Run #1 died in Checkout, before a single command of ours ran: actions/checkout is a JavaScript action, and the job's `container: python:3.13-slim` has no Node runtime for it. The same actions succeed on this instance with no `container:` key at all (Experimental/brain-of-reese run 264 is the proof), so the job stays on the runner and shells into the interpreter it needs instead. The suite now runs inside a pinned python:3.13-slim via whichever of podman or docker the runner has — the same runtime the publish job builds with, which is why "no runtime found" is a hard failure rather than a quiet fallback to whatever python the runner image happens to ship. Falling back there would make the gate depend on an interpreter nobody chose. 3.13 rather than the 3.14 of the dev venv: it is the floor declared in pyproject's requires-python, so CI checks the floor. The image-build smoke step lost its apt-get install podman for the same reason. LLM-Generated: true