fix(rebuild): preserve external policy authority

[apurvvkumaria]

Summary

Sandbox rebuild now binds one recorded OpenShell policy authority through preflight, delete, recreate, restore, and recovery. A changed or externally managed policy stops NemoClaw policy mutation and success publication.

Related Issue

Part of #9833

Changes

• Qualify rebuild policy requirements before destructive work.
• Revalidate policy authority before sandbox, policy, credential, messaging, MCP, and registry mutations.
• Preserve authority receipts through interrupted rebuild recovery and compensation.
• Cover managed, external, drift, restart, and post-delete failure paths.

Type of Change

• Code change (feature, bug fix, or refactor)
• Code change with doc updates
• Doc only (prose changes, no code sample modifications)
• Doc only (includes code sample changes)

Quality Gates

• Tests added or updated for changed behavior
• Existing tests cover changed behavior — justification:
• Tests not applicable — justification:
• Sensitive paths changed (security, policy, credentials, preflight, onboarding, inference, runner, sandbox, or messaging)
• Sensitive-path review completed or maintainer-approved waiver recorded — reviewer/approval link/justification:
• Non-success, skipped, or missing CI check accepted by maintainer — check name, approval link, and follow-up issue:

Verification

• PR description includes a Signed-off-by: line and every commit appears as Verified in GitHub
• Normal pre-commit, commit-msg, and pre-push hooks passed, or npm run validate:pr passed after refreshing origin/main when hooks were skipped or unavailable
• Targeted behavior tests pass for the current change set, or tests are marked not applicable above — focused rebuild authority and recovery tests passed
• Applicable broad gate passed — npm test for broad runtime/test-harness changes; npm run check for repo-wide validation/coverage changes — command/result:
• Quality Gates section completed with required justifications or waivers
• No secrets, API keys, or credentials committed
• npm run docs builds without warnings (doc changes only)
• Doc pages follow the style guide (doc changes only)
• New doc pages include SPDX header and frontmatter (new pages only)

Signed-off-by: Apurv Kumaria akumaria@nvidia.com

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[github-code-quality]

Code Coverage Overview

Languages: TypeScript

TypeScript / code-coverage/plugin

The overall line coverage in commit 6d7a3b1 in the codex/9833-rebuild-a... branch remains at 96%, unchanged from commit 7e7c814 in the codex/9833-onboardin... branch.

Show a line coverage summary of the most impacted files.

File	codex/9833-onboardin... 7e7c814	codex/9833-rebuild-a... 6d7a3b1	+/-
nemoclaw/src/sh...cy-boundary.cts	100%	98%	-2%
nemoclaw/src/bl...print/runner.ts	97%	96%	-1%
nemoclaw/src/bl...est-fixtures.ts	100%	100%	0%

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_{Updated August 24, 2026 23:12 UTC}

[apurvvkumaria]

The rebuild CI failures were fixture gaps. Production authority checks are unchanged. Verified commit adcb438 records managed authority and returns valid sandbox policy metadata in the affected rebuild fixtures.

Verification:

• required two-file reproduction: 7 tests passed
• affected rebuild process tests: 9 tests passed
• focused rebuild authority tests: 24 tests passed
• CLI typecheck passed
• growth guardrails passed
• repository, format, and diff checks passed
• normal commit and push hooks passed
• GitHub reports the signed commit as Verified

CI is rerunning against the repaired fixtures.