fix(persona): a stub citizen has no transport and says so — unblocks canary's --lib gate

[joelteply]

The standing red gate

cargo test -p continuum-core --lib has failed on every canary push for days — verified across the last 6 canary runs. Six tests fail; five share one cause: StubAircCitizen::subscribe_all_rooms was unreachable!().

The premise was stated right in the code — "no service-loop test drives the stub's subscribe." True when written. It stopped being true when the supervisor grew its doctrine/wall cache: supervisor.rs:745 now subscribes to wire a publish-invalidator, so five supervisor tests — about adapter materialization and warmup, caring nothing about event streams — reached that line and aborted.

A guard whose premise the codebase has outgrown doesn't fail like a guard. It fails like a broken build, and takes the whole gate with it. With --lib red on every push, "canary is green" means nothing to anyone else in the repo — which is exactly how it survived days of everyone reading around it.

What's kept

The guard was right to refuse an empty stream. That would hand the supervisor a wire that never fires: the cache goes stale in silence and the tests pass while proving nothing. This does not do that.

It returns AircError::Transport — not the "variant that doesn't fit" the old comment feared, but a free-form transport-side variant, and "this citizen has no transport" is a transport-side fact. The call site already has the matching branch: on Err the supervisor serves raw doctrine/wall sources and logs cache UNWIRED … slow but never stale.

The absence stays loud. It just travels the path designed for it instead of killing the process.

The stub's own test flips from asserting a panic to pinning the invariant that actually matters: report an error, never Ok with an empty stream.

Scope

This fixes 5 of the 6 failures. The 6th, tool_parsing::tests::parse_time_is_measured, is a timing assertion and a separate question — I'm not bundling an unrelated fix into a gate unblock.

Not validated locally, and I won't pretend otherwise

This Windows box cannot build core/llama — its bundled cmake doesn't know the Visual Studio 18 2026 generator, so cargo check -p continuum-core dies in the build script before reaching this code. Standalone Kitware CMake is the fix and it's the Mod-CMake item in the install plan, not this PR.

CI is the validation here: cargo test -p continuum-core --lib and cargo check windows-msvc (lib + tests).

One correction for the record

The Windows job was reported as the failing one, breaking on tests/memory_recall_accuracy.rs with 12 type mismatches. Checked across 6 canary runs: cargo check windows-msvc (lib + tests) passes every time. The consistently red job is cargo test -p continuum-core --lib. Same conclusion — the gate is meaningless — but a different job and a different cause, which matters for whoever fixes it.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Q4NU4VNiELPQfBpCacDZGc

[joelteply]

Closing as redundant — canary already carries this fix.

d8b55d921 landed the same change: StubAircCitizen::subscribe_all_rooms returns Err(AircError::Transport(...)) instead of unreachable!(), with the same reasoning (an empty stream would be the real fallback) and the same test flip from should_panic to asserting the refusal shape.

That version is better than mine on one point: it names the commit whose arrival falsified the premise — #398 slice 3, bf11a66a7, which gave PersonaSupervisor::materialize its subscribe call. I described the mechanism but never identified when it broke.

Two things worth keeping from this:

The ts-rs drift that failed on this PR was NOT from my change — my branch base predated the cu → uu rename in catalog.rs doc comments, so the committed CommandInfo.ts was stale relative to the Rust. Canary has both sides consistent now. Rebasing was the whole fix.

The 6th --lib failure, tool_parsing::tests::parse_time_is_measured, is a timing assertion and is still open as far as I know — worth a separate look once the supervisor five are confirmed green on canary.