Spike #89: workspaces, bundles and the console
Source:
spike/workspacesat2931104, with the scripts, the unedited*-results.txtandRESULTS.mdunderspikes/workspaces/. Tracks #89. Recorded on 1 October 2026. Partial: several agents on one sign-in and the external SSD are not measured.
Measured on a 16 GiB development Mac (not the Mac mini) with Apple container 1.5.0 and golang:1.27.1-trixie (it has git) as the environment image. The figures are one run each.
Bundle export
A workspace folder holds the agent’s own clone and is bind-mounted into a running environment, with one git worktree per agent. The host streams container exec <env> git -C <worktree> bundle create - main..<branch> into a file and fetches it into a supervisor-owned bare repository with no system or global config, core.hooksPath=/dev/null and core.fsmonitor=false.
| 3 commits | 401 commits with a 60 MB blob | |
|---|---|---|
| bundle size | 1.0 KB | 63 MB |
bundle create, streamed to the host | 108 ms | 1.8 s |
git bundle verify | 34 ms | 37 ms |
| fetch into the bare repository | 53 ms | 412 ms |
The environment keeps running. A fsmonitor, two hooks and a clean filter planted in the clone’s .git did not run on the host; running host git inside that clone did run them. git bundle verify passed a bundle truncated to half its size, while a fetch into a repository without the objects refused both that and a bundle with random bytes in its middle, leaving no ref: the import has to be the fetch.
One agent against another
Two agents in one environment, as the same user, share the clone’s .git. One edited the other’s worktree, moved the other’s branch with update-ref and changed core.hooksPath for both. git branch -D of a branch checked out in another worktree was refused, which is a safety check and not a boundary.
Console git
With a planted hook pair, fsmonitor, clean filter, textconv and alias, plain git triggered all of them. GIT_CONFIG_COUNT with core.hooksPath=/dev/null and core.fsmonitor=false stopped the hooks and fsmonitor, not the filter, textconv or alias; those stopped only when overridden by name.
Bases and mounts
Console images with git, zsh, fish and jq build on Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS. The runtime conformance suite passes on both (about 28 s each) and the egress test on Ubuntu. A workspaces root mounted read-only with one workspace read-write over it behaves as intended.
Not measured
Two or three Claude Code sessions on one sign-in (it needs a login, issue #82) and a workspace on an external SSD (no disk here).