[thatswiftdev]

What

Stage 2b of the xerj adoption arc (Lionidas plans/20261021T032458Z-xerj-stage2-plan.md, part B; evidence: Stage-1 spike on lionidas wt/xerj-stage1).

• EsCompatRetriever — a Retriever over any Elasticsearch-compatible HTTP endpoint. BM25-only by design: the Stage-1 A/B measured parity with in-memory BM25 (0.400 vs 0.400 top-3) at ~42–51 ms vs ~18 s per query over a 26k-doc corpus, while hybrid/semantic regressed and cost 10–30 s per fresh query. Hit ids carry provenance (<docSha256>#<ordinal> / note:<id>), so consumers' citation contracts are untouched. Failures throw — degradation is the runner's decision.
• xerjSidecar() — optional one-call runner: locate/spawn the sidecar (loopback, pinned flags per xerj's security model), health-wait, resumable reconcile (mget existence checks + bulk retries) from a consumer-supplied corpus enumerator (butler has no list-all seam). Returns {retriever, degraded, indexedCount, stop}; every failure is a degraded result with the explicit install hint — never a throw, never a silent install, nothing spawns at import.
• Helpers chunkToEsDoc / noteToEsDoc; hermetic tests over a fake ES endpoint (injectable fetch/spawn).

Verification

• pnpm test: 36 files, 209 passed, 5 skipped (pre-existing pg/env skips) — including 7 new tests covering provenance mapping, throw contract, attach/reconcile/idempotent-skip, and both degraded paths (attach-only miss; spawn-never-healthy kills the child and surfaces the install hint).
• Genericity law held: no Lionidas vocabulary in butler; the corpus enumerator is the consumer's.

Notes for reviewer

• Merge is operator-only (per repo workflow); lionidas pins this commit in its Stage-2 wiring PR after this merges.
• BM25-only is deliberate (Stage-1 verdict); the embedder question reopens only with a multilingual model behind proxy mode.