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HarnessesProject Roots

Project Roots

How Coven resolves project roots for harness sessions and why launch requests cannot widen the project boundary.

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Every harness session starts from a project root. Coven resolves and canonicalizes that root before it launches a PTY or records the session.

Why it matters

Project roots make sessions auditable. A session record can answer:

  • Which repository or project was the work tied to?
  • Which harness id ran?
  • Which working directory did the process start in?
  • Which event log belongs to that run?

Without a project root, a harness run is just a loose process. Coven's job is to make it a named, reviewable session.

CLI behavior

Run from inside a project:

cd /path/to/project
coven run codex "fix the failing tests"

If Coven cannot resolve a project root, coven doctor and coven run give setup evidence instead of launching a vague process.

Client behavior

Clients should treat project root as authority-sensitive input. They can collect and display it, but the daemon still validates it.

Do not trust a browser or chat client to enforce project boundaries on its own. The daemon remains the validation boundary described in Daemon security posture.

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