feat(bridge): the local bridge, and long jobs that outlive the tab

[ivanmkc]

The stack

#	PR	What it adds	Tests at this point
1	#311	A real localStorage for the test suite on Node 25	viewer 747
2	#312	@ivanmkc/termchart-canvas; injectable interact transport	canvas 473 · viewer 278
3	#313	lifeboard PWA: fact log, boards, service worker	lifeboard 36
4	#314	Shell, family profiles, tap layer	lifeboard 82
5	#315	The agent turn, four providers, Connections	lifeboard 142
6	#316	Packs, recipes, shopping-list arithmetic	lifeboard 231
7	#317	Provenance and lineage	lifeboard 257
8	#318	Calendar, Gmail, mail triage	lifeboard 301
9	#319	The bridge and long jobs	cli 314 · lifeboard 320
10	#310	Proactivity, scheduled boards, Google sign-in	cli 320 · lifeboard 343
11	#320	Persistence audit fixes: multi-tab, stale builds, no-storage boot	lifeboard 350
12	#321	User guide, bridge setup, QA guide, persistence audit	lifeboard 350
13	#322	A plan for third-party integrations (docs only)	unchanged
14	#323	A practice drill a board can define: audio + Q&A	canvas 485 · lifeboard 372
15	#325	Export and restore	lifeboard 389
16	#326	Draft a message, approve it, then send	lifeboard 399
17	#327	Hand long work to the Mac	lifeboard 406
18	#328	A Packs screen, and authoring one by describing it	lifeboard 418
19	#329	Activity — what changed, who changed it, undo	lifeboard 428
20	#330	Four defects found reviewing the stack	cli 323 · lifeboard 431

Every branch in the stack was checked out on its own and verified independently: npm install, tsc --noEmit for every package, npm test across the workspace, and the offline e2e where it exists. All twenty are green — no branch depends on a later one to build or pass. Full viewer e2e (11 suites, 106 assertions) was run on #312 as the behaviour-preservation evidence for the extraction.

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Stack position: 9 of 10. Base: lifeboard/07-calendar-mail.

The optional local process, and with it the AI subscriptions the family already pays for — plus long jobs that outlive the tab.

Security comes first because a process that can run someone's authenticated AI agents is worth breaking into. Loopback bind, not 0.0.0.0 — a bridge on café wifi is a remote shell with extra steps. A per-run token, printed once, compared in constant time. Origin validation on everything that changes state, because any page you visit can POST to 127.0.0.1; a token alone is not enough, since a page in the family's browser could have been given one. CORS is echoed only for origins already trusted, never *.

Driver detection is a version probe rather than a PATH lookup. A binary that cannot run is not an installed agent, and "installed but signed out" is the most common state and the one worth naming — the fix is a command the person can run rather than an error they have to interpret. Prompts go on stdin, never in argv.

Jobs are owned entirely by the bridge. No client-side runner, no checkpointing in the browser, no resume logic on the iPad: an iPad that sleeps must not be able to lose someone's research, and the only way to guarantee that is for it never to have been responsible. The step budget is not a nicety — an agent asked to research trips can loop, and every loop spends someone's subscription. The client mirrors, renders a card from the moment a job is queued so the screen is never blank, and falls back from the event stream to polling: a difference in latency, never in correctness.

Discovery is opt-in. Probing a port nothing is listening on logs a console error in every browser and costs a request on every start, so the automatic probe happens only for someone who has used a bridge before. The offline e2e now also asserts that nothing but that probe ever leaves the app's own origin.

Also here: a test-stability commit. Three tests waited on a 20 ms sleep and failed intermittently once the suite grew large enough to contend for CPU. Store.settled() resolves once every queued write has landed, and the tests wait on the condition instead.

Verified: CLI 314 tests (33 new, covering origin rejection, signed-out drivers, the step budget and cancellation), lifeboard 320, offline e2e 17/17.

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