marketplace/cli/AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md — the kettle CLI

kettle is a globally installed binary. It owns everything mechanical about issues: what an issue is, where the store lives, who this machine is, and how issues move to and from Gitea. It replaced a set of Python scripts that used to ship inside the plugin.

The plugin keeps what only a plugin can carry — the rules an operator states and a binary cannot enforce. Everything else is here.

This file is the binary's map. Each package documents its own rules in its own directory; nothing below is repeated there and nothing there is repeated here.

Why a binary

Three failures in the Python version were failures of runtime, not of logic:

• the store resolved from __file__, so it landed inside a versioned plugin cache and issues written from one project were invisible from the next;
• the walk that answers "which directory is the project" was written three times — store, login pin, guard hook — and in a linked worktree the three disagreed;
• sys.path.insert was the import mechanism, so the layering rule was a convention checked by grep.

A compiled binary answers all three by construction. There is one walk (internal/project), it is imported rather than re-derived, and the layering rule is a build graph a test walks.

Layers

Knowledge flows one way. The arrow means "imports"; follow a name to that package's own AGENTS.md.

cmd/kettle              thin main; exit status only
cmd/release             build infrastructure, not a kettle verb — see its own file

internal/cmd            the command tree: flags, receipts, exit codes
   │      │      │
   │      │      └────► internal/config   who this machine is, what this
   │      │                               project points at; yaml lives here
   │      │                               and only here
   │      └───────────► internal/gitea    TRANSPORT: one door for every
   │                          │           request, pagination, payload dumps,
   │                          │           the number -> slug ledger
   │                          ▼
   ├────────────────────► internal/wire   ADDRESSES: Repo and Key, and the
   │                          ▲           parsing that reads them. Imports
   │                          │           nothing.
   └──► internal/mapping ─────┘           BRIDGE: md <-> the SDK's payloads,
              │                           no I/O; label colours live here
              ▼
internal/issue    DOMAIN   what an issue is: format, taxonomy, validation,
      │                    checkboxes, dependency graph, the store, eviction
      │                    offline — no tracker, no network, no JSON
      ▼
internal/project  ROOT     which directory is the project, and every path
                           resolved from it: store, payload, config
                           depends on nothing

package	layer	what its own file opens with
cmd/kettle	entry point	os.Exit(cmd.Main(os.Args[1:])), and why there is nothing else in it
cmd/release	build tool	why publishing a release is not a kettle verb, and why it goes around the transport
internal/cmd	commands	the registry every command is a value in, and the generator that writes the plugin's docs from it
internal/config	configuration	two files, and why the tokens are not in the one inside the repository
internal/gitea	transport	the SDK, the payload scratchpad, the ledger, the dependency endpoint
internal/mapping	bridge	md ↔ payload, the id marker, label colours, the checkbox merge
internal/wire	addresses	42, #42, owner/repo#42, a URL — four spellings of one thing
internal/issue	domain	the format, the taxonomy, the store, eviction — all of it offline
internal/project	root	the walk, and every path resolved from its answer

The rules that hold the layers apart, and the seven tests that fail when one breaks, are in internal/AGENTS.md. Read the diagram bottom-up: each layer knows strictly less about trackers than the one above it.

Dependencies, and building

gopkg.in/yaml.v3 and code.gitea.io/sdk/gitea — eight modules once the SDK's own are counted. No cobra: commands are values in a registry, which is what lets the plugin's SKILL.md files be generated from the same struct that holds the code.

make install                 # build straight onto your PATH, version stamped
make install BINDIR=$(go env GOPATH)/bin

go build -o ~/.local/bin/kettle ./cmd/kettle    # the same thing, unstamped
go install git.noodles.cam/claude-skills/marketplace/cli/cmd/kettle@latest

make is the build, and it is also the CI. There is no act_runner on the instance this lives on and none is planned, so nothing runs on a push: make check — fmt, vet, test, go mod verify, build, gen skills --check — is the only thing standing between a mistake and the tracker, and it is on whoever is committing to run it. make help lists the rest; make dist cross-compiles four platforms with a SHA256SUMS, and make release TAG=v1.2.3 publishes them through cmd/release after refusing a dirty tree, a TAG that is not what git describe reports, and a tag the remote does not have.

A hand build says dev for kettle version and means it: a binary out of somebody's working tree is not a release and must not claim to be one. The version is stamped at link time into internal/cmd.Version, derived from git describe rather than kept in a file — a number somebody has to remember to bump is a number that will be wrong.

go.mod says go 1.26, which the SDK requires, and vendor/ is committed — 281 files, 2.3 MB, which is the price of knowing exactly what compiled.

Be precise about what that buys, because it is easy to overclaim: vendoring pins the contents of every dependency in this repository's own history, so a dependency that is retagged, yanked or unreachable cannot change what this binary is built from. It does not by itself give a network-free build. go 1.26 in go.mod means GOTOOLCHAIN=auto fetches a toolchain over the network on any machine whose local Go is older, which is most of them. If an air-gapped build is ever a requirement, pin the toolchain too — vendoring alone will not get you there.

make check runs both halves: go mod verify says the module cache matches go.sum, and go build -mod=vendor ./... says the committed tree is complete and is what actually compiles. A vendor/ that has drifted from go.mod fails nothing until somebody builds with a cold cache, which is exactly when nobody wants to find out.

The transport is the official SDK rather than hand-rolled net/http. What that bought: the payload shapes are one vocabulary maintained by the people who maintain the server, and the instance's version arrives for free, which is what lets the transport answer "does this instance have issue dependencies?" from the version instead of guessing from a status code. What it cost is written down where it happened — see internal/gitea and internal/mapping.

The SDK is imported as sdk everywhere, so one type has one spelling across the tree.

The round trip

push and pull are the two halves of one rule, and the rule is that the store holds what has not left this machine. A successful push deletes the local file — on --update too, one rule with no exception — and only after the tracker confirms the write and the number → slug ledger is written. A pull is how the copy comes back, under the same slug, on a machine that has never seen it.

The mechanics of each half live with the commands that implement them, in internal/cmd; the ledger that survives the deletion is internal/gitea's, and the marker that survives a lost ledger is internal/mapping's.

No guard hook

The Python version needed a PreToolUse hook to block any tea command that would run under a login the model picked instead of the operator. That whole apparatus is gone. The binary holds its own credentials and reads the login out of the project's own configuration, so there is no argument to police and no way for the transport and the guard to disagree — the failure the hook existed to catch is not expressible any more.

There is also no --login and no --repo on any sync command bar labels. A cross-repository address is still an address: kettle pull owner/repo#42 re-points the client for that one call, which is bookkeeping and not a second connection.

Tests

make check      # fmt, vet, test, go mod verify, build, docs — the whole gate
go test ./...   # just the tests

Three disciplines every test follows:

• internal/cmd builds the binary once in TestMain and runs it as a subprocess against a throwaway project in a temp directory. The binary is never run in the directory it was built in, because that is exactly the arrangement that hid the __file__ bug: a tool is installed in one place and used on projects in another, and a test that collapses the two proves nothing about resolution.
• Every fixture strips CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR, the first anchor of the walk, or the harness's own value would point every fixture at this repository. Anything touching credentials sets KETTLE_CONFIG_HOME at a temp directory, so a run can neither read nor overwrite the developer's own tokens.
• Every fake tracker answers /api/v1/version, because building an SDK client asks for it. The fakes say 1.26.1; one says 1.19.4, and that one is a test — an instance too old for the dependency endpoints is answered from its version with no request made.

Documentation that is generated

kettle gen skills --out ../plugins/kettle/skills            # rewrite the blocks
kettle gen skills --out ../plugins/kettle/skills --check    # exit 1 if stale

Everything between <!-- kettle:gen --> and <!-- /kettle:gen --> in the plugin's SKILL.md files comes from the command registry, so a renamed flag cannot ship with documentation that recommends the old one. --check is what a pre-commit hook or a CI step calls. The generator is internal/cmd's, and the seam between command groups and plugin skills is the plugin's.

Note the asymmetry, because it is easy to get backwards: a SKILL.md command block is generated and must never be hand-edited; every AGENTS.md in this tree is hand-written and must never be generated. One is a flag table, the other is a reason.

Status

Done and tested: every package in the table above, and the commands init, auth, config, gen, version, new, check, ac, tree, index, evict, pull, push, remote, comment, close, labels, sync-evict — plus cmd/release, against a fake Gitea.

The plugin is rewired: it lives at plugins/kettle, ships no Python domain code and no guard hook, and its command reference is generated from this registry.

Keeping this file true

• Scope: the binary as a whole — why it exists, what it depends on, how it is built and tested, and where each package's own document is. Files: go.mod, go.sum, Makefile, and the shape of the tree.
• Update it when a package is added or removed (the diagram and the table both name every one), a dependency changes, a make target is added or its meaning changes, or a cross-package contract like the round trip changes.
• Do not describe a package's internals here. That is what the files it links to are for, and a summary that drifts is worse than a link.