v2.6.3

The first run stops stalling. If you tried nuthatch on Ethereum mainnet and concluded it was broken,
it was, and this is the release that fixes it.

Drop-in. Swap the binary and restart; no config changes, no data migration.

A first run on mainnet no longer stalls

Point nuthatch init at a contract, run nuthatch dev, and on 2.6.2 you would get 15 events in 90
seconds - or, behind a provider that refuses without explaining itself, no progress at all, forever.

The window controller grows fourfold on an empty range. An empty range says nothing about capacity,
so from a 1,000-block start it reached 100,000 blocks in four steps having never been served
anything near that. Every mainnet provider refuses a range that wide - Alchemy caps eth_getLogs at
10,000 - and discovering the real cap from there costs a binary search down: refused at 100k, 50k,
25k, 12,500 before anything succeeds. Fifteen round trips that returned nothing, each carrying a
backoff.

What hid it is that the recovery was invisible to the controller. The splitter halves a refused range
until the pieces succeed and returns the merged result, so the caller saw success and grew fourfold
again - on the strength of a success that never happened at that width.

Growth is now bounded by what a provider has actually served whole. One step past proven capacity is
exploration; four steps past it is guessing.

crossing a 200,000-block prefix behind a 10,000-block cap	2.6.2	2.6.3
requests refused	24	4
widest range attempted	100,000	16,000
terminates	no	0.04s

This took five attempts, and two existing tests killed three of them - one defending cheap traversal
of the empty blocks in front of a late-deployed contract, one defending against an exponential
fan-out that turned 3 requests into 2,047 against a dead endpoint. Both requirements are real and both
still hold.

The front door, finished

• A bare nuthatch prints the same grouped listing --help does. It was gated on argument
  count, so the grouping added in 2.6.2 was missing from the shortest way to ask for it. Still exits
  2 on stderr: a missing subcommand is a usage error, and prettier output must not make a script that
  runs nuthatch by mistake see success.
• init prints prose, all the way through. Warnings from the RPC layer used to arrive mid-block
  with a timestamp, a level and ANSI colouring. They arrive as · message now, in the same idiom
  as the ticks around them. Reformatted rather than suppressed: they are the only signal that a probe
  is struggling while init appears to hang.

For operators and contributors

• live-endpoints retries each endpoint three times before calling it dead. Two shipped defaults
  once failed a scheduled run and answered fine two days later, and the job sat red throughout. A red
  nobody trusts is a red nobody reads.
• The review-signature gate is real. It checked that a signature was non-blank, which the literal
  string pending satisfies; it could not detect a self-signature; and it was required on no
  branch, so even a red changed nothing. All three are fixed: a committed roster of who may sign, and
  the context is now enforced.
• The config drift gate reads queries.toml's structs. A key added to Ceiling or NamedQuery
  used to ship undocumented, invisible to the agent skill that is supposed to describe it.
• The stranded-work check no longer fails open. It reported "Nothing. Every PR is reachable from
  main" when its query failed - a clean bill of health from a check that never ran.