Manifest and Drift

This page explains how OAT remembers what it manages and how it distinguishes clean sync state from drift, missing files, or unmanaged strays.

Quick Look

• What it does: describes the manifest contract behind provider sync and the drift/adoption model built on top of it.
• When to use it: when oat status shows drift or strays and you need to understand why OAT thinks a file is managed, missing, or adoptable.
• Primary commands: oat status, oat init, oat sync

Manifest locations

• Project: .oat/sync/manifest.json
• User: ~/.oat/sync/manifest.json

Manifest purpose

Tracks managed mappings so the CLI can:

• detect drift safely
• avoid deleting unmanaged provider content
• execute scoped removals only for managed entries

Install-triggered auto-sync narrows that removal scope further: after oat tools install <pack>, the follow-up sync only plans removals for canonical entries from the installed pack. This protects unrelated provider views if the current worktree has stale manifest entries for other packs whose canonical assets are missing locally.

Autonomous worktree bootstrap also treats sync output as setup state. oat-worktree-bootstrap-auto checks inherited cleanliness before the all-scope sync run, then commits dirty sync-managed output as chore: run sync when needed. The commit is scoped to existing or tracked sync paths (.oat/sync/manifest.json, .claude, .cursor, .codex) and reports the result as sync_commit: pass | fail | skip in its structured status.

For transformed mappings such as project-scoped rules, the manifest stores hashes for the rendered provider output that was actually written, not the canonical source markdown. This keeps drift detection aligned with the on-disk managed file.

Drift states

• in_sync
• drifted
• missing
• stray

drifted reasons currently include:

• modified
• broken
• replaced

Rendered rule files participate in the same drift states as other managed copies. If a provider rule file is edited directly, drift is computed against the expected rendered output for that provider.

Stray adoption

oat init and oat status can offer adoption of unmanaged provider entries into canonical .agents.

Provider files ignored by Git are treated as intentionally local runtime files and are not reported as strays. This includes files covered by tracked .gitignore, repo-local .git/info/exclude, or other standard Git exclude mechanisms.

For rules, adoption maps provider-native files back into .agents/rules/*.md:

• Claude: .claude/rules/*.md
• Cursor: .cursor/rules/*.mdc
• Copilot: .github/instructions/*.instructions.md

After adoption, oat sync regenerates the managed provider copies from the canonical rule file.

Generated provider roles

Some Codex roles are generated-derived — produced by the Codex sync extension rather than mapped 1:1 from a canonical .agents/agents/*.md file. The effort-specific implementer variants (oat-phase-implementer-low, oat-phase-implementer-medium, oat-phase-implementer-high) are the current example.

oat status and oat init treat any role listed in the Codex extension plan's managedRoles set as managed, so generated variants are not reported as stray and are not offered for adoption — even though they have no canonical .agents source. A genuinely orphaned Codex role (no canonical source and not in managedRoles) is still flagged.

Reference artifacts

• .oat/projects/<scope>/<project>/spec.md (FR2, FR3, FR6)
• .oat/projects/<scope>/<project>/design.md
• packages/cli/src/manifest/**
• packages/cli/src/drift/**