daily-fix: HF upload-quota preflight at real scale

Overview / Motivation

Auto-filed by /daily 2026-07-23 (transcript sweep). Incident on #1586: HF returned 403 "setup automatic credit recharge" on PRODUCTION-scale checkpoint uploads while small (~2MB) probe uploads PASSED — the run's upload phase died at scale after the small-probe preflight read green, and the user had to resolve billing state by hand mid-run ("why is it bugging", "so is it done being handled?").

Goal

Make the upload-side preflight catch quota/billing-state failures that only manifest at production scale: probe at a representative size and/or read the account's billing/quota state directly, instead of trusting a KB–MB canary.

Workflow gap

• Bug observed: the preflight's HF check verifies reachability (and disk quotas locally) but has no upload-quota/billing probe at representative size — a 2MB probe passes while a multi-GB LFS/Xet upload 403s on billing state, so the failure surfaces only after training completes, at the most expensive moment.
• Why it is a workflow gap: upload-before-delete is the project's durability contract; a false-green preflight converts a billing hiccup into a checkpoint-stranding incident.
• Confidence: medium (the right probe size/mechanism needs design — a whoami/billing API read may beat a large probe upload).
• verified-at-filing: grep -n "probe|upload|quota|403" src/explore_persona_space/orchestrate/preflight.py → probes are disk-writable-bytes canaries only (MooseFS quota class); no HF upload-quota/billing probe exists (absence claim, in-target 0-hit) (2026-07-24 UTC).

Proposed change (refine in planning)

Add an upload-quota leg to preflight (or the upload-verifier's pre-upload path): either query the HF billing/quota state via API, or a representative-size (~100MB, deleted after) probe to the target repo class, failing loud with the recharge remediation named.

Scope / surfaces

• Primary target: src/explore_persona_space/orchestrate/preflight.py (+ .claude/rules/upload-policy.md note)

Constraints / invariants

• Fail fast, never fallback-silently; the probe must not spam repos with garbage blobs (clean up after itself).
• This session runs under a workflow_fix_target: Provenance line — recursion guard applies.

Provenance

• fingerprint: aa6b52823185

• workflow_fix_target: src/explore_persona_space/orchestrate/preflight.py