The Cleanroom Is the Definition of Done

Done Is Not a Screenshot

A coding engine can look finished while still being a satellite. The window opens. A model answers. A file changes. Then you ask what else had to be running, and the honest list includes a conversational home, a shared database, a vault, a vendor login, or a package imported from the family. That list is the product leaking its real dependencies through the demo.

Firebrand's definition of done is a cleanroom. A fresh machine or a redirected home directory, a local model daemon, one local model, no vault, no door file, no key, no login. The engine completes a coding turn, writes a record, and replays that record without calling the model again. Family ports may be listening on a real office machine. The gate does not require them to be dark. It requires that they were never consulted.

What Doctor Is Allowed to Say

doctor is the spoken form of the same gate. It checks the interpreter, the HTTP client the core is allowed to have, a writable home for sessions, the instruction state, the daemon version, that the selected model is actually local, that the model advertises tools, and that each configured brain reports an auth source by name. It also prints the family check: listening or not, consulted never. A green listening line is not a failure. A consulted line is.

Identity in that rite is bare. Instruction hashes are empty. Credential sources are empty. A canary paid-API key placed in the environment must appear in no record line and in no child environment. Those are not style preferences. They are the sentences that keep the cleanroom from becoming a story we tell about a messier boot.

Boot equals one reachable leg. Everything else is an attachment you can prove, refuse, or leave off. If the engine cannot start without an attachment, the attachment has become the engine.

Why the Gate Uses a Redirected Home

A test that runs inside a lived-in account will always find the vault, the door file, the secrets file, the family daemons. That is not proof the engine needs them. The cleanroom test therefore points the process at an empty home fixture and talks to the shipping front door as a subprocess. If bare identity only holds when the operator's real home is messy in the right way, you do not have a cleanroom. You have a lucky profile.

Code

What the cleanroom asserts, as a reader checklist·python

required = {
    "identity": "bare",
    "instruction_hashes": [],
    "credential_sources": [],
    "family_consulted": False,
    "one_workspace_write": True,
    "clean_session_end": True,
    "replay_byte_identical": True,
}
# A missing key is a missing product, not a skipped test.

Exercise

Take any tool you ship and write a cleanroom sentence for it: one reachable dependency, everything else optional. Then try to boot it in a redirected home. The first import that dies is the real runtime dependency, whatever the README claimed.

Hint

If the first death is a config file you thought was optional, the config file is the product.

Done Is Not a Screenshot

What Doctor Is Allowed to Say

Why the Gate Uses a Redirected Home

Code

External links

Exercise

Progress

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