[dovvnloading]

Problem

Four small verified defects, one commit each:

• BE-13 (job event memory).
  • When an attached reader detached, a finished job kept the live-reader headroom: up to 4x the retained-event ceiling, for as long as the job stayed in the registry.
  • While a reader was attached, the byte cap was never consulted. At the defaults that allowed 2048 retained events of up to 1 MiB each.
• EX-26 (artifact boundary review gate). The gate was weaker than it read:
  • its digest hashed a list of names kept beside the cases, so editing or deleting a case did not change it;
  • a boundary that accepted a hardlink was reported as "blocked" (a host limitation) instead of "failed";
  • --json only changed separators;
  • without --strict, a total failure exited 0.
• QA-15 (real-API e2e).
  • The real-API Playwright spec used port 8799, the README screenshot server's default, with reuseExistingServer outside CI. Anything left listening there was silently tested as "the real API".
  • Its generation test asserted on the first chat in the list, which depends on earlier runs.
• QA-24 (dev environment check). scripts/check_dev_environment.py never noticed three setups: system Python with no virtual environment, an interpreter other than the lock target, or a package that shadows a declared one.

Root cause and change

• BE-13. Eviction ran only inside _append_event, and a terminal job never appends again. The eviction loop is now _trim(record), called after every append and in the finally of events() once the reader's cursor is gone. The live-reader protection now also requires event_bytes <= max_event_bytes * LIVE_READER_EVENT_HEADROOM.
• EX-26.
  • The digest is now computed from the _CASES tuple that runs: each case's name and source in run order, plus the shared fixture helpers.
  • The status is failed if any case failed, blocked only if a case could not run, and passed only if every case ran and passed. An empty corpus fails.
  • Strict is the default: exit 1 for failed, 2 for blocked. --strict is still accepted, so scripts/check.ps1, the pre-push hook and quality.yml are unchanged.
  • Without --json the tool prints a readable summary naming each failed or blocked case.
  • The twelve-case corpus is unchanged.
• QA-15.
  • frontend/e2e/e2e-backend.json holds the port (now 8798) and a marker. playwright.config.ts (through e2e/e2eBackend.ts) and scripts/e2e_backend.py both read it.
  • The backend adds an X-Cortex-E2E-Backend header to its liveness route only.
  • real-api.spec.ts checks the marker before each test and refuses a server that lacks it.
  • The generation test sends a prompt unique to the run and asserts on the chat the server accepted it into.
• QA-24. The check prints advisories for those three cases. Advisories never change the exit code; only pin mismatches fail, as before.

Compatibility and rollback

• No API or data change.
• Exit codes. The artifact boundary review now exits 1 instead of 2 on a failed case, and non-zero even without --strict. Every caller passes --strict and checks for non-zero.
• e2e port. It moves from 8799 to 8798; only the Playwright config and the e2e script use it.
• Rollback. Each commit reverts on its own.

Checks

Run on Windows, Python 3.14 unless stated.

• New tests: python -m pytest -q tests/test_job_registry_live_readers.py tests/test_artifact_boundary_review.py tests/test_check_dev_environment.py tests/test_e2e_backend.py gives 20 passed. Same files on Python 3.12 (py -3.12): 20 passed.
• Against the old code: the same four test files copied onto an export of origin/main (00b76b0) give 16 failed, 4 passed. The 4 that pass on both are guards (for example, a reader that is still attached keeps its unread events).
• Real run of the dev check: python scripts/check_dev_environment.py on this machine prints three advisories (no venv, 3.14 vs the 3.11 lock, a shadowing py package) and exits 0.
• Pre-push hook: scripts/check.ps1, quick tier (ruff, actionlint/zizmor, mypy, full backend pytest, artifact boundary review, contract check, tsc, eslint, vitest): all 11 checks passed in 381.2 s.
• Playwright real-api.spec.ts: not run locally; the CI "Browser tests" job runs it.

Security, concurrency, data loss

• BE-13 only evicts more eagerly. It still never evicts an attached reader's unread events inside the headroom, and still keeps the newest (terminal) event. Eviction runs under the registry lock, as before.
• The e2e marker is a fixed string on a loopback test server that holds no real data.
• The digest includes case source, so it changes when a case changes. Nothing stores or compares it across runs.

Limits

• Playwright not run locally. The real-API spec relies on CI.
• Shadowing check scope. It reports top-level names from installed distributions only.

Plan item: BE-13, EX-26, QA-15, QA-24

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