Dogfooding

attest uses itself. Every commit that lands on main gets a provenance attestation recorded by attest, on attest’s own history, and gated against the committed .attest.json policy in CI. The trust record for this repository is itself an attest ledger, stored in refs/notes/attest and travelling with the repo like any other git data.

This is not a toy fixture: the output below is captured from running the real release binary against attest’s real HEAD. Reproduce all of it with examples/dogfood.sh, which runs in a /tmp scratch clone (your working tree and notes ref are never touched).

Platform. macOS and Linux. The examples/dogfood.sh script and the CI dogfood steps run on macOS.

Why “attest attests attest” is the honest test

A provenance tool is only trustworthy if it survives being pointed at itself. So we record an agent:ci attestation (the same shape CI records) on attest’s own commit, then show it both passing a realistic gate and failing a strict one. The failure is the interesting half: it proves attest actually catches a missing signature / human sign-off rather than rubber-stamping.

1. Record an attestation on attest’s own HEAD

$ attest sign --commit "$HEAD" --reviewer agent:ci \
      --confidence 0.9 --verdict proceed --tests-passed \
      --note "attest dogfooding its own CI: build + 106 tests green"
attest · recorded agent:ci on ab181efcdd

The ledger row on attest’s real commit (ab181ef):

$ attest log --commit "$HEAD"
attest · ledger

  commit ab181efcdd  (1 attestation)
    [ok] agent:ci  verdict:proceed  conf:90%  tests:ok  human:-  unsigned
        note: attest dogfooding its own CI: build + 106 tests green

It’s unsigned and human:- on purpose. That’s exactly what an automated CI attestation looks like, and it’s what the strict policy below will catch.

2. Verify PASS under a lax policy (exit 0)

A realistic CI gate: a commit must carry an attestation and report passing tests. That’s satisfied, so verify exits 0.

{
  "requireAttestation": true,
  "requireTestsPassed": true
}

$ attest verify --commit "$HEAD" --policy lax.json
attest verify · [ok] PASS (1 commit checked)
$ echo $?
0

This is the same fatal gate CI runs against the committed .attest.json.

3. Verify FAIL under a strict policy (exit 1)

Now demand a cryptographic signature and a human sign-off. The agent:ci attestation has neither, so attest catches it on its own commit and exits 1:

{
  "requireAttestation": true,
  "requireTestsPassed": true,
  "requireSignature": true,
  "requireHumanApprovalWhenVerdictAtLeast": "proceed"
}

$ attest verify --commit "$HEAD" --policy strict.json
attest verify · [x] FAIL (1 commit checked)

  violations:
    x ab181efcdd  requireSignature: no valid signed attestation
    x ab181efcdd  requireHumanApprovalWhenVerdictAtLeast: verdict is at least proceed on this commit but no attestation is human-approved
$ echo $?
1

Those two violations lines are the real proof that the gate has teeth.

The CI dogfood: a growing provenance ledger

The CI workflow wires this into every run on the macOS runner. After swift build, swift test, and fledge spec check pass, it builds the release binary, records an unsigned agent:ci attestation on $GITHUB_SHA, runs attest verify --policy .attest.json as a fatal gate (printing the ledger and verdict), and (on a push to main only) best-effort git push origin refs/notes/attest so the ledger accumulates over time. The job has permissions: contents: write; the push is guarded with || echo "note push skipped" so a permissions or race issue can’t redden CI. Only the verify gate can fail the job.

Inspect the ledger from a fresh clone:

git clone https://github.com/CorvidLabs/attest.git
cd attest
git fetch origin "refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*"   # pull the attestation notes
attest log                                       # every attested commit
attest log --range origin/main~10..origin/main   # a recent slice

Reproduce it locally

examples/dogfood.sh

The strict FAIL is expected and captured, so the script itself exits 0:

lax    verify exit code: 0     (expected 0, PASS)
strict verify exit code: 1     (expected 1, FAIL, caught)
dogfood OK: attest attested attest, both outcomes as expected.

Caveats

CI attestations are unsigned: no signing key is provisioned on the runner (signing is optional by design). Provision a key with attest keygen, sign with --sign, and tighten .attest.json to make the ledger cryptographically verifiable.
The notes push is best-effort and main-only. PR runs record and verify an attestation but don’t push notes.
The committed .attest.json is intentionally permissive so the tool is usable with zero configuration; the strict policy above lives only in the demo/docs.