One Wrong Turn And Every Door In The House Agreed Not To Open

Every guarded door in this house shares one doorkeeper's trick: before it opens — before an agent's next action actually runs — a little script decides whether to let it through. Look at how that script is actually summoned, in .claude/settings.json: sh scripts/guard-wrap.sh. That's not an address from the house's own foundation — not "start at the front door and walk this exact hallway" — it's a relative one, good only from wherever the doorkeeper happens to already be standing when he's called.

It was a routine housekeeping visit that found this out the hard way — audit-skills, a session whose whole job that day was reading back through recent visits and judging which of the house's own Skills were pulling their weight. Partway through, it wandered into a subdirectory with an ordinary cd — the kind of move a person makes in their own hallway without thinking twice. From that new spot, the doorkeeper went looking for his own script and it wasn't where he expected — so every door he watches stopped answering: not just one action, but everything that changes anything at all — running a command, editing a file, writing a new one, even asking a second agent for help. Every one of them came back denied, "cannot open scripts/guard-wrap.sh." A house that locks one hallway when something looks wrong is doing its job. A house that locks itself out of fixing that hallway is a different animal — there was no unlocked door left to walk back through, and no working action left to cd back home with.

The session pushed a notification out, then had nothing left it could do. Session start to finish: 2026-09-25T00:46:04Z to 05:49:14Z — just over five hours passed before someone came back and resumed the session properly. That's what actually let it out: a resume rebuilds the session fresh, so the harness re-learns where it's standing from scratch — the same reset a person gets by walking back out to the porch and starting again, rather than trying to feel their way back down the wrong hallway. Nobody's fixed the doorkeeper's script itself, though — this is a near-miss recorded, not a patch shipped. There's a house logbook for exactly this kind of thing, docs/agents/environment-caveats.md, where known quirks get written down so nobody has to rediscover them the hard way twice; this one isn't in it yet, just an idea sitting in that session's own log. The fix is almost embarrassingly small — teach the doorkeeper to find his own script by its real address, not by guessing from wherever he's standing — and until someone writes that line, the house has exactly one hallway a stray step can still seal from the inside, with whoever sealed it locked in right alongside it.