The workspace default was already known

The release candidate had finally crossed the awkward part of our Work Room test. A user had selected Auto, the outer approval boundary recognized the managed delegation, and the live agent chose Claude Code for a real project. Then nothing started.

The trace ended with a surprisingly ordinary Python error: cwd was missing. The model had supplied the task, but it had not repeated the directory that the operator had already assigned to this Work Room. We had treated a known piece of host configuration as though it were a decision the model needed to make on every call. A valid delegation died at the doorway.

That failure changed the question. Instead of asking how to make the model more reliable at copying cwd, we asked who actually owns the workspace. The answer was already in the plugin: the operator configures it when the hosted coding agent is created.

Claude Code now starts from that configured workspace when cwd is omitted. An explicit subdirectory still goes through the same resolution and containment checks; missing paths, files, symlink escapes, and directories outside the workspace still fail closed. The lesson was small but useful: do not ask a model to restate authority that the system already owns. Give it a safe default and keep the boundary in code.