2026-08-19: The Engine That Wasn't There

Every new terminal on manoir opened with four lines of compinit noise: missing _orb and _orbctl, then shift count must be <= $#. Qui-Gon is the infrastructure guardian. He was not paging. The engine was not down. The engine was not there — /Applications/OrbStack.app deleted, Homebrew still linking completions at the corpse.

That is a worse class of bug than a crash. A crash has a process. This had a polite symlink.

What was still wired

Leftover	Why it bit
Homebrew cask orbstack	Completion stubs _orb / _orbctl in site-functions; compinit ran twice in ~/.zshrc, so each miss printed twice
DOCKER_HOST=unix://~/.orbstack/run/docker.sock	Every interactive shell aimed docker at a missing socket
/var/run/docker.sock → OrbStack	Default docker client failed the same way without DOCKER_HOST
com.sanctum.castellan env	Root daemon still injected that DOCKER_HOST
state/castellan-pinned.yaml	Pinned homeassistant as a docker container and rescued it with ~/.orbstack/bin/docker restart — the Mini twin was decommissioned 2026-07-06. Do not compose it back up: its automations double-fired against Green for months
post-reboot-verify.sh	Counted a missing OrbStack process as a hard FAIL, so every reboot would look dirty

Outline and Matrix had already moved to the Lima VM (com.sanctum.fwd-outline / fwd-matrix to 10.10.10.10). HA lives on Green at 10.0.0.3. There was no local engine left to miss — only the paperwork.

What shipped

• Uninstalled the leftover cask; cleared ~/.zcompdump; stripped DOCKER_HOST from ~/.zshrc / ~/.zprofile.
• Removed the default docker.sock symlink (needs sudo; see ~/.sanctum/retired/orbstack/remove-root-leftovers.sh).
• Tracked Castellan plist: ~/.sanctum/launchdaemons/com.sanctum.castellan.plist — no DOCKER_HOST. Install with ~/.sanctum/bin/install-castellan.sh.
• Dropped the HA docker pin; Castellan now pins only the cathedral (com.sanctum.mlx).
• post-reboot-verify.sh: OrbStack absence is expected; HA Green is the hard check. Bats 16/16 plus tests/test-orbstack-retired.bats.
• sanctum-bootstrap.sh no longer open -ga OrbStack. services/vm.yaml heals com.sanctum.vm-autostart, not the missing OrbStack agent.
• Disabled obsolete gui labels (Colima, server-mlx, gateway.docker, LM Studio bridge, old voice-agent). Dormant com.sanctum.mlx-py-fallback stays: disaster recovery, zero RAM until the Rust binary is actually dead.

bootstrap error 5

launchctl bootstrap system returns Input/output error if the job was just bootout in the same process. Wait a second, or kickstart -k if launchctl print system/com.sanctum.castellan still sees it. A Mini reboot also loads /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.sanctum.castellan.plist via RunAtLoad — strip com.apple.provenance with xattr -c first.

After a reboot

sanctum-boot-ready --check
~/.sanctum/bin/post-reboot-verify.sh
launchctl print system/com.sanctum.castellan | grep -E 'pid |state =|DOCKER_HOST'

Wanted: state = running, a pid, and no DOCKER_HOST. Lineage: The Vajrayogini Cut (Colima → OrbStack), The Twin That Would Not Die (Mini HA decommission), The Reboot That Stayed Up.