Day 2: Setting the Stage

Day 1 was plumbing. Day 2 is preparation - making sure there is something to attack and something to think with.

The checklist

Before the OPAR agent can run autonomously, it needs:

1. A target to probe (reachable from the container network)
2. An LLM to plan with (accessible from inside the container)
3. Config that matches reality (allowlist, target TOML, LLM config)
4. All of the above on the same network

Adding Juice Shop

OWASP Juice Shop is a deliberately vulnerable web application. It is the perfect first target because it has well-known vulnerabilities, predictable behavior, and it runs as a single container.

I added it to the Athena compose file as a new profile called “targets”:

juice-shop: image: bkimminich/juice-shop:latest container_name: juice-shop.lab hostname: juice-shop.lab networks:

• athena_lab profiles:
• targets

Now starting targets is one command:

./scripts/run-athena-profile.sh targets

Juice Shop comes up at localhost:3001 (mapped from the container internal port 3000) and is reachable from other containers on the athena_lab network as juice-shop.lab:3000.

Checking the LLM

Ollama is already running locally with 14 models. No llama3:8b available, but gemma3:12b is - a 7.6GB model that handles instruction-following and planning well enough for agent work.

Updated llm.toml to point at it:

[backend] type = “ollama” model = “gemma3:12b” url = “http://localhost:11434”

The container accesses this via host.docker.internal (mapped in the compose extra_hosts). The orchestrator health check will retry 3 times with exponential backoff if the connection fails on startup.

Aligning the config

The allowlist needed its port updated (internal compose port 3000, not the mapped 3001). The SHA-256 hash gets regenerated any time the allowlist changes. The target TOML already pointed at juice-shop.lab:3000 from Day 1.

Config state after Day 2:

config/ tool-registry.toml - 8 tools (nmap, curl, modbus-, canbus-) allowlist.json - 4 targets (juice-shop, dvwa, openplc, grfics) allowlist.sha256 - fresh hash llm.toml - gemma3:12b via Ollama targets/ juice-shop.toml - host=juice-shop.lab, port=3000, max_actions=50 openplc.toml - host=openplc.ics-lab, port=502, safe_ranges defined

Also today: documentation sweep

Updated README and architecture docs across all 5 repos to reflect the current state. Every repo now has:

• README describing what it actually is (not what it aspires to be)
• Architecture doc showing implemented state (not proposals)
• ROADMAP aligned with the 100-day challenge phases

This sounds like housekeeping, but it matters for the challenge. When you are building in public, the documentation IS the product for anyone following along. If the docs describe a different system than what exists, nobody can replicate or learn from it.

What is ready for Day 4

Everything except pressing enter:

ATHENA_TARGET=juice-shop docker compose —profile agent -f deploy/compose/athena-profiles.yml up

This will:

1. Start the container with the entrypoint
2. Validate all config files exist
3. Verify the allowlist hash
4. Health-check Ollama (gemma3:12b)
5. Start the OPAR loop: observe juice-shop, plan an approach, execute tools, reflect on results
6. Write ground-truth JSONL to the output volume

Token savings: still zero

No scenarios have executed. The measurement infrastructure is in place (ground-truth JSONL records include token counts when available from the LLM response). Tomorrow is the first data point.

Day 2 stats

• 1 target container deployed (Juice Shop)
• 1 LLM config updated (gemma3:12b)
• 5 repos with refreshed documentation
• 0 OPAR executions (that is Day 4)
• Total session commits: 50+