"Access denied" and "Not found" now mean what they say

A wrong error message is annoying. A wrong error message that sounds specific is expensive, because you act on it. Three places in the portal used to answer "we could not find out" with a confident, detailed negative — and each one sent someone off to fix a problem that did not exist.

"Access denied: you lack Read permission on X." When the permission lookup itself broke — a wedged cache, a database blackout — the portal reported it as a denial, naming you, the permission and the path. Everything about that sentence was false except your name. People took it at face value and asked an administrator for access they already had, and the administrator found nothing wrong, because nothing was wrong with their access.

"Not found: X." A read that timed out looked exactly like a node that did not exist. For an AI agent this is worse than for a person: told a node is missing, an agent helpfully re-creates it — duplicating content — or deletes and rebuilds the "broken" path. Against a node that was merely unreachable for a moment, that is destructive, and we invited it.

"User unknown." The index of users is filled in the background after a restart. Until it arrives it is empty — and an empty index answered "no such user" instead of "ask me again in a moment". "No such user" is the input that drives sign-up and provisioning, which is how a storage stall once redirected a signed-in user to the sign-up form.

All three now distinguish a verdict from no verdict, decided in the one place that knows — the check or read that gave up. When the portal cannot answer, it says so: the content is still there, your access has not changed, and the fix is to wait a moment and reload rather than to delete anything or to go asking for permissions.

Refusals are unchanged in both directions. A real denial is still a denial, a genuinely missing node still reports Not found, and a genuinely new user still goes to onboarding — a check that cannot run still refuses, it simply no longer claims to know why.