feat(openclaw): answer without inference, opt-in

[SaharBarak]

Completes the third piece of the OpenClaw integration: when a question matches one already answered, the stored reasoning is served and no model call is made.

OpenClaw's before_agent_run can end a turn before any model input, with user-facing text. That is exactly the interception point docs/research/PEER-INFERENCE-STREAMING.md concluded was missing in Claude Code, where the same behaviour needs a wire-compatible /v1/messages SSE proxy. Here it's a hook.

What's new

folklore reuse lookup|record — CLI plus a read-only IPC handler. Separate from ask on purpose: ask expands a resolved-query match into its answer docs and drops the node, which is right for retrieval and useless here. Reuse needs the node, its distilled trace, and the query-to-query distance that says how safely it can stand in for a fresh answer.

recordResolvedQuery already accepted a trace and nothing ever passed one — which is why all 91 resolved-query nodes on a real graph are question-only pointers with nothing to serve. The record path closes that.

Why it ships off by default

This is a finding, not caution. Measured against one stored trace ("what transport does the folklore relay use"):

distance	question	actually
0.000	the identical question	same
0.940	"which transport protocol is the relay running on"	same
1.012	"what protocol does the relay speak"	same
1.074	"what port is the relay on"	different

Paraphrases and adjacent-but-distinct questions overlap, so no threshold on this evidence separates them. The default (0.25) therefore admits little more than a restatement: low recall, but it cannot answer the wrong question. Calibrating looser needs a labelled set, not a guess. FOLKLORE_REUSE_INFERENCE=1 opts in; FOLKLORE_REUSE_MAX_DISTANCE / FOLKLORE_REUSE_MAX_AGE_DAYS tune it.

Age is stricter here than in retrieval (30d default): a stale document a human reads is evidence, a stale answer served as the answer is a wrong answer.

Served answers disclose provenance, age and sources. A user who cannot tell an answer was cached has no way to distrust it when it is wrong.

Verification

Plugin suite 34 tests (9 new, weighted towards the refusals: distant question, stale answer, empty trace, disabled). Core suites green including help coverage.

End-to-end against the live daemon and real graph:

what transport does the folklore relay use     REUSE   d=0.000   (no model call)
what port is the relay on                      model   no stored answer
how do I bake sourdough bread                  model   no stored answer

Not in this branch

Automatic capture from llm_output. Traces are recordable via the CLI today; writing model output into the graph automatically interacts with the privacy classifier and deserves its own pass rather than being tacked on here.

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[SaharBarak]

Added the trace plumbing this depends on as a separate commit (99d457e).

CI failed because recordResolvedQuery(…, {trace}) exists only in the working tree, not on main — I built against it without checking it was committed. That commit is pre-existing authored work (use-cases.ts / query-reuse.ts / query-reuse.test.ts, 79 lines, 7 tests green), kept separate so it reviews on its own rather than hiding inside the feature diff.