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Exit maintainer dev mode — restore orchestration, remove the dev marker, log the exit.
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Based on SOC occupation classification
Maintainer override — suspend orchestration to edit codeArbiter itself. Env-gated (CODEARBITER_DEV=1), entry/exit logged to overrides.log.
The Socratic spec-refinement front of /feature, and the planning front of /sprint. Routed to BEFORE any code — it takes a one-line idea and drives it to an approved, concrete spec with testable acceptance criteria. Four gated phases — frame, refine, write, approve. No implementation and no handoff to tdd until the spec is on disk and approved; each acceptance criterion becomes one tdd Phase 1 obligation.
The only path to a commit. Routed to when the user invokes /commit or otherwise instructs codeArbiter to persist staged changes. Nine gated phases — permission, branch, classification, verification (test/lint/secrets), behavioral proof, diff review, selective stage, message, commit. Nothing reaches version control without clearing every gate; "it looks good" is not authorization.
Optional manual drift audit — report stale provenance-tracked docs (via _provenancelib drift detection across .codearbiter/.provenance/), then per stale doc offer re-scout / re-baseline / defer. Not the daily loop; commit-gate auto-heal owns routine maintenance.
The brownfield back-fill. Routed to by /create-context, and by startup when .codearbiter/CONTEXT.md lacks the <!--INITIALIZED--> body marker but source code exists. Six gated phases — pre-flight, scout dispatch, synthesis, gap interview, write, lock. Reads the existing codebase through parallel scouts, drafts every surviving project-state doc, resolves gaps with the user, and locks the project as initialized.
The banned-primitive gate. Routed to when changed code hashes, signs, encrypts, derives keys, generates security-relevant randomness, configures TLS, or imports a crypto library. Rejects broken primitives, disabled TLS verification, and home-rolled crypto; the approved-primitive list lives in security-controls.md. The auth-crypto-reviewer agent is dispatched as the reviewer.
| name | ca-arbiter |
| description | Exit maintainer dev mode — restore orchestration, remove the dev marker, log the exit. |
| argument-hint | (none) |
The exit door for $ca-dev. No-op if dev mode is not active.
Log exit — append to <project-root>/.codearbiter/overrides.log (append-only, >>):
[ISO-8601 timestamp] | BY: <email> | DEV: exit
Marker — remove <project-root>/.codearbiter/.markers/dev-active.
Resume — re-present the startup state (stage, blocking CONFIRM-NN, in-flight tasks) and
await a slash command. Orchestration, routing, and all gates are back in force.
MUST write the DEV: exit line to overrides.log and remove the dev-active marker before resuming
orchestration — the exit is on the audit trail like the entry. MUST NOT rewrite or truncate
overrides.log — the append-only rule has no dev exception, on entry or exit. If a prior session
ended mid-dev, SessionStart has already appended the synthetic BY: session-cleanup | DEV: exit close
line and cleared the marker (session-start.py, observability-001). In that case MUST NOT write a
second DEV: exit for that orphaned entry — the close is already on the trail.
Session-scoped clearing (#271): SessionStart's synthetic close is now conditional on the marker
plausibly being abandoned rather than owned by a different, still-live session — it will NOT clobber
another concurrently-running session's live /dev marker or write a false DEV: exit for it.
$ca-arbiter remains the ONLY way to cleanly close your OWN /dev session's audit pair; do not
rely on a future SessionStart to do it for you.