Orchestrata Ultimate › Research › Hidden AST spawners

Hidden AST spawners and the editable-venv flip

1. Three spawners nobody asked for

A Claude session starts AST work in the background without saying so. The capture found three such spawners.

1. ast-incremental-refresh.sh runs on PostToolUse. It is both a plugin project-hook and a repo copy. On every edit it detaches two jobs under systemd --user:
   • /opt/orchestrata-tools/lib/ast_live_sync.py --once. This one is correct: it is the deployed tool.
   • serialize --incremental, run with the primary checkout's .venv/bin/python and scripts/serialize_codebase_ast.py. That breaks the "use deployed tools" rule. The census recorded the primary checkout as 497 commits behind; counted against its origin/master ref on 2026-10-23, it is 1,102 behind. The capture at 23:38:47 was triggered by a codetools worker's edits in wt-CT-CODEMAP.
2. ~/.venv/bin/ast-sync is the entry point orchestrata_ultimate.tools.ast_pipeline:main. ~/.venv holds an editable install of the primary checkout, which is a deploy-in-place. Its direct_url.json reads "url": "file:///home/mohamed/workspace/orchestrata-ultimate-architecture" with "editable": true (re-checked 2026-10-23). It ran --once on wt-MAP-PRECOMMIT at session start (23:43:58), with systemd --user as its parent.
3. start-architecture-sync.sh (SessionStart, lines 143 and 153) and scripts/hooks/pre-commit:166 (ruff on each staged .py) call a plain uv run. That is the cause of section 2.

2. A plain uv run flips the venv to editable

Symptom. The pre-push gate refuses with "THE SUITE WOULD TEST THE WRONG SOURCE TREE", and the expected and actual source paths it prints are identical:

[source-provenance] ❌ THE SUITE WOULD TEST THE WRONG SOURCE TREE
[source-provenance]    expected source : /home/mohamed/workspace/wt-MAP-PRECOMMIT/src
[source-provenance]    actual source   : /home/mohamed/workspace/wt-MAP-PRECOMMIT/src

Real cause. .venv/.../orchestrata_ultimate-*.dist-info/direct_url.json says "editable": true. A plain uv run re-syncs the project and installs it editable. The gate refuses an editable install of the repo under test, which is its job, but its message names the wrong problem. The flip was timestamped at session start, 23:43:43.

What it cost. The item-3 map push took four attempts (push-item3*.log):

Fix. Commit 8a2cb42ad on feat/maps-via-codetools switches all three call sites, plus the plugin copy, to uv run --no-sync. The fix reaches sessions only after a push and a config deploy, and push approval has not been given. wt-MAP-PRECOMMIT's venv was non-editable on 2026-10-23.

Until it is deployed, before every push run:

env -u PYTHONPATH -u PYTEST_ADDOPTS uv sync --dev --no-editable --frozen

Then check direct_url.json. Never run a plain uv run in an orchestrata checkout; use .venv/bin/python or uv run --no-sync.

3. The config deploy deletes hand-installed hooks

On 2026-10-23 at 00:00, deploy/install-claude-config.sh --ref a4cbc2bdf ran rsync -a --delete from the repo's claude/hooks/ into ~/.claude/hooks/. It deleted three hooks that exist in no repo:

• codemap_refresh.sh (SessionStart and SubagentStart);
• precommit_gate_subagent.sh (SubagentStop, the gate that blocks a worker until precommit-check passes);
• dispatch_ledger.py (SubagentStop, which writes the dispatch ledger).

The settings still registered them, so four hook registrations pointed at missing files. They were restored byte-identical from the backup that run took (~/.claude/.backup-20261023T000002/hooks), and both shell hooks passed pipe-tests. All three files were present on re-check. The installer keeps only the 3 most recent backups. The ~/bin launchers (precommit-check and the rest) sit outside the rsync and are safe.

Options and recommendation

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