named-gate child that exits early is misreported as EPIPE (flaky named-gate-diagnostics test)

[Rahulstark2]

Summary

Closes #598

Fix word_count_bounds diagnostics incorrectly reporting EPIPE when the child process exits non-zero after closing stdin.

Problem

When wc exits before consuming all of its stdin, Node's spawnSync can set result.error to EPIPE even though the child process has a valid exit status.

Previously, result.error was checked first, so a child that exited with code 2 could incorrectly produce:

word_count_bounds: could not run wc -w: EPIPE

This masked the actual child exit status.

Changes

• Check result.signal first to preserve signal diagnostics.
• Check result.status before result.error.
• Only use result.error when the child has no exit status (status === null).
• Added a regression test where the stub wc exits with code 2 without reading stdin.
• The test uses 100,000 bytes of input to trigger the EPIPE condition.

Verification

• npx vitest run tests/named-gate-diagnostics.test.ts
  • 18/18 tests passed
• npm run build passed
• npm run typecheck passed
• npm run typecheck:tests passed
• Mutation verification confirmed that reverting the production fix causes the new regression test to fail with EPIPE.

Expected Behavior

With the fix, a child that exits with code 2 is reported as:

word_count_bounds: wc -w exited 2

instead of incorrectly reporting:

word_count_bounds: could not run wc -w: EPIPE

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Note

Low Risk
Narrow change to error-message ordering for one named gate plus a test; no auth, data, or API surface impact.

Overview
Fixes word_count_bounds gate diagnostics so a wc -w child that exits with a real status is not mislabeled as could not run wc -w: EPIPE when Node also sets spawnSync’s error after stdin is closed early.

The lowered gate command now checks signal, then non-null exit status (including nonzero), and only falls back to result.error when status === null. A regression test stubs wc to exit 2 with large input to reproduce the flaky EPIPE case and expects exited 2 without EPIPE in stderr.

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit 48e94b2. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}

---

Summary by cubic

Fixes word_count_bounds diagnostics misreporting EPIPE when a child process exits non-zero after closing stdin. The fix checks signal first, then the exit status, and only uses spawnSync's error when the child has no exit status.

• A child exiting with code 2 is now reported as wc -w exited 2 instead of could not run wc -w: EPIPE.
• Adds a regression test using a stub wc that exits 2 without reading 100,000 bytes of stdin.

^{Written for commit 48e94b2. Summary will update on new commits.}

[coderabbitai]

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[cubic-dev-ai]

No issues found across 2 files

_{Re-trigger cubic}

[Rahulstark2]

@khaliqgant @willwashburn

[Rahulstark2]

@khaliqgant Targeted named-gate-diagnostics tests pass locally (18/18).

The Linux artifact workflow is failing in the unrelated authored-parallel-agents.test.ts test due to missing /tmp/.../spans.jsonl. Could you please rerun the workflow once more?

[khaliqgant]

@khaliqgant Targeted named-gate-diagnostics tests pass locally (18/18).

The Linux artifact workflow is failing in the unrelated authored-parallel-agents.test.ts test due to missing /tmp/.../spans.jsonl. Could you please rerun the workflow once more?

Checking this out in the next few days. Thanks for your contributions!