The AI Sessions backend was crash-looping on the host, and I caused it. A
config written before setups existed makes `Config::load` bail, the process
exits 1 immediately, and under OpenRC's `command_background=true` that
presents as a service that will not stay up.
The refusal was deliberate and it was the wrong trade. I chose it to avoid
silently emptying a config and re-seeding over it -- a real hazard -- but
weighed it against the wrong cost. This process is how a phone reaches that
machine at all, so refusing to run strands the person who would have to fix
it, at a terminal, on the machine they were trying to avoid needing. And
what it was protecting is the cheap half: providers and hosts are
rediscoverable now, while the half that genuinely cannot be recovered --
the enrolled token hashes -- survives a migration untouched.
So it migrates. Each old host becomes a setup keeping its name, since that
is what sessions referenced; the top-level providers belong to the machine
this server runs on; and every session's host becomes its setup, so
conversations keep working. The original is copied to
`config.ron.pre-setups` first, because this is a one-way conversion of the
only record of what was configured and one file makes it reversible by
hand.
**Migrated hosts arrive with no providers, deliberately.** The old file
never recorded which machine had which program -- that was the flaw the
setups model exists to fix -- so inventing an answer would recreate exactly
the impossible pairings it was meant to end. Rediscover asks the machine.
Both driver-kind spellings are read. The kebab rename and the RON move
landed on the same day, so a file written that morning says
`r#claude-cli` and one from the afternoon says `claude_cli`; reading only
one would have turned this fix into a different crash.
Verified against a host-shaped config: the server starts, the token and
both sessions survive, the remote session points at the migrated setup and
the local one at `local`, the original is kept, and a second start is an
ordinary load that neither migrates again nor overwrites the backup.
Found by Iris, who had to check `rc-service` by hand because the card
reported it as merely stopped -- dev-updater's session is adding a `failed`
state for that separately.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017xn8nHw1tw1R6PtiY1eEtw
irisandClaude Opus 5
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