No confirmed blockers in the complete local diff for [#18359](https://git.cafe/pingdotgg/t3code/pulls/18359).

- Recovery preserves an existing thread branch and recreates a deleted branch from the project’s current named branch. Same-named tags and stale status caches are covered.
- Failures stop before provider startup, preserve nonfinal retries, and persist branch/path errors without raw Git diagnostics. Interruptions propagate.
- The implementation stays within the existing service and workspace lease. No wire-contract, migration, auth, permission, approval, sandbox, trust, or MCP-semantic changes; no committed scratch files.
- No additional test is needed for a distinct missed failure identified in this review.

Minor note: fallback can change the conversation’s code context and cause a later non-fast-forward push rejection. This follows the explicit product decision and is not a blocker; no force-push is introduced.

Verification: all **34 turn-start tests passed**, the focused Git-driver test passed, and `git diff --check` passed. New error templates processed approximately 3,000-token malformed inputs through failure formatting in **3.56 ms**, with persisted messages bounded to 4,096 characters. No regex or parser loops were added or edited.

Gaps: runtime transcript remains scheduled after review. No browser verification applies to this server-only diff. Other platforms, providers, reconnects, and relay/tunnel connections were not exercised directly. Published CI covers the original head, not this unpushed local revision.

FRICTION tooling|Combined forge output was truncated|Read comments separately with filtered structured output.

VERDICT: MERGE