epic: a successful deploy leaves you unable to log in or hold a conversation

[lex00]

just up works. It ends on a green /health probe, migrations have run, and the README's status table is accurate about all of it.

A beginner who runs it still cannot use fountain, and there is currently no issue that says so — the pieces are spread across two repos and none of them is framed as the gap it adds up to.

What is missing between "deployed" and "usable"

You have no account. A fresh fountain has no verified user and no admin. Upstream ships this as two manual kubectl exec calls into the release binary:

bin/fountain_server eval 'Fountain.Release.verify_email("you@example.com")'
bin/fountain_server eval 'Fountain.Release.promote_admin("you@example.com")'

Nothing in this repo does that, and the README does not mention it. Tracked as INTENTIUS/chant#1354, which is the wrong repo for it to be the only record — the gap is visible here.

You cannot hold a conversation. just secret writes SPRITES_TOKEN=local-dev-not-a-real-token. The app boots against it and the data plane is a placeholder, so the one thing fountain is for does not work. #15 is the fix.

Nothing notices either. just verify asks /health and stops. A 200 there is returned by an instance with no account and no data plane. #4 already argues the gate should be a real conversation; this is the concrete reason it matters rather than a purity argument.

Why this is worth an epic rather than three loose issues

Each of the three reads as a nice-to-have on its own. Together they are the difference between a repo that deploys a process and a repo someone can use. The status table says "Verified — stood up, serves /health/ready, migrations ran", which is true and is not the same claim as "you can log in".

The arc

INTENTIUS/chant#1354	First admin without SQL, as an Op phase. Check managoat/fountain#275 first — upstream added a bootstrap path that may beat exec-ing the release binary.
#15	spritzer for the data plane, and the honest caveats about what it does not emulate.
#4	Retarget verify at a real conversation. Depends on #15; without it the gate is unreachable offline.

Order is as listed. #1354 is the cheapest and unblocks a human actually logging in, which is the step that currently has no owner.

GitHub OAuth (#9) is deliberately not in this arc. Email plus password and a verified account gets you in locally; #9 is what a public instance needs and can follow.

Done

Someone with Docker and nothing else runs just up, follows the README, logs in, and sends a message that streams a reply back.

[lex00]

First of the three landed as #33 — just verify-email, verified against a real k3d deployment.

Login: done. Register at /auth/register, run just verify-email, reach /onboarding/step_1 and /conversations. The README status table now records that as verified rather than claimed.

One correction to this issue while I was in there. I wrote that "you have no account" and pointed at INTENTIUS/chant#1354, which quotes upstream saying login is refused while email_verified_at is nil. It is not refused — it is granted, and every page behind it bounces back to /auth/login with no message. Same dead end, but the diagnosis is worse: it reads as a wrong password rather than an unverified account. Details in #33 and in a comment on chant#1354.

Admin turned out to be a separate problem and is split out as #31 — promote_admin/1 is on upstream main and in no tagged release, so it is unreachable from the pinned v0.3.0. That does not block this epic: a beginner does not need admin to hold a conversation.

Still open on the arc:

• spritzer for the data plane locally, and honest local caveats #15 (spritzer) — SPRITES_TOKEN is still a placeholder, so there is no data plane and no conversation can run. This is now the only thing between a fresh just up and the definition of done above.
• deploy-and-verify: a deploy is not done until a conversation streams #4 (the conversation gate) — depends on spritzer for the data plane locally, and honest local caveats #15.

Next up is #15.

[lex00]

Second of the three landed as #34 — the dataPlane seam, closing #15.

A conversation now streams offline, end to end: provision → turn → output → done, exit_code: 0, with a sprite provisioned and populated in spritzer. Verified on a real cluster.

The definition of done in this issue needs amending, though. It says:

Someone with Docker and nothing else runs just up, follows the README, logs in, and sends a message that streams a reply back.

A message now streams a reply back, and the reply is spritzer echoing the runtime command line — not a model. spritzer emulates the Sprites API, not an agent runtime, so live model reasoning, real tool execution and VM isolation are all absent by construction. That is what #15 said it would be, and it is worth restating here because "a reply streams" is now true and no longer sufficient.

So this epic splits cleanly into two claims:

• The plumbing works offline. Provision, populate, exec, stream, exit. Done, and it is the part a beginner needs to see the thing move.
• A real answer needs dataPlane=sprites and a real SPRITES_TOKEN. Not something this repo can give anyone, and not something a local run should imply it has.

#4 inherits the sharp edge: a gate asserting only that a conversation streamed passes against the emulator while proving nothing about the model. It needs to assert on something spritzer cannot fake, or say plainly that it checks plumbing. Noted on that issue.

Remaining on the arc: #4 alone. Also filed #35 from this work — the app logs a honeycomb 401 every five seconds on a default deployment, which is what just logs shows you when you go looking for something else.

[lex00]

The last blocker is fixed upstream, and this stays open on a release rather than on work.

INTENTIUS/spritzer#20 makes an unrecognised command hold its exec session open for stdin, which was the thing orphaning every turn. Verified against a real fountain deployment on k3d with that build swapped in:

stage turn started
output  claude --dangerously-skip-permissions --print --verbose --output-format stream-json ...
output  say hello
stage turn done  {"exit_code":0}

A conversation completes offline. The reply is the prompt echoed back — what an emulator should produce, and what the docs already say a local run proves.

So the arc is done

• fountain-ops: first admin without SQL, as an Op phase chant#1354 → just verify-email, shipped in you can sign in now #33
• spritzer for the data plane locally, and honest local caveats #15 → the dataPlane seam, shipped in a data plane you can actually run offline #37
• deploy-and-verify: a deploy is not done until a conversation streams #4 → the conversation gate, shipped in the conversation gate, in two modes #36
• the turn itself → spritzer#20

What is left is a version number

spritzer's latest release is v0.4.1; the fix is on main and unreleased, and src/params.ts pins ghcr.io/intentius/spritzer:0.4.1. So a clean just up today still gets the orphaned turn.

Once spritzer cuts a release, this is a one-line pin bump and a status row — at which point the definition of done in the issue body ("logs in, and sends a message that streams a reply back") is met, with the standing caveat that the reply is an echo rather than a model.

Not cutting that release myself: versioning and changelog are a judgement call for whoever owns the repo.