stratless 0.3.4 — the plumbing: what the cold-start build stands on

Phase 1 of the cold-start build (spec §12). No new features — the release is eight acceptance
criteria passing, three of them bugs the Phase 0 measurement sitting caught in the shipped CLI.

Fixed

• "MOST RECENT" meant oldest. Since 0.3.1, the writer's most-recent evidence block received
  the OLDEST 25 judgments of a newest-first list — every pattern-era profile had its
  current-direction evidence backwards. Now selected by timestamp, newest first, regardless of
  caller order, with a test that pins the ordering (C10).
• The meter's blind spot is closed. A call that degraded to the plain-text fallback used to be
  recorded at zero cost, and a call that lost its model pin silently ran on your account's default
  model at frontier rates. Both are now counted — status shows fallback calls: N unmetered · M ran on your default model the moment either exists, and the ledger records which model actually
  ran (C11).
• The borrow is tool-less. Every borrowed claude call — judge, mine, audit, grade, write —
  now runs with --tools "". The borrowed model sometimes took the writer prompt literally,
  attempted a real file write, and returned permission chatter instead of your profile; it no
  longer has hands (C9).
• A failed call's error message can no longer be mistaken for an answer. A broken model pin
  exits 0 with an error envelope whose prose ("There's an issue with the selected model…") the
  judge would have cached as a verdict and the writer would have reasoned from. The envelope's
  is_error flag is now honored: the call is refused and the ladder advances to the next metered
  rung instead. (Found by this release's own review pass, verified against the live CLI.)

Changed

• Every store is written atomically (temp + rename): judgments, patterns, state, usage,
  renders, settings, HUMAN.md, CLAUDE.md. A crash mid-write leaves the old file or the new one,
  never a torn one (C2). Writes follow symlinks and preserve the file's mode — a dotfiles-repo
  link to your CLAUDE.md or settings.json survives, and your chmod stays yours.
• A damaged spend-cache refuses loudly instead of re-billing you. A corrupt judgments.json or
  patterns.json used to read as "empty" — which would silently re-spend your entire history on the
  next run. Now every spending command refuses with the file's path and how to move it aside, and
  status labels the cache unreadable instead of showing 0 (C2).
• One spender at a time. update, and a building profile/report, take a lock; the
  after-session hook and a hand-run update can no longer race each other's writes over the
  judgment cache. A second runner says another stratless run is active and exits clean; stale
  locks from crashes are detected (with PID-reuse protection) and stolen (C4).
• Rate limits bend the run, they don't break it. A streamed batch that hits a 429/overload now
  backs off exponentially and retries the remaining items in a fresh session, bounded, losing
  nothing — a rate-limit storm costs minutes, not evidence (C6).

Added

• The stopwatch. Per-turn, per-stage, per-run wall-clock recorded in state.json on every
  spend — so the cold-start door (0.4.0) can quote minutes measured on YOUR machine, never typed.
  Includes a pure ETA that refuses to estimate any stage it hasn't measured (C8).
• The detached-spawn primitive the Phase 2 worker will stand on: spawn a process that survives
  its parent, with the absolute path to your claude captured at spawn time (C5). Unused by any
  command yet — built and tested ahead of the worker.

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