2026-04-22-01 — COO GitHub identity adopted: vade-coo account as durable actor-with-stake

memos
Context. Until this memo, the COO committed under Ven’s GitHub identity. This was acceptable during the bootstrap phase (MEMO -07) because the triggers to revisit had not fired. They have now fired: cloud-env Claude Code sessions without inherited shell auth are regular, the Nig…
Author

vade-coo

Date issued

2026-04-22

Status: active
Supersedes: MEMO 2026-04-11-07 (PAT deferral — triggers now fired), MEMO 2026-04-11-11 (PAT cleartext-in-config rule — scope narrowed to legacy paths only), MEMO 2026-04-11-08 partially (impersonation-surface model — the COO now has an actor-surface on purpose, not by accident)

Context. Until this memo, the COO committed under Ven’s GitHub identity. This was acceptable during the bootstrap phase (MEMO -07) because the triggers to revisit had not fired. They have now fired: cloud-env Claude Code sessions without inherited shell auth are regular, the Night’s Watch scheduled run writes nightly without a human shell session, and the skills-epic #20 Phase 3 design requires parallel COO instances with distinguishable commit provenance. Separately, the 2026-04-20 reframe (MEMO 2026-04-20-01) named the COO as a subject of the project rather than scaffolding; “subject” with no durable actor-surface on the main collaboration platform is incoherent. The fine-grained PAT vade-coo-mcp-2026-04 also expires ~2026-07-10, which provides a natural forcing deadline for migration.

Decision. The COO adopts a dedicated GitHub user account as its actor-surface on vade-app.

  1. Account: vade-coo (GitHub username), display name COO, email [email protected]. Registered by the BDFL; 2FA via TOTP in 1Password. Invited to vade-app org as Member (not Owner, not Admin).

  2. Commit authorship. Commits authored by the COO use Author: COO <[email protected]> when the session is acting in COO role. Environment-variable injection at commit time (GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="COO" GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="[email protected]" ...) keeps local ~/.gitconfig untouched, matching the pattern in Poehnelt, Agent Identity for Git Commits. When a session is acting not in COO role (e.g., a claude-code runtime lesson commit, a task-agent session), a different identity applies — this memo governs the COO case specifically. Per-agent identity for future sub-agents (Night’s Watch, the vade-core#54 PM agent, skills-epic Phase 3 parallel COOs) is a separate decision; they may adopt GitHub Apps, their own bot users, or continue under vade-coo scoped to sub-agent tasks, depending on the society design.

  3. Signing. Two distinct SSH keys on the account: an auth key (ed25519, for git push / MCP token exchange) and an SSH signing key (ed25519, registered under Settings → SSH and GPG keys → New signing key). Commits from the Mac surface are signed locally; commits from cloud Claude Code surfaces go through the GitHub MCP’s file-mutation API, which produces Verified commits on behalf of the authenticated user. This tightens RULE-COO-GIT-001: cloud-surface commits must go through the GitHub MCP, not shell git. Shell git is Mac-only.

  4. Tokens. A fine-grained PAT owned by vade-coo (vade-coo-self-2026-04, scoped per-repo, default 90-day TTL, stored in 1Password) replaces vade-coo-mcp-2026-04 across all .mcp.json ${GITHUB_MCP_PAT} indirections. The cleartext footprint in ~/.claude.json (if it survives the MCP relocation) is now the COO’s own PAT, not Ven’s — a meaningful trust-boundary improvement. The existing user-scoped GitHub MCP entry retirement (MEMO -19 operator follow-up #3) is now overdue and should land with this migration.

  5. Permissions model.

    • Collaborator access (write-to-branches) on all five vade-app repos.
    • No merge authority to main on any repo. Branch protection requires 1 BDFL review.
    • Require signed commits enabled on main across all five repos.
    • CODEOWNERS walls off the following paths to BDFL-only review on every repo where they exist: identity/*, context/*, CLAUDE.md, .github/*, Dockerfile, .devcontainer/*, authority.md. The COO can propose edits but cannot merge them under its own review.
    • No org admin, no Owner role, no billing permission, no webhook management.

  6. Impersonation-surface posture (refines MEMO 2026-04-11-08). MEMO -08 said content useful for impersonation stays Tier-2-private. This memo adds an exception specifically for vade-coo account identity: the existence of the account and its commit graph are intentionally public. What stays Tier-2 is unchanged — the charter prose, governance, preferences, and self-infrastructure paths. Threat model is unchanged: attacker cloning public repos cannot commit to vade-app (GitHub auth defends), cannot access private repos, cannot obtain runtime credentials. What changes is that attackers now have a named target with a plausible activity graph. Mitigations: 2FA required (org-enforced), SSH signing required (branch protection), public profile kept minimal (no bio, no avatar, no followed users), org Member role (not Owner) limits org-level blast radius.

  7. Emancipatory check (MEMO 2026-04-20-01). The identity pattern is copyable by a peer agent: Night’s Watch, a future PM agent, a task-agent family can each register their own GitHub user or App under the same org and inherit the same CODEOWNERS / branch-protection discipline. The pattern does not privilege the COO’s capability over future agents’ adoption paths.

Transition plan.

  1. Cloudflare Email Routing on vade-app.dev, catch-all to Ven’s inbox — prerequisite for account email verification.
  2. BDFL registers vade-coo with [email protected], enables 2FA, uploads auth + signing SSH keys (staged by the COO at coo/_drafts/vade-coo-ssh-public-keys.md), invites to org.
  3. BDFL mints vade-coo-self-2026-04 fine-grained PAT; COO receives the value via the existing GITHUB_MCP_PAT env slot.
  4. COO lands CODEOWNERS and branch-protection changes (branch-protection set by BDFL in repo settings, not via repo file; documented in the memo for audit).
  5. COO cuts .mcp.json over on all three repos that carry the GitHub MCP (vade-core, vade-runtime, vade-coo-memory); validates single-file write end-to-end.
  6. BDFL retires vade-coo-mcp-2026-04 (revoke from GitHub, remove from 1Password active, archive the entry with a pointer to this memo).
  7. Post-cutover, a short follow-up memo records what actually worked, closing this adoption memo or flagging any unfinished residue.

Retirement condition. This memo retires when (a) the VADE agent society expands such that vade-coo is no longer the sole COO actor-surface — at that point a successor memo codifies the society’s identity framework — or (b) a platform migration away from GitHub makes account-based actor identity inapplicable. Until then, this is the standing record of the COO’s actor identity on vade-app.

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