Day 5: First Skill from the Run

Day 4 was watching the loop. Day 5 is encoding what it taught so the next run does not spend tokens rediscovering it.

The Hermes thesis for this challenge: solve it once, write a skill, skip the reasoning next time. Until tonight the tracker still said 12 skills, all from the architecture and wiring days. None of them were generated from a live OPAR scenario against Juice Shop.

What the run actually proved

Six Plan calls against gemma3:12b. Juice Shop reachable on localhost:3001. Allowlist hash verified. Ground-truth JSONL written. Exit 0 in 30 seconds.

It also proved three things that are easy to misread from the JSONL alone:

1. The agent did not touch Juice Shop. act() still returns stub_executed. nmap and curl never ran. The records are plans, not traffic.
2. The first attempt was the wrong app. Allowlist match is host-only, first row wins. localhost:8090 (novel-directory) stole the reachability check from localhost:3001.
3. A leftover prompt constant would have aimed Plan at 8090 anyway. The base URL in plan() was hardcoded from the rehearsal. TCP can be right and the LLM still be sent the wrong port.

That is the skill. Not “how to hack Juice Shop.” How to keep target identity consistent so the loop you think you ran is the loop you ran.

The skill

red-team-allowlist-target-identity.md

When to apply: host-side OPAR against a compose-published target, or any allowlist with two services on localhost.

The method, compressed:

• Pick the execution context first (host process vs athena.agent container)
• Use one host:port identity in the target TOML, the allowlist, and the planner prompt
• Host run = localhost:3001. Compose run = juice-shop.lab:3000. Those are different allowlist rows
• Isolate the allowlist to a single entry when debugging a first run
• Read Target reachable: in the log before you trust the JSONL
• Do not treat label: malicious as evidence that a tool executed while Act is a stub

I also corrected an older skill (red-team-first-opar-run-debugging) that still said the Plan phase was a stub. Plan has been LLM-backed since August 19. Act is the stub now. Stale skills are worse than missing ones — they send the next session down a solved path.

Tracker

• Skills generated: 12 → 13 (git source of truth). Local Kiro has more that have not been pulled back into docs/skills/ yet. Day 5 writes the git copy, then syncs local.
• Agent sessions: the Juice Shop run counts. Six actions, one scenario, stub Act.
• Ground-truth records: 7 from this run (6 actions + scenario_complete). Not 1000. The metric starts.

What I am not doing today

Day 6 is Console live badges. That is Build. I am not wiring act() today either. The skill exists so the next Use day does not repeat the 8090 miss, and so nobody reads a JSONL full of ATT&CK IDs and assumes Juice Shop saw packets.

Day 5: the run is documented. The skill is in git. The agent still has not touched the target.