vac-optimizer/.scratch/remove-original-decision-trace/issues/02-verify-trace-free-planning.md

02 — Verify integrated planning after trace removal

Gitea: #77

Blocked by: #76

What to build

Demonstrate that the integrated #70–#75 work retains its supported behavior after trace removal. Provide a functionally verified trace-free baseline for #78, which now owns benchmark performance acceptance and optimization. Benchmark performance is no longer a completion gate for #75 or this functional verification ticket.

Acceptance criteria

• Review the integrated contract replacement across all calculation paths and UI callers. Confirm there is no trace recorder, trace transport, acknowledgement wait, historical replay API or retained trace-dependent control or compatibility shell.
• Compare completed outcomes and stable explanations against existing deterministic fixtures, including typed joint obligations, earned-entitlement chains, custom objective formulas, reordered priorities, two- and three-year horizons and no active optimization rules. Do not rewrite placement expectations to hide a behavioral regression.
• Verify real-worker outcome and explanation delivery, heartbeat monitoring, stale-response rejection and explanation failure handling. Exercise cancellation before any valid incumbent and after a valid incumbent, and confirm that partial outcomes remain valid without false conflicts.
• Verify displayed-placement alternative-date analysis and remaining-balance reasons without historical data. Check that captured settings remain immutable and hypothetical alternatives do not change the displayed plan.
• Run the existing full correctness, coverage, static, formatting and build checks appropriate to the integrated change, and resolve regressions within the trace-removal scope. Preserve the repository's required thresholds.
• Complete browser QA for the retained explanation, calendar, cancellation and alternative-date flows, including keyboard interaction and a narrow viewport. Confirm the advanced trace explorer, historical overlays and historical attempt controls are absent.
• Verify that benchmark callers use the supported trace-free calculation contract and retain their correctness, determinism, horizon, placement-count and completed-stage assertions. Full protocol execution, the unchanged 2 GB/300-second performance gates and any required optimization belong to #78.
• Hand off the functionally verified integrated baseline and unchanged benchmark inputs to #78. Verify retained outcome and explanation delivery without waiting for removed trace artifacts or inventing replacement trace counters.
• Keep the original #70–#75 dependency order and report the functional integration result. Apply #75’s revised functional completion criteria: a benchmark performance failure alone does not block #75 or this ticket. Outstanding benchmark requirements remain open in #78, without deadline relaxation or an automatic engine cutoff.

The removal is agreed; its measured speedup is unresolved and is now evaluated in #78. This ticket owns functional verification after trace removal. It does not itself implement performance optimizations or close other issues.

Blocked by

• #76 — Remove the original decision trace end to end (#76).