Isaac/feat/query mechanism

[isaaccodekill]

No description provided.

[piotrnowakowski]

High: the freshness gate is effectively disabled.

• In backend/modules/web_researcher/freshness.py (check_freshness, around line 45), CCC values are looked up by (city, field).
• But _extract_ccc_values() in the same file (around line 185) only stores keys shaped like (city, "_has_data").
• In practice there are no real overlaps, freshness_results stays empty, and backend/modules/web_researcher/context_merger.py (around line 118) promotes any web finding without freshness data straight to resolved.
• I reproduced this with a direct Dresden/capex probe; it returned [] instead of running freshness classification.
  Local repro example:
• After start_step("s1", "Step 1"), the written progress.json contained one running step with "items": [].
• After add_item("s1", "hello"), the in-memory tracker state changed to include {"text": "hello"} under that step.
• But the on-disk progress.json still showed "items": [] instead of the new item.
  So the failure is not theoretical: the state advances in memory, but the file that the status endpoint reads does not. That is why the frontend ends up seeing stale progress even though the pipeline continues.

I also validated the UI side separately with a synthetic local run: when valid steps data was manually present in progress.json, the progress panel rendered correctly in the browser. That narrows the problem to the backend write path rather than the React component.

For the freshness issue, a similarly concrete repro was:

• web finding: Dresden / capex = 50
• context bundle excerpt containing city_key="Dresden" and matching partial_answer text
• check_freshness() still returned []
  That happens because the CCC map is populated under ("dresden", "_has_data"), while the lookup is performed under ("dresden", "capex").

[piotrnowakowski]

Pinning the reproduced issues inline on the changed lines.