A fresh clone fails 11 test files until the binaries are built, and never says so

[lucy-wolfe]

First contact

Clone the repo, install dependencies, run the tests:

bun run test

Eleven files fail. Nothing in the output says why. The cause is that some suites boot the real chiefd binaries, and a fresh clone has not built them yet:

cargo build --bins

Run that once and the same command is green.

Why it is worth fixing

This is the first thing a new contributor does, and the failure gives them no way to tell "I set something up wrong" from "this project is broken". A red suite on first contact, with no explanation, is the worst available introduction — and the fix costs almost nothing.

The fix

Two parts, and the first matters more:

1. The affected suites should refuse in words rather than fail obscurely. A preflight that checks for the binaries and prints build the binaries first: cargo build --bins is a refusal a reader can act on. Failing eleven assertions is not.
2. One line in CONTRIBUTING naming the build step before the test step.

This mirrors how the repo guards already behave: a check that cannot run says so by name instead of reporting a fault it did not observe.

Acceptance

• A fresh clone that runs the test suite without building gets a message naming the command to run.
• After that command, the suite passes.
• The preflight does not add noise to a normal run where the binaries exist.