ADR 0007: Make Alshival conversations private by default

Design history: for current instructions, see Alshival desktop app. See the decision index for amendments and related records.

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-09-01

Context

Neural Labs previously created every Alshival conversation with OpenClaw shared visibility. The workspace's ordinary developer role may participate in shared sessions, so another approved developer could open and write in a conversation they did not create. Sidebar filtering would not fix this because the Gateway would still authorize direct history, subscription, and mutation requests.

Neural Labs also intends to add Slack-like Team Chats. Sharing must therefore be an explicit transition, not a property inherited by every new agent chat.

Decision

Create private Alshival conversations as OpenClaw draft sessions with category neura-private. OpenClaw treats draft as creator-only and enforces that rule for roster visibility, transcript reads, event subscriptions, agent sends, and session mutations.

Set the ordinary maintainer role's sessions.others capability to none. This is the deny-by-default backstop for legacy records and prevents a stale client from using an old shared flag to enter another creator's transcript.

When a creator first loads legacy Neural Labs conversations, convert their creator-owned shared sessions to draft, except sessions durably marked with the future neura-team category. Separate private and team conversations in the desktop sidebar. A future Team Chat may become non-draft only through an explicit share or channel-creation flow and must use Gateway membership for restricted channels.

Consequences

• Approved users no longer receive implicit access to another user's new Alshival conversations.
• Existing private-intent chats become protected when their creator next opens the upgraded desktop.
• Administrators do not gain Alshival transcript access through the ordinary Alshival WebSocket, which continues to omit operator.admin.
• Team channels require a separate data and permission design for membership, mentions, human-only messages, and file references. That design must replace the blanket none capability with a policy proven to honor explicit channel membership without restoring deployment-wide transcript access.