The operator's agent and its licence manager are modules: ADR 0181–0183, to-be 36 and 39

The predecessor's agent module was retired and its six files stayed on both workstations telling
every session to use tools that no longer exist. This is its successor's design, revised during
review on the operator's directions: the host is module-agnostic, the controller has no part, and a
real licence manager hands out the correct licence in every situation.

- ADR 0181 (reconstructed): the operator account is a node fact stated by the operator; the home is
  derived unless stated; a resource may be placed under it owned by the account; a node with no
  account refuses one. What the controller shipped on 2026-09-27 without a record.
- ADR 0182: inside a home the module owns the directory and the files it places, writes into the
  tool's own files for its few keys, never declares a credential's content, and holds everything
  else as found; a predecessor's leftovers are the operator's to remove once.
- ADR 0183: claude-licence-manager holds the mesh seat anthropic-licence-manager and owns the
  Anthropic licences, grants (encrypted with a key the vault made for it), bindings per touchpoint,
  usage and audit; one rotation source under a lease; a token travels module to module sealed to
  each node's module key on request/reply, never as an event; the agent module alone writes what
  the agent reads; the host delivers package and state and knows nothing else. A bounded exception
  to ADR 0113; dated mechanism notes on ADR 0050 and 0113.
- To-be 36 (claude-code): the mesh's part of the agent's configuration lives in the agent's
  machine-wide managed directory, owned whole by the module and written by its code; nothing under
  the home but the credentials file of a subscription licence; the API-key licence through the
  key-helper; the console as a node-scoped provision (to-be 34 amended); MCP servers as settings
  with an mcp_configure tool; one agent directory per machine shared by every session.
- To-be 39 (claude-licence-manager): store, the two licence kinds, keeping a grant alive, the
  hand-over, who gets which licence with the predecessor's fallbacks, adoption with the identity
  guard, the seat's verbs.

Numbers taken across main and every open branch at the time of the merge; to-be 14, 29 and 34
carry dated notes; the glossary gains "operator account".
This commit is contained in:
jochen
2026-10-02 17:22:12 +02:00
parent 2caa5e827b
commit 7b1dabbce0
12 changed files with 838 additions and 1 deletions
@@ -283,3 +283,13 @@ modules in the catalogue require it — so a shared secret is a requirement answ
which is what this record asks for. Private keys are still made where they are used and never
travel, which is the other half and was never in question.
> **The mechanism changed — 2026-10-02, by [ADR 0183](0183-the-anthropic-licence-manager-is-a-module-and-hands-tokens-to-the-agent-over-the-bus.md).**
> What stands: every shared secret the mesh makes is the vault's, a private key is made where it is
> used, and a long-lived value a backend issues enters the vault's custody — here as the key the vault
> makes for the licence manager, which encrypts the vendor's grants at rest with it. What this record
> did not foresee: a credential that lives hours, issued by a vendor to the one module that holds its
> grant, and handed by that module to the agent on each node sealed to that node's module key, on
> request/reply over the bus, never through the vault and never as a file the host writes. ADR 0183
> states that as a bounded exception — one vendor, tokens that live hours, one recipient per message —
> and a second such channel is a decision of its own.