The native-app (RFC 8252) login passed its unit tests but failed in real
Electron runtime — the tests mocked the exact seams that were broken. Four
runtime defects, each proven against a live gated gateway:
1. Lockfile drift: apps/desktop declared @assistant-ui/react +
@assistant-ui/react-streamdown but package-lock.json didn't place them, so
`npm ci` (CI + every fresh checkout) failed to install them → Vite
"Failed to resolve @assistant-ui/react". Reconcile the lockfile.
2. Double JSON encoding: postJsonNoAuth pre-JSON.stringify'd the body before
fetchJson (which stringifies again), so /auth/native/token received a JSON
string, not an object → gateway 422 "Input should be a valid dictionary" →
native login silently fell back to the embedded webview.
3. Cookie-only liveness gate: buildRemoteConnection (and the Settings
connected indicator) treated "signed in" as "has OAuth cookie". The native
flow stores a bearer and sets no cookie, so a completed native login looped
the UI into needsOauthLogin. Accept native token OR cookie.
4. Cookie-only REST path: the hermes:api handler routed oauth-mode REST through
the cookie partition only. A cookieless native session → 401 no_cookie on
every API call. Prefer the native bearer (with transparent refresh), else
cookie — mirroring mintGatewayWsTicket, which was already bearer-aware.
The three decision points (2–4) are extracted into a pure
native-auth-decisions.ts with regression tests, since the mocked flow tests
could not catch them. Verified live: system-browser login → cookieless bearer
→ connected chat, no embedded webview.
