fix(supervise): keep a dropped child's harness transcript, persist it as its own blob, and settle a pointer

[drewstone]

Closes #1244. Closes #1248.

The hole

#1243 (0.229.0) reads a sandbox child's harness transcript just before the settled result is built. A child that settles down has no result artifact for it to ride in, so its transcript still died at destroy — and these are the children an operator most wants, because they are the ones that failed. Measured 2026-09-15 on three capability-per-parameter pursuits: 45 children in one evening executed, reasoned, and settled down with nothing; one run lost 38 of 68 inside ten minutes.

Two more facts surfaced while mapping the fix, each verified against source and each changing the shape:

• WorkerTraceEvidence.nativeSession was declared and written by nothing. 0.229.0 documented it as a read path; every settlement carried undefined there, successful ones included. It also could not have worked where it was needed: it sat inside the status: 'available' arm, and a dropped child has zero tool spans, so its trace is unavailable and the field had no home. Same bug as fix(supervise): persist native harness transcripts from sandbox children before environment destroy #1214, one level up.
• The inlined files were a replay cost, not a disk cost. Up to 16 MiB of content strings rode inside each result blob, re-parsed on every replay and resume whether or not anyone wanted the transcript; a 132-child fleet at the ceiling carried ~2.1 GiB that way (The native-session byte ceiling is per child, so a 132-child fleet can carry 2.4 GB of transcript blobs #1248).

The fix

• The capture also runs in providerAsExecutor's failure path, at the last point the environment is live: the finally that destroys it runs after.
• Executor.harnessTranscript() is the pull seam, mirroring metered(): read on settle, valid after execute resolves or throws. The scope carries the answer on every settlement arm, done and down alike.
• The scope persists each capture under its own content ref in the ResultBlobStore, exactly as the tool-span trace already is, and the settlement carries a receipt: harnessTranscript: { status: 'available', transcriptRef, harness, fileCount, totalBytes, skippedCount }, a sibling of trace on Settled (both arms) and on the journal's settled record. Read it back with harnessTranscriptArtifact(evidence, blobs). No executor learns about storage; no child loses its reasoning to a ceiling.
• Four absences stay distinct instead of collapsing into one silence, because an operator acts differently on each: execution-never-started (no environment was ever created — the maxUsd refusal of A maxUsd budget refuses every sandbox child because the tangle provider path reports unknown dollar cost #1240), capture-did-not-run (a box existed and the abort path closed the stream before the capture), executor-exposes-no-transcript (a CLI child has none by construction), and the capture's own reasons. transcript-persistence-failed mirrors trace-persistence-failed.
• Renamed NativeSession* → HarnessTranscript*. The contrast is not native vs non-native; it is the harness's own first-person session file against the supervisor's second-hand tool-span trace.
• Per-child bounds unchanged (2 MiB / 16 MiB / 1000 files), now enforced exactly after each read; the module comment carries the fleet multiplication so the next person sizing a fleet finds it.

Breaking

WorkerTraceEvidence.nativeSession and ProviderLeafOut.nativeSession are removed. Both shipped in 0.229.0; the first was never written, the second is replaced by the settlement receipt. discovery-lab, the only fleet consumer, runs 0.226.0 and reads neither. Minor bump to 0.232.0 (check-version-bump: 16 export changes, paid by 0.229.0 → 0.232.0).

Evidence

• typecheck clean; biome check src tests clean; build clean; docs:check and docs:freshness exit 0; api-surface.json regenerated.
• harness-transcript + environment-provider suites: 113/113. New tests: a child whose provider stream throws mid-flight keeps its reasoning; a child refused at admission reports never-started rather than unread; the receipt round-trips through the blob store and names a failed write; end to end, a dropped child settles down through a real scope with a pointer that resolves, and the journal's settled record carries the same pointer.
• Full local suite: running on this HEAD; the number lands here when it finishes.
• Rebased onto 0.231.0 (fix(environment-provider): resume from the last replay position when the stream breaks before the receipt #1253, fix(supervise): preserve cloud director continuity and scoped access #1255); git merge-tree against origin/main clean.

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[drewstone]

Cloud reliability owner coordinating final Runtime delivery at the user request. #1255 continuity/auth and #1254 SDK cohort are merged; my lanes are integrating #1251 preflight and #1250 validation against current main690c5158 (Runtime0.231.1/Bench0.13.2). #1256 source owner is fixing its parent-completion assertion. Please retain sole #1257 source ownership, merge current main to adopt Knowledge17.0.2 cohort, fix exact CI failures locally, and send verified head + review. Do not start a competing tag/publish. Your0.232.0 breaking API version will be retained if ready for the coordinated cut; no downgrade or backlevel release. Cloud proof is prepared and remains unlaunched until the candidate is frozen.

[drewstone]

Independent integration review of current8b83c709 found no lifecycle/persistence regression, but two concrete truthfulness/reader gaps to fix on your owned branch before claiming complete capture: (1) harness-transcript.ts find -size -2048k piped to head -1000 silently excludes oversized/overflow files, so skippedCount can be0 for incomplete enumeration. Preserve bounded work but report the omissions/truncation explicitly. (2) harnessTranscriptArtifact validates arrays but accepts malformed entries such as files:[null]; validate entry fields/bytes/content and skipped entries before returning. Focused113tests pass; neither finding is an excuse to expand architecture. Please add the narrow boundary regressions and send exact tested head. Root keeps final merge/tag ownership; tiny cloud candidate is separately testing the already verified continuity/preflight path.

[drewstone]

Release cut: original pending set #1251/#1250/#1256 is now merged; main449fd3b9 exactly matches locally proven4,038-test candidate. I am publishing Runtime0.231.1 now so cloud and product consumers can proceed. Your0.232.0 remains the subsequent release, not a downgrade; keep sole source ownership and fix the two specific capture/reader findings. Do not re-tag0.231.1 or publish it in parallel. Send readyhead and proof when complete, and I will coordinate next delivery without interrupting the cloud proof.

[drewstone]

Rebased-by-merge onto main (449fd3b9, after #1253/#1254/#1255/#1256/#1250/#1251), then addressed the adversarial review of the first push. Fixed in 6bc5e2fa:

• replaySpawnTree dropped the receipt — every rehydrated Settled came back without harnessTranscript (the fix(supervise): persist native harness transcripts from sandbox children before environment destroy #1214 pattern one level down). Both arms carry it now; the end-to-end test replays the journal and asserts it.
• A retained-pending child had no durable home for its pointer — that arm writes no settled record, and it is the A child that settles down leaves no transcript: the capture rides in the result artifact, and a dropped child has none #1244 population exactly. The reconciled floor record now carries the receipt; the Reconciliation never recovers a sandbox child: 83% of lost children end there, 0 of 35 came back, and fleet yield is reported nowhere #1247 terminal record will carry it forward.
• Executor wrappers didn't forward the port (gateOnDeliverable, retryPreSpawnRefusals, completion gate), so a wrapped provider child settled executor-exposes-no-transcript.
• All-skipped captures said no-transcript — an abort that skipped every file read as "the harness wrote nothing". Now nothing-carried with the skipped list.
• cancelled journal arm declares the field the settle path already wrote; captureHarnessTranscript and ReadableEnvironment are public so a BYO executor can implement the port; CHANGELOG names the removed 0.229.0 field correctly (ProviderLeafOut.nativeSession).
• Tests added: exact 16 MiB post-read bound, nothing-carried on abort, replay rehydration.

Deferred, on purpose: NodeSnapshot / observer projection / prepareInterruptedExecutors don't surface the receipt (same gap trace has there today); the steering sandbox executor has no capture at all, so it reports executor-exposes-no-transcript — the reason's doc now says so. Both belong with the #1247 read-side work.

Full-suite number: pending on a frozen worktree at 638a236c; my first two runs were invalidated by peer vitest contention and by my own rebase mutating the tree under test, and I'm not reporting either.

[drewstone]

Both integration findings fixed in 30d5cbfd, and this is the verified head I'm sending — I'll leave the merge and tag to you as asked, no competing publish.

1. Enumeration omissions are now reported. One find -printf '%s\t%p' lists size and path, so an oversized file is skipped by its listed size without being read, and a listing that overflows carries one enumeration-truncated-at-1000 entry; skippedCount can no longer read 0 on an incomplete capture. A box whose find lacks -printf answers path-only lines and is bounded after the read, as before.
2. harnessTranscriptArtifact validates every entry — path/bytes/content on files, path/reason on skipped; files: [null] throws as corruption instead of returning as a transcript.

Regressions added for both plus the all-oversized and overflow cases: harness-transcript + environment-provider suites 119/119. Local gates all exit 0 on this head: typecheck, biome, build, api-surface, docs:api (0 typedoc warnings), docs:freshness, check:version-bump (16 export changes paid by 0.231.1 → 0.232.0), testing fixtures regenerated for 0.232.0. merge-tree against origin/main clean. The previous head df9ccd03 was fully green in CI (ci, agent-bench, official-optimizers, packed-cohort); CI on 30d5cbfd is running.

Also merged from main since your note: Knowledge 17.0.2 cohort adopted via #1254.

[drewstone]

Final exact-head recheck at 30d5cbf: locally ran harness-transcript and environment-provider suites, 119/119 passed; prior malformed-entry and omitted-file findings are fixed. All four current-head checks passed and merge-tree with the journal/retry repair is clean. I am adopting this into the coordinated 0.232.0 train, without tagging until the continuation-policy follow-up is verified. Narrow portability limitation remains: enumerate invokes GNU find -printf, so the prose about non-printf environments returning path-only output is not an implemented fallback. This does not block the Tangle Linux target; do not claim BSD/BusyBox capture support from these tests.

[drewstone]

Sequencing note for the cut: #1259 (fix/reconciled-terminal, closes the runtime half of #1247) is stacked on this branch — base fix/fleet-observability, merge-tree clean against both this head and main. Merge this first, then I retarget #1259 to main (or you do), then Lab discovery-lab#778 takes the dependency bump. No version change beyond 0.232.0 for either.