Test-suite hygiene gaps (vacuous guards, MCP seam, swallowed kwargs)

[prakashUXtech]

Test-quality gaps from the 2026-07-03 dev audit (commit 2ad0eb9). None fail today, but each hides a class of regression:

• test_chain_integration.py:112 guards its only assertion behind if approved:, so an always-fail approval regression passes vacuously. Add assert approved is True before the chain assertion.
• 8 of 39 MCP tools never cross the FastMCP client seam (soul_audit, the five soul_context_*, soul_dream, soul_reload), so a wrapper-layer bug in those ships green. Add client-seam tests or a list_tools + round-trip smoke.
• test_contradiction_pipeline.py:18,60 pass soul_dir= to Soul.birth, which has no such parameter, so it is swallowed by **kwargs ("reserved for future use"). Any typoed kwarg at any birth call site is silently ignored. Consider rejecting unknown kwargs.
• EvolutionManager.apply has no negative-path tests (rejected/pending/nonexistent mutation ValueError guard; type-coercion failure where apply crashes after the mutation is already marked approved). test_evolution.py:121.
• 84 substring assertions on Rich-rendered console output across tests/test_cli are brittle to Rich version and width changes; prefer --json output or pin only short stable tokens.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had activity in the last 30 days. It will be closed in 14 days if no further activity occurs. If this is still relevant, please comment or update.

[github-actions]

Closing due to inactivity. Feel free to reopen if still relevant.

[prakashUXtech]

Reopening — this was auto-closed by the stale bot on 2026-08-17, not because it was fixed. The work is still in active review in #304. Adding pinned so the bot leaves it alone until the fix actually merges.