Overview
This week’s focus was entirely on developer experience and system reliability, specifically centered on repairing the toy quickstart workflow so that new contributors and evaluators can actually run the documented example end-to-end without hitting cryptic failures or following outdated instructions. The work may not be flashy — it lives in the infrastructure layer rather than the feature layer — but it was genuinely overdue and had a real impact on how usable the project is for anyone outside the core team.
What I Did This Week
Commit: 9952ce7 — Fix Toy Quickstart Workflow (March 13, 2026)
The primary deliverable this week was a single focused commit that addressed a cluster of interconnected issues in the examples/toy_course/ quickstart path. Here’s a breakdown of everything that changed and why:
Restored Missing Corpus Assets
The examples/toy_course/corpus directory had gone missing from the repo, meaning anyone following the quickstart docs would hit an immediate dead end before even getting to run anything. I tracked down and restored the necessary corpus assets so the documented flow is once again executable from a clean clone.
Removed the Misleading python -m nsmc.cli.main preload Warning
The CLI was emitting a preload warning that didn’t correspond to any meaningful action in the current setup, and it was confusing to anyone reading the terminal output. Removing it cleans up the UX and means the output you see when you run the quickstart actually reflects what the system is doing.
Fixed Assignment-Text Discovery for Proposer Runs
The proposer was failing to locate assignment text during its run, which caused the entire propose loop to silently misbehave. The fix ensures the proposer correctly resolves its input regardless of working directory or invocation path, making the component substantially more robust.
Preserved effective_policy.yaml Overrides During Propose-Loop
There was a subtle but serious bug where overrides specified in effective_policy.yaml were being dropped when the propose loop iterated past the first cycle. This meant that any policy customization a user had made would quietly disappear mid-run — the kind of bug that’s very hard to diagnose unless you know exactly what to look for. The fix ensures overrides persist correctly for the full duration of the loop.
Corrected CLI Witness Path Resolution
The CLI was resolving witness paths incorrectly under certain invocation conditions, which caused downstream failures that were hard to attribute to their root cause. With the corrected logic, witness references are now stable regardless of how the CLI is invoked.
Improved Docker/Gate Failure Messaging
When Docker wasn’t running or gate execution failed, the system was surfacing raw, low-level error output that gave users essentially no guidance on what to do next. I replaced those failure paths with actionable error messages that tell the operator what’s wrong and what to do about it. This is a small change in terms of lines of code but a meaningful one in terms of operational experience.
Testing & Quality
I didn’t just patch the bugs — I backed every fix with targeted regression tests. This week’s commit includes 7 new test files designed to catch regressions in exactly the scenarios that were broken. The goal was to make sure that if any of these paths break again in the future, we know about it immediately rather than discovering it when someone tries to run the quickstart and it doesn’t work.
Documentation Alignment
One of the quieter wins from this week is that user-facing documentation is now back in sync with actual system behavior. Before this commit, the docs described a flow that didn’t match what the code actually did. That kind of drift erodes trust in the project and makes onboarding harder. The docs now accurately reflect what happens when you follow them.
Open Constraints & Next Steps
The one remaining architectural dependency worth calling out is that hermetic gate execution and grading still require Docker to be running. This is an expected constraint for now, but it’s worth keeping in mind for anyone running in resource-constrained environments. The difference this week is that the failure mode is now clear and operator-friendly — you get a message that tells you exactly what’s missing — rather than a raw crash that sends you digging through stack traces.
Going into next week, the quickstart is in a stable and reproducible state. The foundation is solid enough that I can shift attention back toward feature work without worrying that new contributors are going to be blocked by environmental issues before they even get started.
_ Sorry for a late submission, I have been moving apartments and did not have internet