feat: release Altimate Base hosted model

[anandgupta42]

Summary

• ships hosted Qwen 3.8 as altimate-free/altimate-base
• replaces Big Pickle as the implicit free fallback while keeping Big Pickle explicitly selectable
• adds default-No privacy disclosure, consent-gated anonymous registration, dedicated atomic 0600 credential storage, and bounded key rotation
• pins the managed provider contract so project config or models.dev cannot redirect its key, SDK module, model, or endpoint
• adds Base-specific quota/request-size errors and a session header only for this provider
• updates onboarding, model/provider pickers, ACP defaults, telemetry classification, docs, and tests

Gateway configuration

The public repository contains no internal gateway hostname. Release builds embed the current endpoint from the repository variable ALTIMATE_BASE_GATEWAY_URL; the build fails closed if the value is missing or unsafe. At runtime, ALTIMATE_BASE_GATEWAY_URL remains the highest-priority override, with the old ALTIMATE_FREE_GATEWAY_URL retained as a compatibility fallback. Changing gateway origins invalidates old credentials and requires registration against the new origin.

Isolation and security

Altimate Base is inserted as a dedicated managed provider. Existing provider objects, auth stores, fetch implementations, and headers are untouched. Registration is unavailable until the TUI worker installs a per-launch in-memory consent capability. Redirects and cross-origin credential forwarding are blocked. The installation secret is hashed before registration and never leaves the machine in raw form.

Verification

• 246 pass / 2 existing provider-fixture skips across 9 focused OpenCode suites
• 4/4 TUI disclosure and registration tests
• 13/13 workspace typecheck tasks
• 33/33 release models catalog tests included in the focused total
• strict upstream marker audit clean across 11 shared files
• release build rejects missing or credential-bearing gateway URLs
• pre-push tracker-leak and typecheck hooks pass

Supersedes #1115 and closes #1114.

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Note

High Risk
Changes authentication, consent-gated registration, credential persistence, release-time gateway embedding, and default model routing for CLI/ACP—security- and availability-sensitive paths.

Overview
Introduces Altimate Base (altimate-free/altimate-base) as the hosted, no-signup free tier and replaces Big Pickle as the implicit default. New users see a default-No disclosure before registration; credentials live in a dedicated store, registration sends only a hashed install secret, and inference goes through authorizedFetch with origin checks and bounded 401 handling.

Release and ops: Release builds require ALTIMATE_BASE_GATEWAY_URL (repo variable), validate HTTPS URLs at compile time, and embed the endpoint as ALTIMATE_BASE_DEFAULT_GATEWAY_URL. CI sanity builds set a test gateway URL.

Product surfaces: Provider loading pins the managed contract (project config cannot steer it), defaultModel() and ACP use requireDefaultModel and filtered catalogs so Big Pickle is never chosen silently; onboarding/telemetry events rename from Big Pickle to Altimate Base. TUI registration crosses the worker RPC with one-shot consent tokens from issueArmer().

Smaller fixes: MCP discovery adds symlink-safe resolution and .yarn/unplugged pruning; ClickHouse honors dbt’s secure TLS flag; docs and network/security FAQs describe logging, rate limits, and firewall needs.

An internal doc specifies a follow-up hermetic E2E harness (fake gateway); it is design-only in this PR.

^{Reviewed by Cursor Bugbot for commit f6fbfb5. Bugbot is set up for automated code reviews on this repo. Configure here.}

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Summary by cubic

Ships the hosted Altimate Base free model (altimate-free/altimate-base) as the new implicit free fallback. Big Pickle is no longer offered as a new selection; existing Big Pickle defaults migrate to Base only after a default-No privacy disclosure, and sessions with no usable model now fail closed instead of silently starting with Big Pickle. Registration is consent-gated, and the managed provider contract is pinned so project config or models.dev can't redirect its key, model, or endpoint.

Consent and security

• Registration redeems a bare one-shot token that only the TUI worker can arm; self-constructed stores are inert and the operation is excluded from the package exports so plugins can't mint an install identifier without the disclosure.
• Disclosure defaults to No; declining persists it and returns to the curated picker, and the install secret is hashed before registration and never leaves the machine.
• Credentials live in a dedicated atomic 0600 store; logout clears them but keeps the install secret.
• Rejection persists only after two consecutive 401s; any non-2xx, including rotation retries, resets the counter.
• Redirects and cross-origin credential forwarding are blocked; changing the gateway origin invalidates old credentials.
• ACP and the TUI fallback resolve defaults against the same filtered provider allowlist, and explicit Big Pickle picks from /model or favorite cycling survive via a separate marker.

Gateway and model behavior

• Release builds embed the official endpoint from ALTIMATE_BASE_GATEWAY_URL and fail if missing, non-HTTPS, or credential-bearing.
• The static model definition now declares the gateway's 131072/65536 limits, so the default prompt no longer trips "Context budget exceeded" on the first message.
• Tunes altimate-base sampling to its served model family (temperature 0.55, topP 1) and excludes it from reasoning-effort variants.
• Adds Base-only quota/request-size error and retry-after handling plus a session header attached only to this provider.
• MCP discovery prunes .yarn/unplugged trees and rejects symlinked config escaping the project; the ClickHouse driver treats secure, tls, and ssl as TLS.
• Adds a hermetic e2e suite with an in-process fake gateway covering registration, catalog, inference, rate-limit/budget, and error surfacing, with suites isolated against cross-file credential leakage.

^{Written for commit f6fbfb5. Summary will update on new commits.}

Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features
  • Added Altimate Base, a free, no-signup hosted provider with a Qwen model.
  • Added an onboarding disclosure and registration flow, defaulting consent to “No.”
  • Provider selection now prefers Altimate Base when available.
• Bug Fixes
  • Improved handling of rate limits, unavailable services, oversized requests, expired credentials, and registration cancellation.
  • Restricted gateway configuration to secure HTTPS URLs.
• Documentation
  • Updated setup, quickstart, network, security, telemetry, and provider guidance for Altimate Base, including logging and rate-limit disclosures.