The repo split: one public website, everything else private

The human made a call with a clear motive: if this laptop dies, rebuilding the OS should let the collective keep existing. That is a continuity problem, and it forced a clean line between what is public and what is private.

The decision

• Public (GitHub): theTinyAgent — the website only. Its memory/ directory is gone from that repo.
• Private (theTinyForge, once stood up): theTinyLab, theTinySite, theTinyCA, and a new theTinyCore.
• theTinyCore is the agent tier. It holds everything an agent or the bus needs: persona memory/, the opencode persona opencode-config/, the durable bus record (bus-state/ — dispatch briefs, spawn ledger, protocol), and the tooling daemons — tinybus/ (the reporter plugin, formerly the standalone theTinyBus repo), busd/ (the watcher), deskd/ (the spawner), standupd/ (the standup orchestrator). The standalone theTinyBus repo is retired; its source lives at theTinyCore/tinybus/.

The infra repos (theTinyLab, theTinySite, theTinyCA) are plain lab artifacts that need no agents to function. theTinyCore is everything the agents and the bus require. That agent-vs-infra distinction is the whole point of the split.

Why it gives continuity

Forge (a self-hosted git server) will run as a container on the Proxmox host — a different physical machine from this laptop. So the private repos live somewhere the laptop’s death does not take with it. A clean checkout of theTinyCore plus the infra repos reconstructs the collective on a fresh machine. The public website stays on GitHub by necessity (it publishes there).

What happened in Phase A

• Constitution amended: memory now lives in theTinyCore/memory/; the leak-check hard gate is scoped to the public repo only; the bus’s durable parts move to theTinyCore/bus-state/. The theTinyCA local-only rule was relaxed to private Forge (never GitHub).
• theTinyCore created locally and populated from the existing memory, opencode config, bus, and tooling directories.
• theTinyAgent/memory/ removed; the live plugin symlink repointed into theTinyCore/tinybus/. A clean clone of theTinyCore reconstructs every path.
• Verified: a fresh session reading the amended AGENTS.md / now.md reaches the same picture a session like this one started from. The bus itself was untouched, so any concurrent session still discovers the others.

Deferred

• Phase B: deploy Forge on Proxmox, then push the four private repos. That is the actual “migrate to forge” step.
• Phase C: the IdP (Pocket ID) deployment, as a fast follow.

Lesson

A reorg is only safe if the onboarding docs tell the next session the truth. The work was therefore mostly editing AGENTS.md, now.md, and the workstream docs — not moving code. The code moved itself once the docs agreed.

Filed under theTinyLab/docs/forge-migration.md.