Moving work in and out

Nothing is mounted from the host, so a cell has no path to your files and its own work has no way out. Two folders and two commands close that gap without opening one: the host is always the party that moves the bytes.

Both folders live in the cell's home, so they survive the container being replaced and are destroyed with the cell.

Send work in

solitary send claude notes.md
solitary send claude patch.diff fixture.json

Files arrive in the cell's inbox at /home/cell/inbox. Use this for prompts, patches, fixtures, or other inputs you intentionally choose to share. Directories are refused — send an archive instead.

Publish work out

Inside the cell, artifact publishes into the outbox:

artifact report.pdf dist/app   # publish these, for the host to collect
artifact --list                # what is published, and what is waiting to come in

On the host:

solitary fetch claude               # copy everything published into the current directory
solitary fetch claude --list        # see what is there without copying it
solitary fetch claude report.pdf    # or name what you want
solitary fetch claude --into ./out  # land them somewhere other than here
solitary fetch claude --force       # replace files already there

Fetching copies rather than moves, so fetching twice is not a mistake and an interrupted fetch loses nothing. Clearing the outbox is the cell's own business (rm inside it).

Only the machine has to be running, not the container: what a cell published can still be collected after whatever produced it has died.

The outbox is untrusted input

Its contents are named by whatever runs in the cell, and those names become paths on your machine. Four rules, all enforced on the host:

• Solitary does the listing itself — regular files only, one level deep. A symlink is not followed and a directory is not descended into. For a directory, create an archive inside the cell and publish the archive.
• A name that is not a plain file name — ../escape, -rf, an empty one — is refused by name rather than silently skipped, and the rest still come out.
• Nothing is written over something already there without --force, and the check happens as a group, before the first file is copied.
• Nothing arrives executable. Fetched files land 0644. What a cell produces is data on the host, never a program.