Hardens the dialectic lifecycle against three failure modes that could
leave the prefetch pipeline stuck or injecting stale content:
- Stale-thread watchdog: _thread_is_live() treats any prefetch thread
older than timeout × 2.0 as dead. A hung Honcho call can no longer
block subsequent fires indefinitely.
- Stale-result discard: pending _prefetch_result is tagged with its
fire turn. prefetch() discards the result if more than cadence × 2
turns passed before a consumer read it (e.g. a run of trivial-prompt
turns between fire and read).
- Empty-streak backoff: consecutive empty dialectic returns widen the
effective cadence (dialectic_cadence + streak, capped at cadence × 8).
A healthy fire resets the streak. Prevents the plugin from hammering
the backend every turn when the peer graph is cold.
- liveness_snapshot() on the provider exposes current turn, last fire,
pending fire-at, empty streak, effective cadence, and thread status
for in-process diagnostics.
- system_prompt_block: nudge the model that honcho_reasoning accepts
reasoning_level minimal/low/medium/high/max per call.
- hermes honcho status: surface base reasoning level, cap, and heuristic
toggle so config drift is visible at a glance.
Tests: 550 passed.
- TestDialecticLiveness (8 tests): stale-thread recovery, stale-result
discard, fresh-result retention, backoff widening, backoff ceiling,
streak reset on success, streak increment on empty, snapshot shape.
- Existing TestDialecticCadenceAdvancesOnSuccess::test_in_flight_thread_is_not_stacked
updated to set _prefetch_thread_started_at so it tests the
fresh-thread-blocks branch (stale path covered separately).
- test_cli TestCmdStatus fake updated with the new config attrs surfaced
in the status block.
