What this accomplishes

Makes the KG raw-source provenance pipeline deterministic and self-healing, so the GET /api/db/sessions/:sessionKey/kg/raw-sources/:nodeId route (and the frontend Evidence Trail / Findings deep-links that depend on it) reliably resolves to real source attribution instead of silently returning nothing.

Two commits:

1. fix(kg): deterministic raw-source provenance — NUL strip, flag resolution, embedding/Phase-4b race
2. fix(kg): review follow-ups — embedding-service availability before phase4b repair

Why it was performed

The frontend team reported kg/raw-sources returning {"sources":[]} for the Cardinal reference session. Investigation found three independent latent defects that, combined, meant explicit kg_provenance.source_hash links were never produced for any session in the DB:

1. Ordering race (load-bearing): the post-session KG build (Phase 4b, which links nodes → raw-source chunks) fires on a 5s setTimeout whose delay is for report writes, not embeddings. The raw-source embedding queue is fire-and-forget. So Phase 4b consistently ran against an empty source_chunk_embeddings and wrote zero provenance.
2. RAW_SOURCE_EMBEDDING inert at runtime: the flag is true in flags.env but the dev entrypoint loaded only .env, and featureFlags is a hoisted static import — so the flag resolved false and the embedding dispatcher ran as a no-op stub.
3. NUL-byte silent data loss: the embedding INSERT had no NUL stripping; 14/367 Cardinal sources failed with invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x00, swallowed by a fire-and-forget .catch().

End objective

Future live sessions self-populate source_chunk_embeddings and explicit kg_provenance.source_hash with no manual backfill, and the route uses the preferred deterministic path. A reconciliation safety-net repairs any session that still raced.

Changes (file-level)

• src/utils/rawSource/SourceChunker.js — strip NUL (\0) from chunk content/header (single chokepoint for all raw-source chunks; mirrors the existing kgPhase4cNodeEmbeddings.js precedent). + test/sdk/source-chunker-nul.test.js.
• src/server/loadFlagsEnv.js (new) + claude-sdk-server.js — first-imported side-effect loader so flags.env lands in process.env before the hoisted featureFlags import evaluates (fixes the dev hoisting gap); [Startup] Feature flags banner; broadened embedding-service init gate to also fire when RAW_SOURCE_EMBEDDING is on.
• src/config/featureFlags.js — validateFlags() dependency-validation (warns when RAW_SOURCE_EMBEDDING=true but ARCHIVE/HOOK_DB/(GEMINI||GOOGLE)_API_KEY missing, and on the archive-on/embedding-off divergence). + test/sdk/validate-flags.test.js. Note: this branch's featureFlags.js was rebased onto current main — it preserves main's OPUS_MODEL='claude-opus-4-8' and all wrapped-subagent helpers; only validateFlags() is added.
• src/utils/hookDBBridge.js — source_chunk_embeddings stabilization poll before the KG build (count>0 AND stable across two checks, 60s cap, proceed-on-cap), so Phase 4b sees populated embeddings.
• src/utils/sessionReconciliation.js — safety-net: re-run Phase 4b for built sessions that have embeddings but no source_chunk provenance, gated by a one-shot kg_phase4b_repaired marker + an embedding-service availability probe (so the marker isn't burned when the service is down).
• src/utils/knowledgeGraph/repairSourceProvenance.js (new) — idempotent DELETE-then-rerun of Phase 4b for one session (reused by the runner + reconciliation).
• src/utils/knowledgeGraph/kgPhases1to5.js — Phase 4b provenance write hardened: truncate source_key to varchar(200) and strip NUL (previously dropped ~6 rows/run silently).
• src/db/postgres.js + migrations/023_kg-edges-composite-idx.js + migrations/024_sessions-kg-phase4b-repaired.{up,down}.sql — kg_edges(session_id, source_id) / (session_id, target_id) composite indexes (boot path plain; migration uses CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY) + the kg_phase4b_repaired column.
• scripts/run-phase4b.mjs + scripts/backfill-source-chunk-embeddings.mjs (new) — standalone Phase 4b runner + historical-session backfill tool (for sessions predating the live fixes).

Risks

Viability / verification

• 12/12 new unit tests pass (source-chunker-nul, validate-flags) via node --test.
• Cherry-picked cleanly onto current main; featureFlags.js conflict resolved preserving main's OPUS_MODEL=4.8 + wrapped-subagent helpers (only validateFlags added).
• The DB-side changes (source_chunk_embeddings backfill, kg_edges indexes, kg_phase4b_repaired column, 2,055 Cardinal chunk rows + 171 explicit provenance rows) are already applied to the shared DB and validated; this PR lands the code that produces them going forward.
• Outstanding before full trust: Tier-3 live verification (a fresh session self-populating explicit provenance through the race fix) is tracked in Tier-3 live verification: raw-source embedding → Phase 4b explicit provenance (race fix) #188 — deferred to a real session run.

CI note

This branch does not restore .github/workflows/kg-tests.yml (that workflow was removed on main). The two new tests (source-chunker-nul.test.js, validate-flags.test.js) need to be wired into main's current test setup before merge.

Context

Extracted from the v6.14/banker-qa-phase-1 worktree where they were authored out-of-scope; relocated to this isolated branch off main so the banker PR (#178) stays scoped. Related: #188 (Tier-3 verification), #23/#41 (tool/flag history).

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