Background
Issue #937 in the cognitum-v0 appliance repo flagged that the
`cognitum-csi-capture` systemd unit shipped `--simulate` by default,
silently serving synthetic CSI tagged as production telemetry on
`/api/v1/sensor/stream`. That's a textbook trust-eroding pattern — the
single most-cited "where's the real data?" evidence external reviewers
(#943, #934) point at when they call the project AI-slop.
A grep across THIS tree surfaced the exact same anti-pattern in three
places:
docker/docker-compose.yml:27 # auto (default) — probe ESP32, fall back to simulation
docker/docker-entrypoint.sh:14 # CSI_SOURCE — data source: auto (default), ...
main.rs:6435 info!("No hardware detected, using simulation"); "simulate"
The sensing-server's `auto` source resolver at main.rs:6425-6440
silently fell back to synthetic with only an `info!` log line as the
signal. Downstream consumers calling `/api/v1/sensing/latest` or
`/ws/sensing` had no in-band way to know they were being served fake
data.
Fix
`auto` now refuses to fall back. When neither ESP32 UDP nor host WiFi
is detected, the server logs a clear `error!` explaining the situation
and exits 78 (EX_CONFIG). The error message names the two ways to
proceed: provision real hardware, or set `--source simulated` /
`CSI_SOURCE=simulated` explicitly. Existing operators who already use
`--source simulated` (or its legacy `simulate` alias) are unaffected —
the alias is preserved for back-compat.
Docker entrypoint comment, docker-compose comment, and the Tauri
desktop app's source-default path also updated to reflect the new
posture. The desktop app keeps its `simulated` default because it's
an explicit demo product — the value passed downstream is the
*explicit* `simulated`, not `auto`, so the server tags it correctly
and never lies about its data source.
Validation
cargo build -p wifi-densepose-sensing-server --no-default-features
cargo test -p wifi-densepose-sensing-server --no-default-features
→ 122 / 122 pass, build clean (existing pre-fix warnings unchanged).
Deployment
⚠ Breaking change for unattended deployments that relied on the
`auto → simulated` silent fallback. That is exactly the failure mode
this PR fixes: pretending to serve real sensing data when the source
is fake. Operators who genuinely want demo mode set
`CSI_SOURCE=simulated` explicitly; the error message and the
docker-compose comment both point them there.
b6420ac9ba