2026-08-05 — Second full smoke test

Second full smoke test (2026-08-05, fresh tenant, post-restart JVM with the pattern book, drilldown, __q rail and *err* tee aboard): 26 evals, every core surface, verdict "holds up very well" — and the first field report to drive a change upstream. Its battery covered the whole day's work sight-unseen: pattern index followed to a real file, (ex-data (__q/catch …)) recovered programmatically, compel-vs-unreturned-child verified with counter evidence, eviction and bogus-id errors quoted approvingly. Three findings, all reproduced live before fixing:

1. The sharp edge (real): the taught catch recipe, applied to a cancelled entry, silently cancelled the probing eval itself — Quiescent semantics working correctly (catch never sees cancellation; grounding propagates it) against a recipe that only said "the failure as a value." The safe probes (failure, which status-checks first; cancelled?; await) all existed and none were taught at the point of need. Closed from both ends: Quiescent 0.9.0 gained get-ex — the symmetric partner of get-now: the exception as a value, failure and cancellation alike, nil otherwise, non-blocking, never throws, the read catch cannot express — prototyped and validated through the live connection against the impl's own isExceptional/getResult shims before landing upstream. The taught recipe is now (__q/get-ex (__r/res 12)) everywhere (instructions, res and failure docstrings, registry's own doc), with the catch-propagation caveat stated beside it; and the :cancelled response note — which fires almost only for propagation, since a directly-cancelled running eval gets no later response — now renders the exception's own message: cancelled — Task cancelled directly., the provenance the exception already carried.
2. Stale ns on running responses (real, one line): the footer default read the session's sticky ns, which only eof updates — an explicit-ns eval outliving its await reported the previous namespace. Fixed: the default is now where the eval started (explicit request, else sticky); :done keeps its authoritative override.
3. Eviction "at ~7 read entries" (working as designed, message fibbed): capacity counts the whole registry and protection is absolute, so read entries bear all the pressure — but the error said "keeps the 20 most recently used settled evals," implying 20 delivered slots. Reworded to name the mechanism: holds N entries, running and unread protected, least recently touched of the read entries go first. The loop's full length this round: field report → live reproduction → library gap identified → get-ex upstream in Quiescent 0.9.0 → recipe swap downstream → response teaches provenance. The tenant also tripped exactly where the reviewer did minutes later (cancelled? returns a plain boolean, not a task) — converging evidence that the corner needed the docs it now has. The codebase eats the same dish: both internal exception extractions — failure's and the failed-response render's @(q/catch task identity) — became (q/get-ex task), retiring the chain-and-deref dance everywhere the taught recipe retired it.