Remove the no-model demo path; make setup the single road to a real first conversation

[charneykaye]

Summary

The first conversation a new player has decides whether there is a second one — and its one job is to prove this is not a chatbot: the entity across the table has its own universe of concern, and the player succeeds by investigating it, appealing to it, and compelling within it. The no-model paths did the opposite. The fake runtime returns the same hard-coded reply on every turn, forever ("Hello there. I am a simulated NPC."), and the scripted tutorial is on rails. Offering either as first contact taught "this is a bad chatbot" at the exact moment of maximum skepticism — then lost the player for good.

This PR removes the entire no-model conversation offering from every user-facing surface and reinvests the first-run flow in getting the player to a real conversation. Closes #473.

What's removed

• Welcome: the "Try it right now" scripted-tutorial card. One road now: Set me up (advanced Ollama/GGUF paths stay).
• Installing: the "Have your first conversation [scripted]" CTA.
• Choose / Model Manager: the "Continue without a model / Text-only demo" card; DemoConfirmStep and the demo-warning step are deleted.
• Preflight / Settings health: the universal "Try text-only instead" escape hatch (a blocked machine gets a fix action, details, and copy-diagnostics — honest failure beats fake success).
• Home: the "Try text-only demo" no-model card.
• Conversation / Debrief: the SCRIPTED/DEMO badges, the mid-session model-ready toast machinery, and the "Try it with the real AI" upgrade CTA.
• Flow internals: handleConfirmDemo, handleStartTutorial, the demo onboarding outcome write, and the tutorialComplete / tutorialInstallId / activeRuntimeHint localStorage keys (stale legacy values are inert).
• e2e: P2 "instant play" journey deleted; the onboarding fast trio becomes P1/P7.

What replaces it

• Welcome states the promise plainly: "Not a chatbot. Not a mirror." — everyone you talk to arrives mid-life, with stakes, moods, and goals that have nothing to do with you.
• Installing turns the download wait into the recruitment window: the promise, the three-beat loop (investigate their universe → appeal and compel within it → succeed on their terms), and previews of real scenarios from the registry as "your first missions" (the internal tutorial scenario is never advertised). No playable facsimile.
• Arrival: install completion lands the player in the scenario library, one click from a real first conversation.
• All new/changed strings are localized (en + de).

Backstop (API-level guarantee)

POST /api/sessions now refuses (409, with a clear finish-setup message) any session that would resolve to the fake or scripted runtime unless the request pins that runtime explicitly — covering both a persisted model-free selection and the config-default fake shared runtime on a profile that never installed a model. Tests and dev tooling keep the explicit pin; a player can never fall through to a puppet by accident. The fake/scripted runtimes and the first_words_tutorial scenario remain as internal test/dev infrastructure.

Migration

A legacy profile with a recorded demo outcome no longer counts as having a model: GET /api/setup/status resolves incomplete (never never-run, so no wizard bounce), which shows the existing non-blocking finish-setup banner steering the user to install the real thing.

Verification

• Frontend: 47 files / 1278 tests pass; tsc clean; eslint identical to main (no new issues); i18n audit clean.
• Backend: 2047 passed / 3 pre-existing root-container preflight failures (identical on clean main); new tests cover the 409 backstop, the explicit-pin path, and the legacy-demo status migration.
• e2e onboarding: 49 passed (P1/P3–P8) after P2 removal; actionlint clean on the workflow change.
• Pushed tree verified byte-identical to the locally tested working tree (matching git tree SHA 64cff7df).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01C9WmcidRL3ABq7qhWHUsrG