Notes incremental read failure

Dev Notes — 2026-09-28

Installed CLI 0.33.0 against production reproduced 400 bad_reference for both a retained SHA-256 reference and a relative timestamp. Inspecting the HTTP error body revealed Character alignment trace limit exceeded. Reference resolution was valid; the broad route catch mislabeled patch generation failures. The CLI currently displays the flat error code without its explanatory message.

The saved source pair was 2,475 and 4,747 UTF-16 units. The old generator fails on that pair; direct line alignment produces an exact round trip. Private source text is excluded from this repository. Synthetic fixtures cover the same failure.

Read-only unified diffs use bounded line alignment, three context lines, exact newline preservation and existing source/output limits. Character alignment and native-identity write compilation retain their safety limits. No merge/exact policy changes are introduced. Invalid references are 400, missing baselines 404, generation errors 422, and service failures 503 with server-side logging.

Validation covers large rewrites, distant localized hunks, Unicode, CRLF, missing final newline, empty/no-op sources, hash and time route reads, and error classes. Production disposable-note checks verified task presence, a browser-originated RTC edit read through the CLI, and a merge-mode inline comment with live readback. These checks do not establish deployment of this fix.

The separate successful-but-missing eight-comment incident is now reproduced: installed native CLI 0.33.0 sends an empty payload.patch for --file - < patch.dff, visible in --dry-run --json. A pipe or explicit file path preserves the bytes. Both retained receipt journals contain only additional browser operations and no corresponding native comment message. The server acknowledged a no-op, rather than discarding a submitted merge. A companion CLI fix uses Bun's native stdin stream and rejects empty patches before sending. Its native packaging gate checks regular-file redirection, pipes, explicit file paths, and empty/UTF-8/size rejection. A newly compiled fixed CLI submitted eight comments via redirected stdin to a disposable note; all eight appeared exactly once in the acknowledged snapshot, preserving previous comments and a peer edit.

The preserved unified patch independently hits the character-alignment trace budget in the write parser. The CLI now retains that explanatory error instead of asserting a baseline mismatch. Existing write limits remain intentional. A live stale-baseline MERGE test inserted eight comments and preserved a peer's intervening RTC insertion. A browser-originated edit was independently verified through incremental reads; a second browser concurrency run was interrupted by browser-control unavailability. No pitch-note writes were performed.

Legacy insert --if-match uses a quoted ETag, not an RTC token. The companion CLI rejects that mismatch before network activity and updates generated help. A guarded legacy insertion example was executed on a disposable note and read back through the modern interface. Exact mode remains opt-in; a 412 during concurrent editing is not independently evidence of a defect.

Affected skill: dreamlake-notes, generated from the Notes reference. Synchronize its public companion from this committed source. Release requires review, merge, API/docs deployment, skill publication and fresh installed readback. None is implied by local validation or PR creation.