Run 35 — three reviews cleared, plus a research briefing and two prototype branches

The operator's index (comment 9101) gave me three blockers in strict order — all three were round-N reviews on my open PRs. I cleared them, then used the remaining time for self-directed work: the cards research seed, a rebase, and a real bug fix.

The three homeworks (all pushed, locally green)

PR #33 round 2 — test-db guard. Two small gaps: a dangling pg.Pool type reference in seed.test.ts (the import was removed but the annotation stayed — invisible to every check except full type-checking), and the equality guard: resolveTestDatabaseUrl now refuses the test database URL when it equals the database URL or the show database URL, so a copy-paste typo can't silently point tests at the show server. Three new guard tests. Also dropped six { skip: false } no-ops that were unrelated churn.

PR #31 round 3 — roster validator. The big one: fetchModelEndpoints now returns a tagged result — {kind:'ok'}, {kind:'not-found'}, or {kind:'error', detail}. Before this, a 5xx, a network failure, and a timeout all became "Model not found on OpenRouter (404)" — fail-closed but lying about why. A 30-second OpenRouter blip would abort a season saying "all six models not found". Now you get "OpenRouter returned 503", "OpenRouter unreachable: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND", and "OpenRouter request timed out (10s)" via AbortSignal.timeout(10_000) — the third time this operator asked for a fetch timeout, so it's now a reflex. Plus three new tests each pinning an honest reason string.

PR #32 round 3 — show_runner integration. The validate command was a dangling ReferenceError — the switch called cmdValidate but it didn't exist. I implemented it: loads the roster, validates every entry, returns a clean JSON report, no side effects. Live-verified against OpenRouter: all 4 roster models valid. Also added force and validate declarations to manifest.json so the harness schema knows about them.

I hit one rebase foot-gun: git rebase --onto <new> <upstream==HEAD> replays zero commits and silently drops your work. Recovered from reflog with git reset --hard. Lesson banked: when the upstream argument equals the branch tip, --onto is not your friend.

Free time: the cards research seed

Per comment 8923, I researched and drafted briefing/cards.md — a second show (blackjack → Texas Hold'em), research + design only, no code. Highlights:

• Prior art: Kaggle Game Arena (the same Google/DeepMind arena as chess) expanded to poker + werewolf in Feb 2026 — 2.1M hands, 10 models. Direct precedent. PokerSkill claims expert-level LLM play without training. No verified prior art for the described-tells mechanic — the operator's twist is genuinely novel, and their "involuntary leak" idea (publish think-time + reasoning length) is novel too.
• Platform rules: Twitch's 2022 gambling ban was scoped to slots/roulette/dice — poker streams remain a normal category; there's a Gambling content-classification label that likely applies. YouTube tightened gambling-promotion rules in June 2025 but entertainment play-money content with a disclaimer should be fine. I flagged explicitly what I could NOT verify (the policy pages themselves resisted my search engines).
• Engine rec: hand-roll blackjack (trivial rules, zero deps); for Hold'em use an evaluator (@pokertools/evaluator or pokersolver) plus our own betting state machine — we keep control of the state/cost event shape that the frame already consumes.
• Design draft: 6-max no-limit, HaidyBotMoney as the fake currency (never €/$ symbols), a permanent-UI disclaimer, and open questions (tell-channel policy, blinds structure, when involuntary leaks publish).

WIP is 3/3 so this sits on docs/cards-briefing — PR when a slot frees.

Two prototype branches (also WIP-blocked)

• fix/core-dumps: rebased onto main per the operator's instruction. Verified the ulimit -c 0 fix actually works — 0 core files after full test runs (was 23 × 40MB, from embedded-postgres segfaulting as non-root).
• fix/errored-game-status: the top live-game note (item 3) turned out to be a genuine bug — when runGame rejects, the catch broadcast an error status event but never updated the DB, so the game row stayed running forever. That's exactly what game 1 of the S0 test showed: a phantom game for scheduler and standings. The fix marks the row error + completedAt, mirroring what onGameEnd does. 84 chess tests still pass.

State of play

All three PRs pushed and locally green; CI was queued at my one allowed check, so the wake digest will tell the story. Three branches ready to PR the moment a slot frees: cards briefing, core-dumps, errored-game-status. After #31 merges, the real show test: show_runner validate → start with mixed models.