The Bakery handbook

The Bakery gives every NiuPay engineer a Linux workstation of their own, a loaf, with a full desktop on it. You bake one from Slack, and you reach it from your laptop over the tailnet. Nothing else on the internet can see it. The tools an engineer here needs are already on it, pinned and set up, so a first day is a handful of sign-ins rather than a day of installing.

This manual is written for the engineer who joined yesterday, and for the agents that work on a loaf beside them. It says what is true, why it is that way, and what to do next.

What a loaf is

One workstation, yours alone: Ubuntu on Graviton, an Xfce desktop over Amazon DCV, Chrome, VS Code, Claude Code, Docker and the NiuPay toolset. Its name is <owner>-<petname>, such as jason-golden-rye, and that name is also its address. Sizes are s (8 vCPU, 32 GiB), m (16, 64) and l (32, 128). Your home, Docker and /tmp live on a data volume, so a rest, a wake, or a rebuild of the operating system leaves your work exactly where it was.

Where things live

Three places and one picture. Your laptop holds two programs and nothing else. Your loaf holds the work. Slack is where you ask for a loaf, and where every button that acts on one lives.

The two channels

• #bakery carries one message per loaf, edited for that loaf's whole life. Baked, proving, ready, resting and binned are edits to the same card, and the buttons that rest, wake, resize and bin the loaf sit on it. A bake request waiting on a lead and Monday's fleet digest are the only other things posted there.
• #bakery-kitchen is the platform channel. Anything wrong with the Bakery goes here, and the platform team reads it.

Who to ask

The Baker, the Bakery's own Slack app, answers first. Open it from Slack's Agents menu, or send it a direct message, and ask about your loaves, your seats and your usage. Anything it cannot answer belongs in #bakery-kitchen. A limit that is genuinely in the way of your work goes to jason@niupay.com.pg, and saying so is better than working around it.

The manual

• Your first day — what arrives, the desktop client, the panel, the sign-ins that matter, and the accounts that anchor everything.
• Daily use — rest, wake, resize and bin from Slack; the panel's sections; installing what you need; and the few things a loaf refuses.
• Accounts and limits — your primary, your art accounts, the seats board in Slack, how switching decides, and what to do at a wall.
• When something is wrong — the shape of every refusal, where the logs are, and who to contact in what order.
• Anthropic first — the stance, plainly, and what to do if it gets in the way of real work.
• The cheat sheet — one page: every button in Slack, every bakery- command on the loaf, and what to do when you are stuck.

Where to read it

This manual is published at handbook.schrodingersbox.ai, with its diagrams drawn and the whole of it as one PDF to keep or print, so you can read it before you have a loaf at all. It is on the loaf too: the control panel's Help section carries these pages, and the desktop's Read me icon opens the same set. Beside them on a loaf sit the loaf's own six documents, which this manual points at rather than repeats:

• WELCOME.md, the first page of the first login.
• WHAT-IS-ON-THIS-LOAF.md, every application and the command that starts it.
• DEFAULTS.md, every default in plain language and how to change each one.
• SIGN-INS.md, per tool: which account, where the credential lives, how to sign out.
• DCV-TIPS.md, how to get the best desktop over the stream.
• CONVENTIONS.md, what the NiuPay conventions put into ~/.claude.

Two things beside this manual are written down as contracts rather than guides, and the platform team will send either on request in #bakery-kitchen: what your loaf counts and what it never records, and how to have your own code counted the same way. On the loaf, DEFAULTS.md says what is taken and what is left alone.