[kixelated]

Finishes quest/m0/kix/runner-timeout.md and deletes it, along with its link in the kix epic.

Summary

The test test/runner.test.ts > "pauses a large conflicted continuation with a bounded question and intact checkout" ran past vitest's 5s limit in the host land gate (5038ms and 5170ms on 2026-10-31). That ejected moq-dev/quest#320 and moq-dev/quest#329.

Cause. I wrapped git in a logging shim and found that 126 of the test's 181 git processes were git cat-file blob <oid>, one per changed path:

• 60 came from the checkpoint snapshot taken before the continuation. That snapshot only needs the tree and the change count, but it read every file's content anyway.
• The rest came from the publication snapshot.

Each spawn costs tens of milliseconds on a loaded host. With the shim's extra overhead, the 60 checkpoint reads alone took 2s, and the test timed out at 5045ms.

Fix (src/runner/workspace.ts):

• #pending() computes the tree, the merged commit, and each changed path's blob id without reading any file. The checkpoint before a continuation uses only this.
• snapshot() builds on #pending() and reads every blob with one git cat-file --batch. This is the same pattern src/cli/tree.ts already uses.

The test now spawns 2 blob-reading processes instead of 126. This also speeds up real publications with many files. The timeout and the test itself are unchanged.

Measurements

The single test ran pinned to 2 CPUs (taskset -c 0,1), with 8 busy loops competing for those CPUs:

	before	after
no shim	2140ms, 2237ms	1399ms, 1760ms, 1354ms
with logging git shim	5045ms (timed out)	2565ms
unloaded	~600ms	~600ms

The remaining time goes to about 60 git calls that the continuation flow needs (fetch, worktree, merge, read-tree/add/write-tree) and to starting the fake claude/nix bun processes.

Choices made without asking

• The batch read shares the old 64 MiB output buffer, which was previously applied per blob. kix refuses publications whose decoded total is over 16 MiB (LIMITS.bytes in cloudflare/src/jobs/publish.ts), so the total cap only affects publications kix would reject anyway. Past 64 MiB, the error now comes from git's maxBuffer instead of kix's "Publication too large".
• The checkpoint no longer reads file contents. As a result, it no longer fails on a single file over 64 MiB in a paused checkout.

Checks

• just check: pass
• env -u CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR just test: pass (726 passed, 2 skipped; worker 426 passed)

Suggested follow-ups

• The runner calls conflicts() (git diff --diff-filter=U) twice in a row while pausing a conflicted continuation: once in Workspace.prepare and again when it builds the question. This is minor, so I'm not planning a quest for it unless the runner's spawn count matters elsewhere.

Review

• Reviewer: Codex gpt-6.1-sol, medium effort, via quest review --base origin/main (session 01a193c3-9de8-7160-a35d-114d9e3c1f8f, round 1)
• Reviewed head: 207e683
• Findings: none

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

(Written by Claude Opus 5.5)

[coderabbitai]

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