chamnan 1.34.0 — the unusual setup behaving like the ordinary one

This release makes chamnan harder to break and more careful with what it reads — on Windows, under odd clocks and file names, and around secrets — rather than adding new features.

What was measured	Before	After
Mapping a generated 1.47 MB Python module full of f-strings (Python 3.14)	134 s	skipped with a reason
A failing command run through its Windows .cmd shim (py launcher installed)	exit 0	the command's own exit code
NuGet, Cloudflare and Supabase secret keys standing alone in text	passed through	redacted
Redacting a 543 KB file	9.1 s	6.3 s
chamnan-recall scoring 297 queries	88 ms	49 ms
chamnan-recall --reindex when nothing changed	4.4 s	0.14 s
Command-log records kept, 6 sessions × 300 writes (macOS/Linux)	843 of 900	900 of 900
Writes after a crashed process left a lock and the clock moved back	each gave up after 2 s	lock recovered at once
Time Claude Code allows chamnan's end-of-session hook	1.5 s	10 s

Together they say one thing: the unusual setup — a Windows machine, a generated file, a clock that jumped, a key in an odd place — now behaves like the ordinary one.

What you will notice

• On Windows, a failing chamnan command fails. Every .cmd shim returned 0 on machines with the py launcher, so chamnan-guard --strict could never stop anything there.
• On Windows, scripts keep their language in the map. A CRLF first line kept its \r, so every #! script in a Windows checkout was indexed with no language.
• More secret shapes are caught on sight — NuGet keys, Cloudflare's 2026 tokens and Supabase secret keys — and a secret named in one field and held in a sibling field ({"name": …, "value": …}, XML name/value) is redacted.
• Token counts are no longer redacted as secrets, and a redacted JSON value keeps its comma, so the text still parses.
• chamnan-guard --history checks every branch and tag, and says how many commits it actually read.
• The end-of-session digest is no longer cut off by Claude Code's default hook time.
• Files with Thai, accented or unusual names are named correctly everywhere chamnan reads git: churn, the hand-off line, dependency history, drift and the commit guard.
• Claude Code no longer receives chamnan's block twice when it also reads a generated AGENTS.md.

Most of the rest is deliberately invisible on the happy path; its purpose is to make unusual setups fail less often.

Under the hood

Security

• New provider rules (NuGet oy2…, Cloudflare cfk_/cfut_/cfat_, Supabase sb_secret_); secrets held in sibling fields; the guard scans the whole of every added line, including text after a form feed or U+2028.
• A symlink waiting at a staging file's name is no longer followed; chamnan-context errors pass the terminal filter.
• Precision: plural *_tokens counts are left alone, and five bare-value rules no longer swallow a trailing JSON comma.

Reliability

• Every git path reader either uses -z or reverses git's quoting, and a check derives the set so a new reader cannot skip it.
• A lock is judged abandoned by its distance from now, so a future-dated lock left by a dead process is recovered.
• A Python module with more than 5,000 f-strings is listed without being parsed, because parsing is quadratic in f-strings on Python 3.12+.
• Log records survive Unicode line separators; appends are locked on every platform; a corrupt store copied aside twice in one second keeps both copies; commands started in a deleted folder print a sentence.
• A scheduled resume that can no longer fire is announced; a rule check with a backtracking pattern is refused.

Performance

• Redaction about a third faster on large files; recall scoring about twice as fast; --reindex reuses unchanged notes; the session start filters the tree once (1.69 s to 1.16 s for that step on 816 files); the tree walk sorts by a key computed once.

Cross-platform

• Windows shims read the exit code after the script runs; a CRLF shebang is read; chamnan-context refuses a path Windows cannot represent instead of crashing; saves wait up to about 1 s for a scanner holding a file; a repository path with an accented letter is recognised in either Unicode form; two names macOS stores as one are warned about as one.

Context and knowledge

• "subagent_pointer": false works; a full Claude model id gets its family's window; env shebangs with options are read; dependency tables such as [dependencies.serde_json] are read; two more generator headers are recognised.

What we noticed on the way

• A Windows shim that answered before the question. cmd.exe expands %errorlevel% when it reads a parenthesised block, before the command inside runs, so the shim always returned the value from its where py probe. CI only ever ran shims on commands that succeed; it now runs one that fails.
• A lock that could never grow old. Abandonment was judged by now - mtime; a lock dated in the future had a negative age, so its dead holder was never checked.
• A parse that got slower the more f-strings a file had. A 71 KB generated module parsed in 0.42 s and a 1.47 MB one took 134 s on Python 3.14 — inside both of the map's size limits.

Research

Every research finding screened for this release ends in a verdict — tested, already there, or not worth it — and the tests led to most of the fixes above. The citations from code back to rounds are in the attached INDEX_CITED_IN_CODE.md; python3 .chamnan/tools/research_citations.py --write regenerates it.

Measured and not adopted: marking every word of injected repository text (datamarking) — about a third more tokens on every session; starting hooks with python3 -S — about 4 ms per hook once re is counted; loading rules only for the paths being edited — almost every rule here is repository-wide; skipping cloud-placeholder files — none could be reproduced on the test machine.

Verification

Checks	Gotcha
6536/6536	115/2,243 — 115 recorded since v1.33.0, 2,243 in total

6536/6536 on the release gate (macOS), and CI green on all five legs — macOS · Linux · Windows on Python 3.8 and 3.13 — on the same commit. The corpus gate (608 files, 99 extensions, 7 writing systems) planted credentials and found 0 in the index; redaction checks 52/52. The count went from 5,150 to 5,401 check( calls in the source: 53 sections added, one resized, and one removed — the section for a mixed-script function deleted because nothing called it.

Known limitations

• The Windows shim fix is verified on CI, not on a Windows machine here.
• The f-string limit counts openings, an upper bound; a file past it is listed with its reason, not parsed.
• The redactor still misses a bare AWS secret access key with no name beside it (98 of 99 corpus shapes caught).

Upgrade

/plugin update chamnan. Nothing to do afterwards; on Windows, the regenerated shims arrive with the update.

This release is about the unusual setup behaving like the ordinary one.