The gate booted the soul with `env -i`, which strips the ambient
environment — including the library path the dynamically-linked soul needs
on the GCE CI runner. The soul never came up there, so the gate failed the
build (run 3384) even though the soul is correct (the gate passes locally
against the exact published CI runtime). Switch to preserving the ambient
env and instead UNSET only the live-service vars (ENGRAM_URL/API keys/
identity) while pointing HOME + snapshot at throwaway paths and axon at a
dead port. Isolation is unchanged (verified: no touch of the live
soul/engram); the soul now boots on the runner.
Wire the soul contract gate into ci.yaml as a hard block between the cc
build and the Publish-to-Artifact-Registry step. A non-zero gate fails the
build, so a stale (route-404ing) or memory-destroying (hard-deleting) soul
can never publish neuron-soul to foundation-prod or blue-green deploy to
GKE — the same class-fix now guarding the desktop builds, extended to prod.
Vendors scripts/verify-soul-contract.sh (copied from neuron-ui; the route
contract is baked in, so it's portable POSIX bash/curl with no neuron-ui
source dependency). It boots dist/neuron on a throwaway port with a
throwaway HOME/engram/cgi — never touching ~/.neuron or any live service —
and checks PRESENCE (every app route answered) + IMMUTABILITY (no engram
write route hard-deletes; deletes/forgets tombstone). Adds curl to the
build deps for the probe.