- Foreground gateway: a run that ended without official data is written to the existing same-day negative snapshot store; later turns that day answer from it without starting the gateway (second call <= 0.15 s, same fields). Success still goes to the positive cache first; a consult-gate deferral and a join timeout are not failures. - /v5/vedastro-validate: a result blocked by VedAstro itself is kept in memory for a day per (evidence fingerprint, candidate pair); evidence-decided results are not. The whole check has 11 s (frontend waits 12 s); calls with time to spare keep the adapter timeout, so normal output is unchanged. - conftest also isolates the negative store and clears the check memory. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>