Review found five real defects in the configuration-source work, all confirmed
against the code rather than argued:
1. The note claimed --config outranks settings.yaml. It does not: the settings
seam registers a plugin's cordis entry config as the `base` layer and the
user section layers over it, and the seam cannot tell a shipped value from a
--config one. The note now states shipped reality and names --config-replace
as the lever for a deployment that must win. Separately, a literal `apiKey`
in settings outranked both the environment and .credentials.yaml — the field
is removed, so configuration carries a reference and nothing else.
2. DEEPSEEK_SEARCH_BASE_URL was functionally deleted: the shipped inline went
away without the provider learning to read it. It now resolves from the
environment snapshot, as the README always claimed.
3. The bootstrap deny list missed the interpreter start-up hooks. BASH_ENV is
the sharpest: `bash -c` sources it on every bash tool call, so a project
.env could run a file of its choosing before every command. The list now
covers BASH_ENV and its per-language siblings, the Git hook commands, and
the remaining preload and CA variables, organised by what a variable does
rather than which runtime owns it.
4. YAML parse errors quoted the offending source line — which in a credentials
document is the secret — into boot stderr and the watcher's logger. Only the
error code and position are reported now, in credentials-local and
settings-local alike, pinned by a test that asserts the secret is absent.
5. 0600 governed only files the harness wrote. A hand-created 0644 document was
read normally. POSIX now checks the mode before reading contents, at boot
and on every reload; Windows has no mode to inspect and is skipped rather
than faked.
The project a session is launched in is trusted by default, with no prompt and
no stored trust record: it may supply its own endpoint, ordinary variables, and
a key ranked below the managed store. Trust stops at the harness itself — a
discovered file still cannot set DSH_PERMISSION_MODE, PATH, BASH_ENV, or the
rest, because those take effect with no user action, before any turn, outside
the permission policy and the sandbox.
$DSH_HOME/.env had just become an ordinary environment layer, which left the
harness resolving user-facing values from a flattened process.env that could
no longer say where a value came from. A key stored through the web page
stayed shadowed by an older key in the user's own .env. An endpoint could be
redirected by the project: the invoking directory's .env is materialized like
every other layer, and a base URL decides where a resolved API key is sent, so
a DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL written into a model-editable workspace would send the
user's credential — and the prompts carrying their code — to whatever host
that file named.
Give every user-facing value one ordering, with four kinds of source:
explicit for this run per-operation override, CLI argument
> authored by deployment --config / --config-replace
> this launch's shell inherited process environment
> product-managed store settings.yaml, .credentials.yaml
> discovered file $DSH_HOME/.env
> defaults schema default, shipped base, public default
The domains differ only in which tiers exist. The earlier split — credentials
ranking the environment over the managed file while settings ranked over the
environment — was inconsistent: the distinguishing fact is who authored the
source, not the domain.
packages/util/environment owns an immutable snapshot with per-layer
provenance. getFrom(name, sources) searches only the layers a caller names,
and omitting one is a refusal rather than a demotion: the adapters ask for
['process', 'user-env'], so no reordering can let a project file back into a
decision it was excluded from.
isBootstrapOnly rejects, before anything is materialized, any .env setting a
variable that governs how a process launches (PATH, SHELL, NODE_OPTIONS,
LD_PRELOAD), where code or model-visible instructions load from (the whole
DSH_* namespace, HOME, XDG_*), or how the network is reached (proxy and CA
variables). The namespace is denied wholesale so a switch added later cannot
become settable by being forgotten, and there is no opt-out.
verify-config-source-ownership keeps both rules: no unregistered process.env
read under packages/*/*/src (26 allowlisted with reasons), and no apiKey,
baseURL, or headers inlined from the environment in shipped Cordis config —
removing those inlines is what makes the deployment tier meaningful.
$DSH_HOME/config.yaml was an implicit composition layer: if the file existed,
every launch applied an arbitrary Loader patch graph over the shipped tree,
kept live by a dedicated HMR watcher. Three costs came from the implicitness,
not the capability. A patch replaces its target row's whole config, so a file
written months ago pins that row to the field set it knew and every default
the shipped tree later adds silently stops applying. It competed with the
typed settings namespaces llm-deepseek and llm-pi-ai already register, so
which one wins was a function of layer order rather than meaning. And the
explicit escape hatch it was supposedly redundant with did not exist on every
surface: dsh -p, dsh meta, and dsh upgrade all rejected --config, so for them
the implicit file was the only composition route at all.
Complete the explicit layer first: --config and --config-replace now work on
every booting surface. A headless --config-replace tree must still mount a
webserver row, because that surface reaches its own agent over the same HTTP
gateway the browser uses; AppCLIEntry names that contract in the failure
instead of reporting a bare missing service.
Then delete the implicit one. PERSONAL_CONFIG_FILENAME, loadPersonalPatches,
watchPersonalPatches, and the config-only HMR row mounted for it are gone; a
file left at that path is inert, and --dump-config no longer reads the Harness
home. --config therefore stops *replacing* the personal overlay and simply
*is* the user overlay.
No migration: a user who wants the old behavior names the same file
(dsh --config ~/.dsh/config.yaml), which a shell alias makes permanent.
$DSH_HOME/.env carried two incompatible jobs. As credentials-local's writable
secret store it could not be hoisted into process.env — hoisting makes every
stored key read as a read-only launch override and blocks rotation from the
TUI and the web page. But its name and dotenv format promise an environment
file, so a DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL sitting beside a working DEEPSEEK_API_KEY in the
same file was silently ignored: only the credential provider read the
document, and it addresses credential references alone.
Split the two jobs into two files.
.credentials.yaml is the provider-managed store: a strict YAML mapping of
CredentialRef to non-empty string, no version field, no wrapper level. Because
it holds credentials and nothing else, a non-mapping root, a non-identifier
key, a non-string value, an empty string, a duplicate key, and malformed YAML
are all rejections rather than skipped entries — loud at boot and at a write,
warn-and-keep-last-good on a live reload. The dotenv physical-line editor
gives way to a patch of the parsed document, so comments and untouched entries
keep their formatting and any string value round-trips, multi-line included.
Writer lock, read-modify-write, atomic 0600 write under a 0700 directory,
watcher, self-write suppression, and quiescent disposal are unchanged.
$DSH_HOME/.env becomes the user's ordinary environment layer. app-boot's new
loadLayeredEnv loads the invoking directory's .env then the Harness home's,
giving user < project < inherited; the home resolves from the inherited
environment first, so a project .env cannot redirect it.
Credential precedence is unchanged: the live environment still wins read-only
over the file, and shadowed writes still reject. Whether a provider-managed
store should instead win over the environment is a separate decision.
No migration: a key already in $DSH_HOME/.env keeps resolving through the new
environment layer, as a read-only env source that shadows the stored one.
