Measure database polling on an idle cluster

Prompt

Before responding to questions or discussion points in this document, explore the shakenfist codebase thoroughly. Read relevant source files, understand existing patterns (object lifecycle, state machines, MariaDB storage via the three-layer direct/gRPC/public pattern, Pydantic schemas, daemon architecture, operation queue system, event logging), and ground your answers in what the code actually does today. Do not speculate about the codebase when you could read it instead. Where a question touches on external concepts (KVM/libvirt, VXLAN networking, MariaDB/Galera, gRPC/protobuf), research as needed to give a confident answer. Flag any uncertainty explicitly rather than guessing.

Consult ARCHITECTURE.md for the system architecture overview, object types, and daemon structure. Consult AGENTS.md for project conventions and the index into docs/, including build commands and database access patterns. Consult GOALS.md for current development priorities. Key references inside the repo include shakenfist/baseobject.py (object lifecycle and state machine), shakenfist/mariadb.py (three-layer database access pattern), shakenfist/schema/ (Pydantic models), and shakenfist/daemons/database/main.py (gRPC database daemon).

Plan file conventions (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-file-conventions.md):

• All planning documents live in docs/plans/.
• Detailed planning gets one plan file per phase. Phase files are named for their master plan, sit in the same directory as it, and append -phase-NN-descriptive before the .md extension.
• The master plan tracks its phases in a table under its Execution section. Merged is last, and the push audit is the last row, for the reasons given in plan-push-audit-phase:

Phase	Plan	Status	Merged
1. Schema migration	PLAN-thing-phase-01-schema.md	Not started
2. Public API	PLAN-thing-phase-02-api.md	Not started
3. Push audit	-	Not started

• One commit per logical change, and at minimum one commit per phase. Unrelated changes are not batched into a single commit. Each commit is self-contained: it builds, passes tests, and has a message explaining what changed and why.

Situation

test_no_unbudgeted_fixed_rate_database_polling (shakenfist/deploy/shakenfist_ci/database_tier.py) is the review-time detector for the August 2026 database load regression, which was fixed-rate polling on an idle cluster: about 5 Dequeue/s per node and 19 GetExistingLocks/s cluster-wide with nothing to do (#3499). It runs inside the parallel functional suite, so the cluster is never idle while it measures. It therefore has to infer which traffic is a poll from four 60 second windows of a busy cluster, using two filters in shakenfist/deploy/shakenfist_ci/load_budget.py:

• fixed_rate() keeps a pair whose busiest window is within 2.83x of its quietest.
• independent_of_activity() keeps a pair whose share of the tier's traffic moved more than its rate did, and the test skips unless the tier's total varied by at least 1.8x.

Neither filter can do the job. The tier total that the second filter compares against is set by whichever test spiked in one window, so a workload pair driven by any other test reads as independent of it. In

4021's twenty recorded failures the check certified object creates and

deletes ((SetObjectState, api)), network listings, lock traffic from the queue worker, and more as new polls. Across the family (#3975, #3999,

4014, #4028, #4039, #4072, #4092, #4110, #4176, #4359, #4401, #4450, #4464,

4575) neither of the test's assertions has yet found a real new

server-side poll. Every finding has been the harness's own polling, suite workload or a gap in the model, and each was answered with an exemption (HARNESS_DRIVEN_PAIRS) or a model change.

Meanwhile a genuine poll is far more regular than the filters require. In run 39847969049 every GetNodeDaemonState positive control held within 1.6% across the four windows (about ±1 event in 90). On an idle cluster that regularity is the only thing left to see, which is why the regression the test exists for was an idle-cluster regression in the first place.

The fix for #4021 (branch issue-4021-unbudgeted-api) is an interim measure that does not depend on this plan. It reports api-caller pairs under request_driven instead of failing on them, records per-window rates for every flagged pair, and evaluates both assertions in one run (#4177). It clears the dominant false positive. It does not touch the queues, net and transfers pairs (#4401, #4450, #4464), and it widens CI's blind spot to every api pair. This plan removes the reason for both.

The functional suite is run by the Run functional tests step of shakenfist/actions/.github/workflows/smoke-cluster.yml as one stestr run --config <stestr_config> --concurrency=<n> over ssh to the primary. The CI headroom probe is stopped in a later step of the same job.

Mission and problem statement

Measure database polling where polling is the only thing happening: on the CI cluster after the functional suite has finished and the cluster has settled. Then replace the in-suite inference with that direct observation.

On an idle cluster nearly every request the tier serves comes from a loop: the daemons' own polls, the cleaner and cluster sweeps, and sidechannel monitoring of whatever instances are standing. A pair that is present at a steady rate with no client connected is a poll. No activity covariate, spread gate or harness exemption is needed to say so, and that includes api pairs, which become visible again. The budget's poll terms can be held to the rate that configuration dictates. A small number of deliberately standing instances keeps the per-instance terms in play, so they are measured rather than evaluated at zero.

Success means:

• the idle check gates every merge-queue functional job that today runs the in-suite test, and fails on an unbudgeted steady pair or a budgeted pair over its ceiling;
• the in-suite unbudgeted assertion, independent_of_activity(), the activity spread gate, REQUEST_DRIVEN_CALLERS and the HARNESS_DRIVEN_PAIRS entries that only exist because the suite was running are retired;
• the open issues in this test's family that are activity artefacts are closed as superseded rather than fixed one exemption at a time.

Open questions

1. What does "settled" mean, and how long can it take? After the last test, teardown deletes, the queue worker drains, and the cleaner and the deleted-object sweep catch up. The idle check must wait for an observable condition rather than a sleep: no instance, network or namespace in a transitional state, an empty queue, and perhaps two consecutive scrapes with no Create*/Delete* traffic. The wait needs an upper bound, and what happens when it is hit (fail, or skip and say so) is a decision.
2. Which jobs run it? Every merge-queue functional job (about 2–4 minutes each, on the critical path), or one per topology family. The 1-node smoke topology in PR CI is the cheapest place to find a new poll before it reaches the queue.
3. Does it run when the suite failed? Running it after a failed suite gives more evidence per run. It also risks measuring a cluster left in a broken state, which the settle condition may never satisfy.
4. How long a measurement? On an idle cluster two windows may be enough to show steadiness, and fewer windows cost less. The straddle allowance in FIXED_RATE_MAX_SPREAD exists for slow loops under the ceiling, and its value should be revisited, not inherited.
5. What becomes of the in-suite test? Its over_budget half checks load against the model under a realistic workload, which the idle check cannot. Keep that half (non-gating or gating), or retire the whole test once the idle check has soaked.
6. Where does the code live? A new stestr directory and config in this repository (idle_ci_tests/, idle-ci.conf), reusing load_budget.py, keeps the measurement beside the budget it reads. The workflow step that runs it lives in shakenfist/actions, so the change spans two repositories. The step needs an input that defaults off, so the downstream repositories that call smoke-cluster.yml are unaffected.

Execution

Plan status vocabulary (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-status-vocabulary.md):

A status cell -- in the master plan's own Execution phase table, and in the row docs/plans/index.md carries for the plan -- holds exactly one of these terms and nothing else:

• Proposed -- written down as a concept, not yet scheduled.
• Not started -- scheduled, but no work has begun.
• In progress -- work has begun and has not finished.
• Blocked -- cannot proceed until something outside the plan changes. Say what, in the plan.
• Complete -- the work is done.
• Abandoned -- deliberately dropped without being done.
• Superseded -- replaced by another plan, which the plan names.

The term is the whole cell. No dates, no phase arithmetic, no parenthetical qualifiers, no summary of what happened: a status is read to decide whether a plan still wants attention, and prose in that column has repeatedly grown until it could no longer be read either by a person scanning the table or by tooling. Detail belongs in the plan file, and a one-line summary belongs in the index's own Intent column.

Matching is case-insensitive, so In Progress is accepted, but the spelling above is the one to write.

In this project

The same term is written twice: once in the phase table below, and once in the row this plan carries in docs/plans/index.md. Keep them in step -- the index row is the whole-plan status, so it only reaches Complete once every phase has been completed, abandoned or superseded.

Phase	Plan	Status	Merged
0. Decisions: settle condition, job coverage, fate of the in-suite test	—	Not started	—
1. Idle load check as its own stestr suite in this repository	—	Not started	—
2. Run it from smoke-cluster.yml behind a default-off input, and enable it in this repository's merge jobs	—	Not started	—
3. Soak, then retire the in-suite unbudgeted assertion and the activity filter	—	Not started	—
4. Push audit	—	Not started	—

Phase 1 is the measurement: a settle helper with a bounded wait, a fixture that leaves a small known number of instances standing, the positive control carried over from the in-suite test, and both budget assertions with no activity filter. It also needs unit tests for the settle logic in shakenfist/tests/, so the harness is checked on every commit and not only when a cluster is built. It can be run by hand against a CI cluster before any workflow calls it.

Phase 2 touches shakenfist/actions. Its step runs after the headroom probe is stopped, so the probe's pairs are not part of the idle measurement, and the exemption for them is not needed there.

Phase 3 begins with a soak. The idle check gates, and the in-suite test keeps running for comparison. Only then are independent_of_activity(), activity_spread(), ACTIVITY_DISCRIMINATION_SPREAD, REQUEST_DRIVEN_CALLERS and the suite-only HARNESS_DRIVEN_PAIRS entries deleted, along with the tests that hold them up and the prose in docs/developer_guide/ci_cloud_sizing.md that justifies them. The probe's obligation to trim its exemption on retirement goes with them.

Push audit phase (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-push-audit-phase.md):

• Every master plan ends with a phase that runs the repository's PUSH-AUDIT.md over the whole plan's work. It is the last row of the Execution table and it is not optional. The rule binds every plan that carries the phase, which is decidable from the plan file alone: a plan that is already Complete, Abandoned or Superseded and does not carry the phase is not reopened to acquire one, and a plan that has the phase runs it even if it reaches Complete before the phase does.
• That phase audits the accumulated diff of every phase in the plan against the default branch, not the diff of the last phase alone. Auditing one phase at a time would miss what the phases did to each other -- the duplicated helper that only exists once phases three and six have both landed, the doc page that phase two made wrong and phase five never revisited.
• Once the plan's phases have merged, a diff against the default branch is empty and would read as a clean audit. The range is not reliably derivable after the fact either: unrelated work lands on the default branch between phases, so anything anchored on "since the plan file appeared" is far too wide. It has to be recorded. As each phase lands, what put it on the default branch goes into the plan: the merge commit of its pull request, whose diff against its first parent is the whole of what landed, or -- where the phase landed directly -- every commit of the phase, or its first..last range. A single commit is only ever enough when it is a merge commit.
• Where the Execution phases are a table, that record is a Merged column, added last so that a row which omits it still reaches Status; where they are prose sections it is a Merged: line in the phase's own section. The Status column keeps its single vocabulary term and nothing else (see plan-status-vocabulary). A phase that landed in another repository records <repo> <sha> (#pr) and is audited against that repository's default branch, as part of the pull request that lands it; the plan's own push-audit phase cites that audit rather than re-running it.
• Phases that landed before the plan started recording them are reconstructed rather than left blank. Recover what you can from gh pr list --state merged and git rev-list --first-parent, and say in the plan that the range was reconstructed. Do not trust a path-filtered git log on its own: it lists the commits that touched a path without saying which arrived directly and which arrived inside a pull request, and recording a commit that came in under a merge audits one commit of that pull request rather than the pull request. A reconstructed record may be a summary table in the audit phase's own section rather than a column or a line in the Execution table, which keeps retrospective archaeology out of a table that tracks live status. Where a phase accreted over months of unrelated commits and no range is recoverable, say that instead and name the paths the audit read -- an audit that says what it could not scope is a result; one that silently audits nothing is not.
• Findings land as their own pull request against the default branch, and the plan is not complete until they are resolved or explicitly declined in writing. A finding that is declined says why, in the plan, where the next reader will find it.
• Where the audit finds nothing, record that in the plan in one sentence. It is a real result, and a run of them is the evidence for making the phase conditional rather than mandatory.
• A repository with no PUSH-AUDIT.md still carries the phase, and the phase says that the runbook does not exist yet and what was done instead. Silently omitting it is what let the audit go untriggered for as long as it did. What is done instead is at least the checklist below, applied to the recorded ranges: it is a floor, not a substitute for a runbook, and a plan adds the questions its own repository's blast radius raises. Each item gets a verdict, or a sentence saying why it does not apply. Do not borrow another repository's runbook instead: a runbook is written for one repository's blast radius.
• Every recorded landing takes one of the forms above: a merge commit with two parents, whose diff is read against its first parent; every commit of a direct landing, or its first..last range; a landing in another repository, whose own audit is cited; or a statement that no range is recoverable, naming the paths the audit read.
• Anything the diff added that runs unattended -- cron, a timer, a scheduled workflow, a self-update -- reports its own failure somewhere a human sees, or is named as not doing so.
• No secret or token entered any repository, and no private hostname or IP address entered a repository more public than the one it came from.
• Anything the diff removed or renamed has no consumer left, checked by grep across every repository that could consume it rather than by assumption, with the greps stated.
• Where the repository publishes something -- an image, a release, a package -- a broken change fails closed: one that publishes nothing is recoverable, one that publishes something wrong is not.

In this project

The runbook is PUSH-AUDIT.md at the repository root, and it reads its $RANGE from the Merged column, so a plan without one cannot be audited once its phases have merged.

The column goes in the master plan's Execution table, last:

| Phase | Plan | Status | Merged |

tools/check-plan-status.py reads the Status column by name rather than by position, so a Merged column added after it does not disturb the index arithmetic. A phase which has not landed reads — -- in a table cell or a **Merged**: line alike -- rather than an empty cell (as the worked example in the plan-file-conventions block above leaves it), TBD or n/a.

A few of this repository's older roadmaps write their phases as prose sections rather than as a table: blob-storage-roadmap.md, api-query-batching-roadmap.md and PLAN-attribute-field-masks.md, which are the three named in check-plan-status.py's HAND_COUNTED. The first two carry a **Merged**: line in the phase's own section -- beside **Status** where the phase has one, otherwise directly under the heading. The third carries no such line, which is a decision rather than an oversight: it is Complete and has no push-audit phase, so the shared block's do-not-reopen rule leaves it alone. Nothing checks either form, so a wrong SHA is caught only in review.

Phase landing (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-phase-landing.md):

A plan's status and a repository's review state both live in files that every branch would otherwise rewrite. Left alone, that turns each of them into a merge-conflict hot spot, and it spends a pull request and a full CI run on a change that is entirely prose. Three rules keep them out of the way.

• A phase is closed out in the first commit of the next phase, not in a pull request of its own. By the time the next phase branches, the previous one has merged, so its merge commit is known and its Merged cell can record the thing the push-audit phase actually needs. This is the only ordering that works: a phase cannot record its own merge commit, and a separate close-out pull request buys that record at the price of a round trip. The close-out sets the finished phase's Status and Merged cells and the plan's row in docs/plans/index.md, and it is committed before the next phase's own work, so that the branch never claims the plan is further along than the default branch is.

• The last phase closes itself out. The push-audit phase is the last row of every plan, so no next phase will carry its close-out. Where the audit raises findings, the plan is not complete until they are resolved or declined, and those land as their own pull request after the audit phase has merged -- so that pull request is the carrier, and it can record the audit phase's merge commit, which by then is known. Where the audit finds nothing there is no carrier, and no follow-up pull request is opened for the sake of one cell: the phase sets its own Status, and the plan's index row, to Complete in its own pull request, and records no Merged cell. It is the only row permitted to omit one. The column exists so that the push-audit phase can reconstruct what to audit; the audit phase is last, so nothing ever reads its own row.

• REVIEWS.md is not pruned or regenerated in a pull request that changes code or documentation. Editing a reviewed file stales its mark, and adding or removing an in-scope file moves the header count, but neither is the landing pull request's business. prune regenerates the file whether or not it dropped anything, so the prune-reviews workflow heals both on the next push to the default branch. Pruning from a branch is also wrong more often than it is right, though not for the reason it first appears: prune compares each stamp against HEAD, which on a branch is the branch tip, so it drops the marks for the files the pull request itself touched while keeping marks the default branch has already pruned. Committing that state merges a review file computed from a stale tree, and can resurrect marks prune-reviews has already removed. Accumulated staleness is reported by the review-coverage audit, which recomputes coverage against HEAD and raises an issue once the backlog is worth a review session.

A review session is the exception, and it is not optional tidiness: stamp regenerates REVIEWS.md as well as writing the marks, and the rows, the sidecars and the marks are committed together (see docs/code-review-tracking.md). Where a repository requires a pull request to reach its default branch, that is how a review session lands, so "not in a pull request" is about the kind of change, not the mechanism.

These rules assume phases land one after another. Where two phase branches are open at once, each closes out only the phase it directly follows.

In this project

This repository does not track human review, so it has no REVIEWS.md and no prune-reviews workflow; the third rule has nothing to act on here. The first two apply as written.

Agent guidance

Execution model

Sub-agent execution model (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/subagent-execution-model.md):

All implementation work is done by sub-agents, never in the management session. The management session is reserved for planning, review, and decision-making. This keeps the management context lean and avoids drowning it in implementation diffs.

The workflow is:

1. Plan at high effort in the management session.
2. Spawn a sub-agent for each implementation step with the brief from the plan, at the recommended effort level and model.
3. Review the sub-agent's output in the management session. Check the actual files -- the sub-agent's summary describes what it intended, not necessarily what it did.
4. Fix or retry if the output is wrong. Diagnose whether the brief was insufficient (improve it) or the model was too light (upgrade it), then re-run.
5. Commit once the management session is satisfied.

This applies to all steps, including high-effort ones. If a sub-agent cannot succeed even with a detailed brief and the right model, that is a signal the brief needs improving, not that the management session should do the implementation itself.

Use isolation: "worktree" for sub-agents when the change is risky or experimental; the worktree is discarded if the output is unsatisfactory. For safe, well-understood changes, sub-agents can work directly in the main tree.

Planning effort

Planning effort (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-planning-effort.md):

The master plan itself is always created at high effort -- it requires broad codebase understanding, cross-referencing several source files, and judgment calls about scope and sequencing.

Each phase plan states the recommended effort level for planning that phase. Phases that turn on design decisions, cross-component coordination, protocol changes, or subtle correctness questions should be planned at high effort. Phases that are mechanical, or that follow a pattern already established elsewhere in the codebase, can be planned at medium effort.

In this project

Phases involving schema design, cross-daemon coordination, protocol changes, or subtle correctness questions (locking, consistency, migration safety) should be planned at high effort. Phases that mirror an already-established pattern -- adding a new MariaDB accessor alongside an existing one, for example -- can be planned at medium effort.

Step-level guidance

Sub-agent step guidance (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/subagent-step-guidance.md):

Each phase plan includes a table like this:

Step	Effort	Model	Isolation	Brief for sub-agent
1a	medium	sonnet	none	One-sentence summary of what to do and which files to touch
1b	high	opus	worktree	Why this needs high effort: requires understanding X to do Y

Effort levels, from cheapest to most thorough:

• low -- Purely mechanical changes: rename, reformat, add a log line, regenerate generated code. The brief is a complete instruction.
• medium -- The plan provides enough context to follow a clear brief. The sub-agent may read a few files, but the approach is already decided.
• high -- Requires reading several files, making judgment calls, or understanding non-obvious invariants. The sub-agent needs to think about edge cases.
• xhigh -- The setting for hard coding and agentic steps: long-horizon changes, or steps where the sub-agent must both research and implement.
• max -- Correctness matters more than cost. Expect diminishing returns and occasional overthinking; reserve it for steps where a wrong answer would be expensive to detect.

Brief for sub-agent: this is the key field. Write it as if briefing a colleague who has never seen the codebase. Include what to change, which files to touch, what patterns to follow, and any non-obvious constraints.

A good brief front-loads the research the planner already did, so the implementing agent does not repeat it. Instead of "add storage functions for the new object", name the functions to add, the file they belong in, the existing equivalent to mirror (with line numbers), and any registration the change also needs.

The better the brief, the lower the effort level needed and the lighter the model that can succeed.

In this project

High effort typically means a new object type lifecycle, a cross-daemon protocol change, or migration logic; medium effort typically means a new gRPC endpoint parallel to an existing one, or a new MariaDB accessor; low effort typically means a rename, a log line, or regenerating proto stubs.

A worked brief for this codebase: instead of "add MariaDB functions for the new object", write "add direct, gRPC, and public wrappers for get_widget in shakenfist/mariadb.py, mirroring the get_artifact trio at lines 11129/11797/11811. The direct path uses _get_widgets_table(); the gRPC wrapper goes through GetWidget on the database daemon; register the counter in the Monitor operations list in shakenfist/daemons/database/main.py."

Model choice

Sub-agent model roster (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/subagent-model-roster.md):

The planner recommends which model is best suited to each step. This is a judgment call, not a rigid rule -- the right model depends on what the step requires, not on whether it is "planning" or "implementation". The models available to sub-agents are:

• fable -- The most capable model available, for the hardest reasoning and the longest-horizon work: multi-step changes a single sub-agent must carry end to end, or steps whose correctness depends on holding a whole subsystem in mind at once. It costs materially more than opus, so reserve it for steps that have already defeated opus or are expected to.
• opus -- The default for steps needing deep reasoning, architectural understanding, subtle correctness judgment (locking, state machines, migrations), or intricate implementation that would be costly to debug if it were wrong.
• sonnet -- A good default for well-briefed implementation work. Faster and cheaper than opus, and effective when the plan front-loads the research and the brief leaves no broad judgment calls to make.
• haiku -- Suitable for purely mechanical tasks: search-and-replace, regenerating generated code, adding log lines, running commands. The brief must be a near-complete instruction.

Model choice interacts with effort level and brief quality. A detailed brief compensates for a lighter model -- sonnet at medium effort with a thorough brief often matches opus at medium effort with a vague brief. The planner's job is to write briefs good enough that the recommended model can succeed.

The model also determines the context window: fable, opus and sonnet have 1M tokens, haiku has 200K. A step that must hold many files in context at once may need one of the larger-context models for that reason alone, even when the reasoning itself is straightforward.

When in doubt, skew to the more capable model. Saving money only matters if the outcome is still acceptable. A failed or low-quality implementation wastes more time -- and therefore more money -- than the heavier model would have cost. Recommend a lighter model only when you are confident the brief is detailed enough for it to succeed.

Management session review checklist

Management session review checklist (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-review-checklist.md):

After a sub-agent completes, the management session verifies:

• The files that were supposed to change actually changed -- read them, do not trust the summary.
• No unrelated files were modified.
• The changes match the intent of the brief: not merely syntactically correct, but semantically right.
• The project's own pre-merge checks pass, including any generated code that has to be regenerated and committed (see the project-specific checks below).
• The commit message follows project conventions, including the Co-Authored-By line recording model, context window, and effort level.

In this project

The project-specific checks referred to above are:

• The code passes pre-commit run --all-files (flake8, stestr unit tests, mypy).
• If proto files changed, stubs were regenerated with tox -e genprotos and committed.

Administration and logistics

Success criteria

We will know when this plan has been successfully implemented because the following statements will be true:

• The code passes pre-commit run --all-files (flake8, stestr unit tests, and mypy type checking).
• New code follows existing patterns: object lifecycle in baseobject.py, MariaDB access via the three-layer pattern (direct/gRPC/public), Pydantic schemas in shakenfist/schema/.
• Object or attribute filtering is pushed down to the MariaDB SQL layer where indexes can make it faster, rather than materialising everything and filtering in Python.
• There are unit tests for core logic and preferably functional test coverage as well (see shakenfist/deploy/shakenfist_ci/cluster_ci_tests).
• Lines are wrapped at 120 characters, single quotes for strings, double quotes for docstrings.
• gRPC proto changes (if any) have been regenerated with tox -e genprotos.
• Documentation in docs/ has been updated to describe any new features, commands, or database changes. In particular docs/operator_guide/database.md has been updated for schema changes.
• ARCHITECTURE.md, README.md, and AGENTS.md have been updated if the change adds or modifies modules, daemons, or object types.

Documentation index maintenance

When creating a new master plan from this template, update the following files in docs/plans/:

• index.md — add one row to the Master plans table: the date the plan was written, a link to it, a one-line intent, its status from the vocabulary above, and its phase arithmetic (0 of 7, or — for a plan with no phases). One row per master plan, never one per phase — the phases are tracked in this plan's own Execution table, and duplicating them in the index is how the two drift apart. Rows run oldest first.
• order.yml — add an entry for the new master plan, in the intended reading order. This registers the plan and is what the plan-status check reads; it does not by itself put the plan in the published site navigation, which mkdocs.yml.tmpl currently lists by hand. The file is not ours: its format and its meaning as a per-directory navigation allowlist come from tools/sync_component_docs.py in shakenfist/actions, which is how a repository's docs are synced into a documentation site. Keeping it complete is what would make generating the nav from it a mechanical change later. Phase files should not be added to order.yml; they are linked from the master plan's Execution table only, which makes that table the only path to them.

The index row carries the whole-plan status, so it only reaches Complete once every phase has been completed, abandoned or superseded. Update it as the arithmetic changes, not only at the end.

Plan close-out sections (shared block; do not edit -- the canonical copy lives in shakenfist/development at templates/shared-blocks/plan-closeout-sections.md):

Future work

We should list obvious extensions, known issues, unrelated bugs we encountered, and anything else we should one day do but have chosen to defer to here, so that we do not forget them.

• The over_budget siblings (#4072, #4176, and the model issues behind #3999 and #4092) are a modelling problem rather than a discrimination problem, and this plan does not address them except through the phase 0 decision on the in-suite test.
• Once the idle check exists, the unbudgeted ceiling it uses could be lowered, since an idle cluster has no workload noise to clear.

Bugs fixed during this work

This section should list any bugs we encounter during development that we fixed. You should also scan the project's issue tracker, where one exists, for directly related issues that we should either resolve as part of this master plan or at least be aware of while planning it.

• 4021: workload certified as polls by the activity filter. The interim

  fix is on issue-4021-unbudgeted-api; this plan is the root-cause fix.

• 4177: only the first failing category was reported. Fixed on the same

  branch.

• 4110 and #4575 (api pairs) are closed by the interim fix. #4401,

  #4450 and #4464 (queues, net and transfers pairs) are expected to be superseded by phase 3.

Back brief

Before executing any step of this plan, please back brief the operator as to your understanding of the plan and how the work you intend to do aligns with that plan.

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