[variablenix]

Summary

• Give lightweight Search Assist a short head start, then race bounded browser and independent source fallbacks instead of serially waiting for every timeout.
• Preserve original-question retries, provider settings, source attribution, positive caching, input limits, and the single-browser limit; cancel and join losing work.
• Accept inline Assist payloads directly and bound origin refreshes when a usable search snippet already exists.
• Keep specific genre, type, procedure, and alternative questions out of generic entity fallbacks.
• Replace the generic failure sentence with a clearly labeled Search Assist / web results link, with valid bounded URL encoding. This does not fabricate an answer or promise an upstream answer for every question.
• Add concurrency, cancellation, panic-isolation, snippet, URL, and opt-in live latency/relevance regressions; update plugin documentation.

Validation

• Go 1.26.10: full race suite including offline Chrome fixtures passed on the final head.
• go vet, staticcheck, govulncheck (no vulnerabilities found), module verification, and native/Linux amd64 builds passed.
• Live checks without IRC messages: the three baseline questions passed seven repetitions, five including expected-subject/relationship checks.
• Representative uncached timings: OS definition about 10.5 s before versus 1.0–1.1 s after; cost comparison about 11.0 s before versus 0.5–0.8 s after. Upstream latency can vary.
• Six additional live checks passed for character/vehicle questions, both genre phrasings, opinion/explanation, and a VM installation question (0.7–1.8 s). Some appropriately returned attributed search excerpts rather than generated Assist text.
• All 20 live provider-plugin smoke tests and both live YouTube searches passed with available deployment credentials; no credentials were logged and no messages were sent to IRC.
• Verify, Analyze Go, and CodeQL passed on the final PR head. Main-branch CI and CodeQL also passed after merge.
• Prerequisite patched Go baseline Update Go baseline for certificate-validation security fixes #176 is merged.

Deployment

• Built the merged revision 7cf294e with Go 1.26.10 and restarted the service.
• Verified the running executable revision, clean build metadata, metrics readiness, both network connections, and four joined channels.
• Configuration, environment, and the pre-existing workflow backup were preserved byte-for-byte.
• Repeated the baseline live latency/relevance checks twice after deployment: all passed (about 0.55–1.05 s).
• Docker image build was not exercised locally; its official base-image tag was verified as active.