[kixelated]

Finishes quest/m0/land-priority.md: cheap checks wait a bounded time in quest gate, and the land daemon's check goes ahead of agent load.

Changes

• quest gate --quick <command> waits at most QUICK_MS (60 s, the load average's lag window), then starts the command. The caller passes the flag; Quest keeps no list of command names, and the bound belongs to the gate, so callers can't pass 0.
• QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY=1 in the environment makes a gate wait for memory but never for load. It is an environment variable, not a flag, so it reaches the nested quest gate calls in a repository's just recipes (for example moq's sh/local.sh).
• Quick and priority admissions still go into the ledger, so other callers count them against the host's headroom. Neither is an unbounded bypass: --quick waits up to a minute, and priority still waits for memory.
• quest agent strips QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY, as it already strips QUEST_GATE_ADMITTED, so agents launched from inside a check don't inherit priority.
• gateBoundary now parses --quick as the gate's own option when it comes before the executable. After the executable it still belongs to the command.
• README, quest gate --help, and tests are updated. The quest is deleted.

Where admission happens on the host (investigation)

I checked nixos read-only:

• Each daemon runs quest land serve --sandbox <repo>-check. That command connects to /run/quest-land-<repo>-check.sock. The socket starts quest-land-<repo>-check@.service (Slice=ci.slice, CPUQuota=1600%, MemoryMax=18G, RuntimeMaxSec=60min), which boots an ephemeral systemd-nspawn container. Inside it, quest-land-check-command runs nix develop --command just ci "$BASE".

• moq's just ci runs sh/local.sh. Outside GitHub Actions, that script calls exec quest gate bun … local.ts (the image's quest 0.1.0). So admission happens inside the container. That gate's ledger is private: /home/check/.cache/quest/admissions/qland-6 in a fresh copy of the image. But its load signal is the host's 1-minute load average, and its limit is the host's 32 CPUs. The land check therefore queues behind agent load without ever appearing in the host's ledger.

• In the batch logs (/var/lib/quest-land-moq/moq-dev-moq/batch-*.log), 3 of 24 batches printed quest gate: waiting for the load average to fall (4 to 6 times each).

• The 2026-10-31 05:07Z–06:45Z "idle" window was not gate starvation. The daemon was busy the whole time:

  • Batch 7344 ran 05:07Z–05:40Z and failed check gh.
  • Batch 7426 ran 05:41Z–06:21Z and failed check gh.
  • The service restarted at 06:22Z. Batch 6946 ran 06:24Z–07:10Z and failed check quest.
  • Batch 7304 landed at 07:50Z.

  check gh failed in 2 s (alert.yml's workflow list is out of sync with .github/workflows/ — stale (remove, CI-only): Pullfrog). The rest of just ci still ran for 32–40 minutes before the batch was ejected. Neither of those first two batches waited in the gate.

Host-side change (kixelated/nixos, not made here)

• In modules/quest-land.nix, have the generated quest-land-check-command export QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY=1, next to its other exports, before exec nix develop …. The container's private ledger means a host-side reserved slot can't work, and the launcher already bounds the check: one container per repository socket, a 16-CPU quota, and an 18 GiB memory cap inside ci.slice.
• Bump the image's quest pin to a release that contains this PR. The image ships quest 0.1.0 from the Nix store.
• Do not use QUEST_GATE_ADMITTED=1 for this. It would also skip the memory admission that currently spaces the check's parallel Cargo suites inside its 18 GiB cap.

Choices made without asking

• The --quick bound is a fixed 60 s owned by the gate, rather than a duration the caller declares, so it can't be turned into a zero-wait bypass.
• Priority means "ignore load, keep memory", not a reserved slot. A slot counted in the ledger can't work while the check's gates use a ledger private to the container.
• A --quick command still marks its descendants admitted, like any gated command. Pass the flag only for commands that start nothing expensive.
• land-serve.ts does not set QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY on the sandbox's environment, because a parallel quest owns that file. The nspawn sandbox doesn't forward the daemon's environment anyway.
• I deleted the quest instead of rewriting it, because the remaining work lives in kixelated/nixos and moq-dev/moq. Those items are listed as follow-ups below.

Suggested follow-ups

• kixelated/nixos: export QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY=1 in the land check command and bump the image's quest (see above).
• moq-dev/moq: use quest gate --quick for cheap suites such as check quest, formatters, and markdown (moq-dev/moq#7250, moq-dev/moq#7257). Also make just ci fail fast once a module fails: the 2-second check gh failure cost two 35-minute batches.
• quest: have land-serve.ts pass QUEST_GATE_PRIORITY=1 in the sandbox environment, after the land-head-moved quest lands.

Review

• Reviewer: Codex gpt-6.1-sol at medium effort, via quest review --base origin/main (session 01a19294-8f89-76a1-bc11-d83ddf3495e6, round 1)
• Head reviewed: 132eeec
• Findings: none

Local checks on this head: just check passed, and just test passed (724 passed, 2 skipped; worker suite 426 passed).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

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Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 66a39b7 and 132eeec.

Files selected for processing: 8

• README.md
• quest/m0/README.md
• quest/m0/land-priority.md
• src/cli/agent.ts
• src/cli/gate.ts
• src/cli/main.ts
• test/agent.test.ts
• test/gate.test.ts

• Autofix · Keep fixing CodeRabbit findings and required CI, and resolving merge conflicts

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