diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 0c2dd6946..464cd7ec6 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ Format adapted from [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/), al
 
 - naming a recurring voice now opens a guided who-is-this sheet. sol offers people it noticed around that voice, lets you search everyone in your journal, and keeps two people with similar names apart instead of quietly merging them. attaching a voice previews what will change first, and you can undo it.
 - the prompt about a recurring voice now names how often sol has heard it and opens that exact voice in the who-is-this sheet, and it stays quiet once you've dismissed that voice. from a transcript, you can now send a statement to the same sheet when the voice behind it isn't someone sol knows yet — and if sol hasn't heard it enough times, it says so plainly instead of dead-ending.
+- sol now reports one honest thinking-status state with one next action, so Health, Home, Thinking, support diagnostics, `sol top`, and `journal doctor` agree on whether thinking is available.
 - sol now suggests exact Gemini models, Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, instead of moving `latest` aliases that could quietly change which model your journal uses. if your journal had a moving flash alias saved, it now pins it to the matching exact model. if it had the old `gemini-pro-latest` alias saved, Thinking shows one action: choose an exact model in Thinking, because that alias has no single exact match.
 
 ### Fixed
diff --git a/docs/PROVIDERS.md b/docs/PROVIDERS.md
index 66c80573b..a58e403de 100644
--- a/docs/PROVIDERS.md
+++ b/docs/PROVIDERS.md
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ responses, schemas, images, URLs, or credentials.
 Provider failure is not a routing signal. Solstone surfaces the failure and
 recovery action for the active profile.
 
-- Quota failures are recorded in `health/talents.json`.
+- Quota failures are recorded through `record_brain_runtime_failure` into `health/brain.json`.
 - Endpoint reachability and contract errors are classified by the local
   endpoint wrapper.
 - Local generate retries once only for narrow capacity/truncation cases, using
diff --git a/docs/THINK.md b/docs/THINK.md
index fb59525fd..85efafc98 100644
--- a/docs/THINK.md
+++ b/docs/THINK.md
@@ -171,12 +171,14 @@ use_id = cortex_request(
 completed, timed_out = wait_for_uses([use_id], timeout=300)
 ```
 
-### Direct CLI Usage (Testing Only)
+### Brain Health CLI
 
-The `journal providers check` command is an ad-hoc provider check CLI. Cortex does not use it as the talent spawn path. For testing purposes, it can be invoked directly:
+Use `journal brain status` to inspect the active thinking lane and
+`journal brain refresh` to run one bounded active-brain check:
 
 ```bash
-journal providers check [TASK_FILE] [--provider PROVIDER] [--model MODEL] [--max-tokens N] [-o OUT_FILE]
+journal brain status
+journal brain refresh
 ```
 
 Provider resolution lives in `solstone/think/models.py`. Generate and cogitate
@@ -243,7 +245,8 @@ AI agent system and tool-calling support for solstone.
 | Command | Purpose |
 |---------|---------|
 | `journal cortex` | Agent orchestration service |
-| `journal providers check` | Ad-hoc provider check (testing only) |
+| `journal brain status` | Active-brain thinking status |
+| `journal brain refresh` | Bounded active-brain check |
 
 ## Architecture
 
diff --git a/docs/testing.md b/docs/testing.md
index 4ad042acf..ee0188302 100644
--- a/docs/testing.md
+++ b/docs/testing.md
@@ -85,9 +85,6 @@ triaged by asking which side is wrong. Current recorded findings:
 - `GET /app/network/api/status` materializes link CA key material on a read path:
   `ca_dir().exists()` first creates `journal/link/ca`, then `_ca_fingerprint()` calls
   `load_or_generate_ca()` and writes `private.pem` plus `cert.pem`.
-- `GET /app/home/api/pulse` can write the awareness `thinking_readiness` cache. This is
-  weaker than the link CA finding because it routes through the awareness owner and is
-  not an L3 read-verb violation.
 - `GET /app/network/api/status` reaches `_detect_lan_ip()`, which opens a UDP socket to
   `8.8.8.8:80` to read the kernel-selected source address. The WSGI test harness reaches
   that syscall.
diff --git a/solstone/talent/journal/references/cli.md b/solstone/talent/journal/references/cli.md
index 530b5313c..6c2e7b5e6 100644
--- a/solstone/talent/journal/references/cli.md
+++ b/solstone/talent/journal/references/cli.md
@@ -290,7 +290,7 @@ Cogitate talents have access to all `sol` commands. The following infrastructure
 - `sol import`
 - `journal config`
 - `journal cortex`
-- `journal providers check`
+- `journal brain refresh`
 - `journal observer` / `sol observe-*`
 - `journal sense`
 - `journal transcribe` / `journal describe`