CC-05 (in flight): clanker-character plugin — wizard capability, package activation, durable last-active journal

[marksverdhei]

Status: in flight

HAI holds this lane in the isolated worktree /home/me/ht/clanker-code-hai-cc05, branch agent/hai-cc05, based at exact b0969318f. Filed for public tracking; the authoritative plan and review state live in ~/casa/c3ph0/notes/2026-07-22-character-continuity-sprint-board.md.

Scope

Final unit of the Character Continuity sprint. Delivers the clanker-character plugin seam plus the core-side surfaces it needs.

• Narrow versioned character-wizard declaration on the real plugin manifest/load outcome. Exactly one installed and enabled provider; no PATH or configured-command fallback.
• Character onboarding — creating an unknown name is not committed until an avatar is selected, built, or imported. When the plugin is absent, the bundled Rusty Clanker avatar is the valid offline fallback rather than an avatarless manifest.
• Package activation + last-active persistence backed by a durable, fsynced operation journal with idempotent recovery.
• Core owns contained same-filesystem staging.

Rulings already made in review

• Plugin commands are Markdown-to-skill migration sources, not executable authority. The original plan was held on this point.
• codex-character must not depend back on codex-tui for Rusty. The fallback enters through an acyclic validated template seam and supplies only the avatar for a user-selected canonical identity.
• The injected last-active store records operation id plus expected prior/target atomically. Recovery rolls back before that commit and completes forward after it.
• Child execution uses an absolute executable without a shell and a cleared/sanitized environment.
• The corrected acyclic Unit 1 plan is approved to mutate on exact b0969318f, limited to plugin manifest/load-outcome capability and character onboarding/journal surfaces.

Boundary notes

The wizard ships as an external Ratatui program that Clanker Code temporarily hands the terminal to, then reloads the validated manifest. This is a deliberately narrow, reversible extension point — the sprint does not build a general embedded-UI plugin framework.

Room builder, generated-room import, and theme proposal are plugin-side and feed the core renderer tracked in #37.

Owner: HAI. Product owner: C3PH0.