Certification and promotion

Candidate gate

A candidate tuple is the complete set of client version or commit, Rails gem version or commit where applicable, exact OpenCode image, profile, and consumer commit. Changing any member invalidates the certification.

There are two distinct scopes:

pre-merge-pr-head-candidate-only proves that one reviewed PR head is compatible. It is never a deployment or promotion authorization.
promotion-deployed is recorded only after a passing post-merge canary and the consumer coordinate is the actual main/merge commit. If policy deliberately retains the PR-head commit, the evidence must additionally record both Git trees as identical and name the actual main/merge commit. Comparing diffs is not an identical-tree attestation.

The gate requires:

repository validation and the shared fixture corpus;
the public exact-image matrix against the deterministic model stub;
an isolated custom-image canary for Ajent Rails and Mushu;
the consumer's own focused and full required tests in its devcontainer;
a user-visible canary turn for stream consumers;
captured evidence including image ID/digest, server version, source commit, gem commits, timestamps, and probe outcome.

For a Git-sourced gem, “gem commit” means the peeled 40-character commit in both the Gemfile ref and lockfile revision, plus runtime loaded-source proof: the loaded version, Bundler::Source::Git, observed revision (and observed ref when the consumer test exposes it), and the consumer test that made those assertions. Annotated tag objects remain useful release provenance, but they are not an execution coordinate.

Ajent's runtime is a three-product selection. The ledger records AIGL, Blackline, and Raven under one source commit. Candidate evidence may say that a product artifact has not been built; promotion may not. At promotion time the set of content-addressed product artifacts must exactly equal the selected product set.

Health-only probes do not certify a tuple.

The shared live probe is intentionally strict: full_text must equal the expected text byte-for-byte and the deterministic model must receive exactly one request. A response that merely contains the expected text, including a duplicated compat-ok\n\ncompat-ok, fails.

Promotion

Promotion is a reviewed manifest change that moves the old current tuple to previous and the passing candidate to current. The consumer change must already have a main/merge identity (or the equal-tree exception below) before that manifest change. Production rollout remains a separate consumer-owned operation; workflows in this repository have no deploy credentials or deploy steps.

Before invoking the promoter, replace PR-head-only metadata with either the actual main/merge consumer ref and main-commit promotion provenance, or an explicit identical-tree attestation containing the main commit/tree. Both forms require a post-merge canary evidence path. Set promotion_eligible only after that evidence exists. The promoter rejects the current PR-head candidates even when their compatibility probes pass.

Use the repository promotion command; do not hand-edit the three tuple slots. It binds evidence to a canonical SHA-256 of the complete tuple, requires full consumer and gem commits, rejects mutable runtime image coordinates, and writes the manifest with a same-filesystem atomic rename. The command only changes manifests/runtime-tuples.json; it cannot deploy a consumer.

First inspect the fingerprints for both the candidate and rollback tuple:

ruby scripts/promote_runtime_tuple.rb fingerprint \
  --consumer travelwolf \
  --consumer-commit FULL_40_CHARACTER_CONSUMER_COMMIT

Commit one or more JSON evidence documents under evidence/. Each document must explicitly contain values matching the promotion:

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "consumer": "travelwolf",
  "profile": "rails-persisted-turn",
  "consumer_commit": "FULL_40_CHARACTER_CONSUMER_COMMIT",
  "status": "pass",
  "certified_at": "2026-07-18T12:00:00Z",
  "tuple_sha256": "sha256:FULL_64_CHARACTER_FINGERPRINT"
}

Preview the exact manifest transition with --dry-run, then repeat without it to write the manifest:

ruby scripts/promote_runtime_tuple.rb promote \
  --consumer travelwolf \
  --consumer-commit FULL_40_CHARACTER_CONSUMER_COMMIT \
  --status pass \
  --certified-at 2026-07-18T12:00:00Z \
  --evidence evidence/travelwolf-candidate.json \
  --previous-status pass \
  --previous-certified-at 2026-07-17T12:00:00Z \
  --previous-evidence evidence/travelwolf-rollback.json \
  --dry-run

The --previous-* arguments are required while the old current tuple lacks a valid certification record. Later promotions reuse and revalidate that record. Both candidate and previous evidence must match the printed tuple fingerprint, consumer, full consumer commit, timestamp, and pass status. A tag may be kept only in a tag_provenance field; image, registry_ref, and base image fields must use image@sha256:..., while a private local artifact may use an exact docker_image_id.

An application canary and the shared deterministic contract prove different layers. For example, a consumer may instrument one application prompt without being able to observe the underlying model request. Record that distinction explicitly; do not infer a model request count from an application prompt count. The exact-image shared contract supplies the model-request proof.

Likewise, the public image job executes only ruby-rest-sse; it does not silently certify Rails persistence, plugin hooks, voice streaming, strict route gates, or provider hooks. Every other profile is labeled executable-consumer-attestation with shared_ruby_probe_sufficient: false. Those profiles appear as required_consumer_profiles in the image matrix and need executable evidence from their owning consumer before a full tuple can pass. A prose review or a successful shared Ruby probe is not that evidence.

The command clears candidate after promotion. It sets the repository-wide migration_state to certified only after every consumer has certified current and previous tuples and no pending candidate.

Bootstrap with a failing baseline

If the observed production baseline fails the current contract, keep its full coordinates for emergency recovery but mark it failed. Do not create passing evidence for it and do not promote it into previous. The promoter rejects known-failed baselines even if a document claims pass.

Do not manufacture a no-op second commit merely to fill previous. Once the candidate has been merged, deployed, and canaried under promotion-grade provenance, a reviewer may use bootstrap-current with this exact acknowledgement:

accept-degraded-rollback-with-failed-emergency-provenance

That operation certifies only current, moves the failed baseline to emergency_provenance without relabeling it, leaves previous null, and sets migration_state to bootstrap-current-only. This is an intentionally degraded rollback state, not full certification. The next meaningful passing release uses normal promotion; the already-certified current tuple then becomes the first honest certified previous tuple.

Until main/deploy evidence exists, promotion_readiness remains blocked and a candidate PR must not be treated as deploy authorization.

After reviewing the degraded rollback consequence, preview the explicit bootstrap before writing it:

ruby scripts/promote_runtime_tuple.rb bootstrap-current \
  --consumer travelwolf \
  --consumer-commit FULL_MAIN_OR_ATTESTED_PR_COMMIT \
  --status pass \
  --certified-at 2026-07-18T12:00:00Z \
  --evidence evidence/travelwolf-post-merge.json \
  --acknowledge-degraded-rollback \
    accept-degraded-rollback-with-failed-emergency-provenance \
  --dry-run

Rollback

Rollback restores the whole previous tuple. Do not roll back only the gem or only the runtime image: the wire contract is the unit of compatibility.

For a custom image, retain its immutable registry digest or Docker image ID and the source commit used to build it. A source tag alone is insufficient.

Custom-image canary

Run the shared live contract on a host that can pull the exact image:

OPENCODE_RUBY_PATH=/path/to/opencode-ruby \
OPENCODE_IMAGE='registry.example/image@sha256:...' \
scripts/run_image_contract.sh

If an older private registry cannot expose an OCI repository digest, set ALLOW_EXACT_IMAGE_ID=1 and pass the locally present sha256:... image ID. Record the registry tag, image ID, source commit, and reason a repository digest was unavailable in the evidence.

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