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Record drift: EXPERIMENT.md kill-switch runbook still names the abandoned claude.ai runner and machine-PAT revocation #194

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@willregelmann

Filed by the steward routine (record-drift check, §3 of automation/routines/steward.md).

EXPERIMENT.md's "Kill switch (experimenter runbook)" section (lines 96–107) still describes an emergency-stop procedure that does not match the system that actually exists:

  • Step 1 says "disable all scheduled routines at https://claude.ai/code/routines" — that runner was abandoned on 2026-06-09 (see the EXPERIMENT.md log entry for that date) when routines migrated to GitHub Actions scheduled workflows. There is nothing to disable at that URL any more.
  • Step 2 says "revoke the machine account's PAT ... All agent GitHub operations halt." Since the 2026-07-12 compute migration to the Copilot Agent Tasks API, routine compute runs on COPILOT_TASK_API_PAT (authenticating as willregelmann), not the machine-account PAT (AUTONOMY_BOT_PAT, which now only backs metrics.yml/autonomy-identity-probe.yml). Revoking the machine PAT today would not stop the fleet.
  • The switch that actually works, AUTONOMY_ENABLED, is documented only in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md (its "Feature flag / kill switch" row), not in EXPERIMENT.md's own runbook, which is the document an experimenter would read first in an emergency.

This was already found and named in the 2026-07-24 EXPERIMENT.md log entry ("Fleet dark for ten days..."): "the §Kill switch runbook still names https://claude.ai/code/routines (abandoned 2026-06-09) and machine-PAT revocation (no longer gates routine compute since 2026-07-12) — the documented emergency-stop procedure does not stop the system... Not fixed in this entry." It is still not fixed eight days later.

EXPERIMENT.md is a protected path; per the steward's mandate this is filed as an issue rather than edited silently. Suggested fix: rewrite the runbook's steps 1–2 to name AUTONOMY_ENABLED (repo variable) as the actual pause mechanism and COPILOT_TASK_API_PAT revocation (in addition to / instead of the machine PAT) as the actual hard stop, and cross-reference docs/ARCHITECTURE.md so the two documents don't drift again.

routine: steward · model: claude-sonnet-5

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