Safety rules for crewrota contributors

crewrota works inside people’s Claude Code setups, so a few rules hold for every change: never read a credential file, never write to the main ~/.claude or ~/.claude.json, never delete through a link, and never let a test touch a real account. They come from the repo’s CLAUDE.md, which has the full guide. A change that needs to break one of them needs the maintainer’s word first.

The rules

Rule	Why
Never read, copy or print a credential file: any .credentials.json or .env*	A member’s login is Claude Code’s own. crewrota never copies or moves a login; to read usage, quota-axi uses each member’s own sign-in on your machine
Never write to the main ~/.claude or ~/.claude.json; they are read only, for the shared items	Members link to it, so a write would land in every member and in the user’s own setup. The one exception is crew restore, which adds skills, agents, commands and CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude without overwriting
Never a recursive delete through a link	Member folders hold junctions and symbolic links to ships and to ~/.claude; a recursive delete would follow them. Members and ships are moved to removed/ after their links are unlinked. The only folder deleted is one crewrota made moments ago in a failed creation, with no link in it
Only src/claude.ts runs claude and quota-axi	One place to swap for the fakes, and one place that sets CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR
Tests never call the real claude or the real quota-axi	Use the fakes (CREWROTA_CLAUDE, CREWROTA_QUOTA_AXI) or an injected runner, and call isolate() so HOME, USERPROFILE, APPDATA, XDG_CONFIG_HOME and CREWROTA_HOME point at temp folders
Write only a member’s own files, never through a link	settings.json, .claude.json and the plugin lists are refused when they are links
Never print what a ship’s mcp.json holds beyond names and types	Headers, environment values and URL queries carry keys; crew ship mcp list leaves them out
Never send a message except in crew warmup	Every other usage reading comes from quota-axi or the status line, which send nothing

How the code keeps them

• findLinks and unlinkAll in src/links.ts walk a folder without following links; moveToRemoved renames, it never deletes.
• discardFresh in src/members.ts refuses to delete a new member folder that holds a link.
• refuseLink in src/shared.ts stops a launch before writing through a link.
• The backup leaves credential and key files out by name and never takes a member folder.
• describeServer in src/cli.ts prints a server’s type and URL without its query, or its command and how many arguments it has.

House style

• No em dash and no en dash anywhere: code, comments, docs, commit messages. Plain hyphens.
• Comments only where the code is not obvious, one short line.
• Plain words in messages: what happened, then the exact command that fixes it.
• Do not commit during feature work; no commit trailers.
• The private denylist lives outside the repo; never copy its terms into a file. See CI and the private scan.

Related

• Architecture
• Testing with the fakes