The Working Contract Is Continue-Host-Work

Today Has a Name

The last three tracks were not a wishlist. They were the working contract: a surface on a daemon-owned fire, many surfaces typing into one session, an optional hold, one gateway per Mac that is not the sibling door, TestFlight as delivery. Call that continue-host-work. You can open an existing session and type in it beside the Mac, open a shell or CLI on the host, prepare an Anvil seat without submitting, reconnect as the same kind of surface, and read what you last saw while offline. Physical acceptance on a real device can still be open while that contract is already the product in source. Installed is not the same as Dad-has-lived-in-it. This lesson will not collapse those either.

What continue-host-work is not: a phone-owned PTY, a phone-owned SSH stack, a phone-owned key store, a file browser, a replacement for every other iOS terminal. Those sentences belong to later milestones. Mixing them into today is how a quest teaches a phone that is not in the pocket yet.

Hold the Tense

You will feel the urge, writing or reviewing, to smooth the edge: "and soon you will SSH from the train." Soon is a destination. Today is a gateway. A sentence that uses the present tense for a planned milestone is a B1 — it teaches wrong. A sentence that uses the future for a working verb ("you will someday be able to spectate") is also wrong; you can spectate now. This track exists so the two tenses stay in different rooms.

Name today's verbs in the present. Name the destination in the future. Continue-host-work is the working contract. Direct SSH is not, yet.

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Present tense versus destination tense·text

PRESENT (working contract — do not hedge these)
  open a host session and type beside the Mac (read-only devices only watch)
  take / release an optional hold
  open a shell or supported CLI on the host
  SSH-through-the-Mac (the host's ssh, not the phone's)
  Anvil prepare: copy a draft, never auto-send
  reconnect as the same kind of surface
  read saved session lists and screens offline (not checkpoints)

FUTURE (authorized destination — do not present-tense these)
  checkpoints that survive rotate/background as a reconstructed screen
  direct SSH from the phone, no Mac gateway required
  phone-owned keys, jump hosts
  SFTP / Files
  retire other iOS terminals for the actual workday

# SSH-through-the-Mac lives in PRESENT.
# Counting it as direct iOS SSH is a tense error.

Exercise

Write five verbs you want the phone to do. Mark each present or future using only the two lists above. If a verb is not on either list ("run a local Linux VM"), it is not this product — park it off the page. If you marked a future verb present, rewrite the sentence until the tense is honest.

Hint

Honesty is shorter than hedging. "You can spectate today. Direct SSH is the destination." beats a paragraph that tries to be both.

Today Has a Name

Hold the Tense

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Exercise

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