Put Piggy on Prime Agent, and let it write to the book

Piggy was a hand-rolled OpenAI tool loop. It is now a Prime Agent session —
Prime Intellect's own harness, embedded as a Node library — answering from
PIG's tools and, for the first time, able to put information into the CRM
rather than only read it out.

The harness is a coding agent, so the first job was taking the coding agent
away from it. `noTools: 'all'` plus an explicit allowlist leaves the model
with PIG's ten `pig_*` tools and no bash, no filesystem, no IPython. That
holds under attack: a hostile extension, a skill and a settings file planted
in the agent's own directory, then `setActiveToolsByName` called with every
built-in, still leaves ten tools, all ours. Both lines are load-bearing —
`noTools` alone registers nothing, and the allowlist is what admits our own.

Writing is gated rather than assumed. A change is proposed, not made: the
tool returns a description, the transcript renders a diff card, and nothing
reaches the database until someone presses Apply. Contracts, commitments,
allocations and compliance always stop for a human whatever the mode. Every
write runs through `executeMutation` as the calling user, so their
capabilities and the audit trail apply exactly as they would to a human's.

Four things about the SDK are wrong in its own documentation and cost a
debugging cycle each: models.json does not resolve an env var name for
`apiKey`, it sends the literal string; there is no built-in prime-inference
provider in 0.84.1; a ResourceLoader you pass in is never reloaded for you;
and the stock system prompt is a coding-assistant prompt that must be
replaced — but replacing it also silently removes the tool list, because the
harness only renders that section when it owns the prompt. AGENTS.md records
all four.

The expensive one was thinking level. The harness defaults to `medium`, and
nemotron spent an entire 4,096-token budget reasoning and returned an empty
answer. `low` was worse; `off` omits the parameter so the endpoint's default
wins. An explicit `reasoning_effort: none` via `thinkingLevelMap` took a turn
from 6,195 output tokens to 149.

And a turn is now bounded. The harness loop is `while (true)` with no
iteration cap; a runaway on a frontier model would have eaten the credit it
is supposed to report on. Ceilings on model calls and tokens, enforced both
through the harness hook and independently from the event stream, plus a
per-user daily spend limit — and the ledger now records spend on turns that
fail, which it previously discarded.

Signing in lands on /piggy, which is a workspace: conversations down one
side, the agent in the middle, what it did and what it cost beside it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Dockerfile

@@ -78,6 +78,53 @@ COPY apps/cli ./apps/cli
 COPY apps/piggy ./apps/piggy
 COPY --from=build /app/apps/web/dist ./apps/web/dist
 
+# Two build gates for Piggy, both of which exist because the alternative is a
+# container that crash-loops in production for a reason no log makes obvious.
+#
+# 1. apps/piggy/src/agent/models.json is READ AT BOOT, not imported — it is the
+#    provider document the harness registers Prime Inference from, and Piggy's
+#    config schema validates the default model against it before the process
+#    will start. It arrives here inside `COPY apps/piggy`, so nothing special
+#    is needed to ship it; what is needed is a guard against a future
+#    .dockerignore rule or a narrowed COPY quietly dropping it. Parsed rather
+#    than merely stat'd, because a truncated copy is the interesting failure.
+#
+# 2. The Prime Agent SDK is installed with --ignore-scripts, and it drags in a
+#    large transitive tree (@google/genai, protobufjs) whose install scripts are
+#    denied in pnpm-workspace.yaml on purpose. Importing the SDK here proves the
+#    scriptless install produced a loadable module graph rather than one that
+#    needs a postinstall to have generated something. If a future version of the
+#    harness genuinely requires a build step, this fails at `docker build` in
+#    front of whoever changed the dependency, not at 03:00 in front of the
+#    on-call.
+RUN node -e "const d=JSON.parse(require('node:fs').readFileSync('apps/piggy/src/agent/models.json','utf8'));const n=d.providers['prime-inference'].models.length;if(!n)throw new Error('models.json has no models');console.log('models.json ok:',n,'models')" \
+  && cd apps/piggy \
+  && node --input-type=module -e "await import('@earendil-works/pi-coding-agent');console.log('pi-coding-agent imports under a scriptless production install')"
+
+# Where the Prime Agent harness keeps its own state: the models.json Piggy
+# writes for it at boot, plus whatever else it decides to keep alongside —
+# a models-store.json appeared there on the first real turn.
+#
+# Deliberately NOT the default `~/.pig/piggy-agent`. Under `docker run` that
+# resolves to /home/node and happens to work, because Docker sets HOME from the
+# passwd entry. It is not a property to rely on: a runtime that starts this
+# image with a numeric user and no matching passwd entry — `runAsUser: 1000`
+# under Kubernetes, most obviously — leaves HOME unset, os.homedir() falls back
+# to `/`, and the mkdir fails against a root-owned root directory. That takes
+# the agent down on its first turn, long after the deploy reported success.
+#
+# Deliberately NOT under /app either, and this one is a security property
+# rather than a convenience. The harness discovers extensions, skills and
+# context files from its cwd, and Piggy points the harness's cwd at this
+# directory. Anything reachable from here can end up in a CRM agent's prompt,
+# so it must never be the checkout and must never be a bind mount of one.
+#
+# Created in the image, owned by node, 0700: a directory that exists with the
+# right owner is one the unprivileged process can write without a startup
+# chown, and a named volume mounted here would inherit this ownership rather
+# than arriving root-owned.
+RUN mkdir -p /var/lib/piggy-agent && chown node:node /var/lib/piggy-agent && chmod 700 /var/lib/piggy-agent
+
 # Run unprivileged. The node image ships a `node` user for exactly this.
 RUN chown -R node:node /app
 USER node