feat(context): ship the adaptive-context lifecycle on by default

[macanderson]

context.lifecycle.enabled now defaults to true. The whole lifecycle — decomposed recall, frame identity, recall telemetry, selection reasons, the typed learning loop, the ledger and its review surface — is what a workspace gets without configuring anything.

Stacked on #745, which repairs a main that does not currently compile. Review that first.

Why this is safe to default on

The behavior-compatibility suite asserts every spec §8 guarantee on both the typed path and the opted-out one, from the same assertions: tombstone suppression across re-learning on every surface, the per-session creation cap, never clobbering a hand-edited file, deterministic candidate identity, and failure isolation.

Phase 3 deliberately kept the lexical loop reachable rather than deleting it, so "behavior-compatible" stays a checkable claim rather than a promise. Defaulting on is the point of having built that evidence — a lifecycle nobody runs cannot be evaluated.

The flip is two changes, not one

This is the part worth reviewing closely. Flipping LifecycleSettings::default() alone would have shipped nothing.

The reader asked:

.and_then(|s| s.context).is_some_and(|c| c.lifecycle.enabled)

A workspace with no settings.json — the common case, and every new user — answered false regardless of the struct's default, because the context block was absent rather than present-and-false. An absent block now means "the defaults", which is what it always should have meant.

There are tests for the no-settings-file case and the empty-block case specifically, because that is exactly the gap that would have shipped this as a silent no-op.

What still fails closed

An unreadable or malformed settings file stays OFF. That file may be the one in which someone turned the lifecycle off, and silently overriding an opt-out we failed to parse is worse than leaving a default unapplied. An explicit "enabled": false is honored and restores the previous behavior wholesale.

Notes for the reviewer

• The test fixtures that used to get the lexical loop by writing nothing now opt out explicitly, since "write nothing and get the old path" is no longer true. That is a change to what the fixtures say, not to what they assert — no assertion was relaxed.
• DriverConfig::lifecycle_enabled still defaults false on purpose: a programmatically built config should opt in deliberately rather than inherit a product default it never read. The CLI passes the real setting.
• learning.mode and governance.mode remain inert — they have no consumers outside settings tests. lifecycle.enabled is the only real switch.

Gate

make gate green: exit 0, 3805 tests, check-file-size: OK — 475 Rust files, none over 1500 lines except 25 grandfathered (none grew).

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1 Skipped Deployment

Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
stella-cli-docs	Ignored	Preview	Jul 26, 2026 11:36pm

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