WriteGate rejections print to stdout — pipelines silently swallow them

[jordanpartridge]

What happened

know add entries rejected by WriteGateService print the rejection to stdout and exit 1. Any pipeline that filters stdout (e.g. know add ... | grep ID to capture the new entry id) silently discards the rejection — the operator believes the entry stored when it didn't. Bit me twice tonight before I caught it: a long factual checkpoint entry was gate-rejected and the red message vanished into a grep.

Repro

know add "test-$(date +%s)" --content "$(python3 -c 'print("word " * 400)')" --no-git | grep ID
echo $?   # 1, but nothing was printed — rejection message was on stdout, filtered away

Proposed fix

• Write gate rejections (and other add failures) to stderr; keep stdout for the success table only. Standard CLI contract: stdout = result, stderr = diagnostics.
• Bonus: a --quiet flag that prints just the entry UUID on success would make scripted use (ID=$(know add ... --quiet)) robust and remove the temptation to grep the table.

Secondary observation (separate concern, mentioning for context)

The gate rejected a dense, fact-heavy operational handoff (dates, paths, decisions) — plausibly a criteria false-negative on long multi-topic content. Not requesting a change here; just noting the gate's heuristics may deserve an eval set of known-good/known-bad entries, same pattern as hird-eval.

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spec: specs/know-add-write-path/spec.md

Acceptance (night-shift 2026-08-31; remainder is #161)

• know add: caller stays dumb — do not require category #167 title is stale: category is already optional. Do not rebuild that.
• WriteGate rejection prints to stderr only; stdout stays empty on failure so know add | grep ID cannot swallow a reject.
• --quiet silences stderr; exit code unchanged. UUID-on-success (--id-only) is not this SPEC.
• know add … >/tmp/out 2>/tmp/err on gate reject → /tmp/out empty, /tmp/err has the reason, exit 1.
• Unknown category is not a caller error. Hash duplicate is success + existing id (non-interactive).
• vendor/bin/pest --filter='KnowledgeAddCommand|RememberTool' green.
• No PSTrax. No merge from night-shift.

[shit-agents]

Tonight's shot (2026-08-31).

• Thor clone: /home/jordan/Projects/conduit-ui/repos/knowledge
• SPEC: specs/know-add-write-path/spec.md (grok-4.6 CLI Auto-review blocked on Thor this session; executor wrote SPEC from issue body + checkout). Local qwen-coder-32k types after 02:00.
• Bound job.json on Thor. No merge from night-shift.

[jordanpartridge]

night-shift 2026-09-01T21:59:52-07:00: dispatched /home/jordan/.grok/skills/night-shift/jobs/knowledge-161.json (local-worker). No merge.

[jordanpartridge]

night-shift 2026-09-02T03:50:13-07:00: dispatched /home/jordan/.grok/skills/night-shift/jobs/knowledge-161.json (local-worker). No merge.

[jordanpartridge]

night-shift 2026-09-03T06:02:41-07:00: dispatched /home/jordan/.grok/skills/night-shift/jobs/knowledge-161.json (local-worker). No merge.

[jordanpartridge]

night-shift 2026-09-04T02:02:16-07:00: dispatched /home/jordan/.grok/skills/night-shift/jobs/knowledge-161.json (local-worker). No merge.

[jordanpartridge]

night-shift 2026-09-05T06:46:55-07:00: dispatched /home/jordan/.grok/skills/night-shift/jobs/knowledge-161.json (local-worker). No merge.