docs: correct RDE session retention model and add an RDE FAQ - #196
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The RDE docs described a retention model that doesn't exist. Two pages said a terminated session's persistent disk is kept "for a limited time" and "eventually cleaned up" / kept "until the usual cleanup". There is no time-based or inactivity-based cleanup, and the claim contradicts the RDE Order Form §10.5(e), which states Bitrise will not delete Environment Storage on the basis of elapsed time or inactivity alone. A docs-vs-contract conflict surfaces at renewal. What actually bounds a session's life is the stack it was created from: the disk stores only a diff on top of that stack image, so when the stack is removed under the published stack deprecation and removal policy, the session is permanently erased. Nothing in the docs said this. Retention fixes: - key-concepts: rewrite the Session lifecycle retention paragraph, and add a paragraph to Stacks and machine types stating that a session stays permanently tied to its stack and cannot be migrated to another one. - managing-rde-access: rewrite the Revoking access paragraph so an admin offboarding a leaver knows the disk persists and reclaiming it is manual. - overview: qualify the persistence promise with one clause. Also adds a Remote Dev Environments FAQ, the gap in our FAQ coverage (Build Cache, Pipelines, AI and Workspaces all have one). 36 questions in 7 sections, drawn from customer Slack channels May-Jul 2026 and RDE meeting transcripts, with every answer sourced from the docs rather than from the Slack archive. Per product decisions on the docs track, the FAQ publishes no storage allowances or rates, no pricing figures, and never promises a notification about stack removal - it points at the published deprecations feed and its RSS instead. Self-serve and Enterprise differ in only two answers (how to buy, how to get access), so those are handled inline rather than by splitting the page. Also wires the page into the RDE landing page, static/llms.txt, and the changelog. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
arpadkun
requested review from
aorcsik,
ilanazholobovsky,
matenadasdi and
zoltan-baba
as code owners
August 25, 2026 00:57
matenadasdi
previously approved these changes
Aug 25, 2026
Convert several prose answers to bulleted lists for scannability, replace em-dashes with colons/periods per style guide, spell out numbers under 10, and fix an unclosed inline-code span introduced in an earlier pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
zoltan-baba
approved these changes
Aug 25, 2026
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Why
Two RDE pages described a retention model that doesn't exist. They said a terminated session's persistent disk is kept "for a limited time" and "eventually cleaned up" / kept "until the usual cleanup".
There is no time-based or inactivity-based cleanup. The claim also contradicts RDE Order Form §10.5(e), which states Bitrise "will not delete Environment Storage on the basis of elapsed time or inactivity alone". Docs are what customers read, so a docs-vs-contract conflict surfaces at renewal.
What actually bounds a session's life is the stack it was created from. The disk stores only a diff on top of that stack image, so when the stack is removed under the stack deprecation and removal policy, the session is permanently erased. Nothing in the docs said this — including on the page where you choose the stack.
Separately, RDE had no FAQ. Build Cache (RN, Xcode), Pipelines, AI and Workspaces all have one.
What changed
Retention correction (4 edits, 3 pages)
key-concepts→ Session lifecyclekey-concepts→ Stacks and machine typesmanaging-rde-access→ Revoking accessremote-dev-environments-overviewNew page: Remote Dev Environments FAQ — 36 questions in 7 sections, sourced from customer Slack channels May–Jul 2026 (ForeFlight, Rippling, Nextdoor, Shopify, Compass, NYT, UHG, Stripe, Etsy) and RDE meeting transcripts. Every answer was written from the current docs, not carried over from what we said in Slack — an FAQ built from a Slack archive records what we said, not what's true, and decays at the rate we ship.
Plus: FAQ card on the RDE landing page, entry in
static/llms.txt, and a changelog entry.🤖 Generated with Claude Code