a rename on either side yields a host that beats,
parses nothing and reports success. These tests are what make that a contract
rather than a coincidence.
Also asserts the property the middleware comment claims and nothing checked:
wrong machine credentials and no credentials produce *identical* responses,
because bad credentials fall through to `public` rather than erroring so that
probing cannot reveal which machine ids exist. Comparing the two bodies is the
only way that stays true.
Two of these tests started out asserting 401 and were wrong, not the code —
`machineOnly` sees a public actor either way and forbids.
138 tests, 0 fail.
