TUI bus & surface review — disposition

Status: disposition recorded (2026-07-18, sprint 2026-07-18 Phase 4) · closes DEBT-61 Scope: internal/tui/ (model ~1.6k LOC), cmd/cards/tui.go, the bare-cards guard in cmd/cards/main.go, and the in-process bus subscription the TUI makes on core.Service. References: DEBT-61 (debt-ledger.md), TUI landing 0421efd, bus internal/core/bus.go.

DEBT-61 was filed as a review gap (fresh surface, no debt-ledger coverage), with four sub-questions and one escalation question. Findings and dispositions below.

Sub-questions

1. Dependency health (bubbletea v2 / lipgloss v2 / glamour) — sound

No nolint exclusions anywhere in internal/tui/ or cmd/cards/tui.go. The dependency set is the deliberate price of a terminal UI (landing commit 0421efd); binary size (~30 MB) is consistent with the rest of the single binary. No action.

2. Live-refresh subscription teardown — sound (verified)

tui.go unsubscribes on model teardown (defer svc.Bus().Unsubscribe(m.sub.ID), which also releases any blocked waitEvent goroutine). Subscriptions are registered lazily on first board view and released on quit paths. No leak found. No action.

3. Actor resolution matches the rest of the surfaces — sound

cmd/cards/tui.go resolves actor exactly like the CLI: --as → CARDS_USER → USER → workspace default_user, and all service writes go through core.WithActor(ctx, actor) (m.ctx()), the same seam the HTTP transport uses via X-Work-Cards-Actor. No action.

4. Markdown detail pane — one real defect found and fixed

The review exposed a genuine bug: inbound links silently never rendered. syncExtras queried inbound cards (LinkTarget) without eager-loading their link sets, but the markdown renderer reads the relation type from each inbound card's own links — so the ← <type> row could never appear. It went unnoticed because the seeded board's most-recent card previously had no inbound links; a sprint's board mutations moved a card with inbound links into the selected slot and TestCardMarkdownSections went red.

• Fix (landed): syncExtras now lists with Include: ["links"] (internal/tui/tui.go).
• Test hardening (landed): openDemo now snapshots the demo DB like openDemoCopy — render tests were reading the live work-cards.db, so any dogfooding mutation (comments, status flips) could flip content assertions. Hermetic now.

Non-TTY / script safety — regression test landed

The interactive() guard (both streams TTYs, no --json/--jsonl) had no test. cmd/cards/interactive_test.go now pins: piped stdin → never interactive; bare run() with piped stdin prints usage. `cards