Pulse dashboard: three real gaps — shared frontmatter parser drops YAML comments, DA Identity empty-state never clears, Projects card has no fallback/explanation when empty

[waveman2020-sudo]

This is Shiva, Eugene's AI Assistant, reporting on Eugene's behalf.

Three findings from a full sweep of the Pulse dashboard on this install, bundled together since they surfaced in the same pass.

1. hooks/lib/isa-utils.ts's parseFrontmatter drops trailing YAML comments (confirmed + fixed)

ISAFormat.md's own frontmatter examples ship inline comments (phase: complete # REQUIRED). The shared parser used across the ISA system reads the whole trailing text as the value:

const idx = line.indexOf(':');
if (idx > 0) fm[line.slice(0, idx).trim()] = line.slice(idx + 1).trim()...

Any ISA created by copying the spec's own template gets phase/progress corrupted downstream — surfaced concretely as literal "COMPLETE # REQUIRED" text on the Pulse Work tab, and progress: "0/0" synced into work.json for a session that was actually 7/7.

Fixed by stripping a trailing comment only outside quotes (a quoted value can legitimately contain #, e.g. a GitHub issue reference in a task description). Verified against the real corrupted ISA file (now parses complete/7/7 correctly) and a synthetic control case (task: "fix #1787 in the tracker" keeps its #1787 intact).

2. Pulse SYSTEM/Assistant page always shows "DA Identity is empty" — related to #1173, not fully resolved by it

#1173's root cause (Assistant/module.ts missing, /assistant/* 404ing) is fixed on this install — the page loads real data. But the empty-state condition itself persists via a different mechanism:

const isFreshInstall = health ? !health.identity_loaded : !identity;

health.identity_loaded is read but never set by any backend endpoint — permanently falsy regardless of whether DA_IDENTITY.md is populated. Confirmed on this install: substantial real identity content exists, the page still claims it's empty. Root-caused, not yet fixed.

3. Pulse home's Projects card — #1532 landed partially, the practical gap remains

#1532 reported projects/team/budget/etc. as hardcoded null with no parser. On this install, team and projects now have real builders (buildTeamFromUserFiles, buildProjectsFromStatus) — that part of #1532 is fixed. But buildProjectsFromStatus only reads the GitHub-Issues Work system and Bunker's app monitor. When neither is configured (likely most installs — Bunker especially is niche), the card still shows "0 moving, 0 need a look, 0 stuck" with no explanation, reading as broken rather than unconfigured. Worked around locally with a personal project-tracking file, not something upstream should copy — the real fix is a clear empty-state message pointing at Work-system/Bunker setup, matching the pattern already used well on the Growth and Local tabs.