nx_daemon_budget_gate.nx

nx_daemon_budget_gate.nx -- REGRESSION PROOF for the self-retiring-daemon class (debt seq882, 2026-07-25). THE DEFECT IT LOCKS OUT: 44 sovereign daemons run `while served < budget { accept... } sys_exit(0)`. A supervised daemon launched with a SMALL finite budget therefore RETIRES ITSELF -- and nx_hostctl's guard (nx_hostctl.nx:798) reads the repeated exits as a crash-loop and BACKS OFF, so the surface goes genuinely DOWN while `status` still prints UP. Measured live: the gallery gateway, the wiki/hub/torrent/gen gateways, the main OPAQUE login daemon AND the mgmt API itself were all launched with budget=5000. That is the root cause of the operator-reported "gallery wont let me login" AND of the chronic mgmt/MCP transport flake. nx_docportal_search_serve.nx:303 documents this same failure being diagnosed on 2026-07-03 -- fixed there and never swept. This gate exists so it can never silently return. WHY ASSERT ON BYTES, NOT ON INTENT: an author-optimism check ("we fixed it") is not evidence. Each tooth greps the actual launch-command constant. T8 greps the LIVE DEPLOYED BINARY, not just source -- this session proved that class of lie twice (a carve-out banked in memory as "landed in source" was NOT in source, and a deployed gallery thumbnailer predated its own fix by three weeks). Source-GREEN + binary-RED = NOT SHIPPED. T9 is the MUTATION tooth: it fails if the exact bad literal ever reappears, so a revert cannot pass quietly. Run from the nishihost CWD (the tools daemon fork-execs it there). license_tier: ORIGINAL No hw writes (Rule 26).