Ahoy lifecycle tracking silently drops changes made with no Current actor

🤖 From Claude:

AhoyTrackable (included in ApplicationRecord) tracks create/update/destroy for every model, but track_lifecycle_event opens with:

return unless Current.user || Current.source

Current.user is only set for a signed-in request (ApplicationController#set_current_user), and Current.source is set in exactly two places (public_forms_controller, events/public_registrations_controller). Everything else that writes without a signed-in user leaves no trace at all — no event, no error, no log line.

Verified

Calling scholarship.accept_agreement!(by: "recipient") with no actor set:

Where this bites today

• Scholarship accept/decline on the public callout. Events::CalloutsController does skip_before_action :authenticate_user! and never sets Current.source, so a logged-out recipient accepting or declining their agreement produces no Ahoy event. The bespoke scholarship_agreement_responses log is currently the only record of it.
• Anything outside a request — jobs, rake tasks, console, webhooks (Stripe). These are dropped twice over: the actor guard, and Analytics::LifecycleBuffer only flushing in ApplicationController's after_action, so a buffered event outside a request is never written.

Recommendation

Close the request-shaped hole narrowly rather than removing the guard.

1. Default a source for every actorless request — one line in ApplicationController: set Current.source when there's no signed-in user, so any public flow (present or future) is covered without each controller having to remember. Named per controller where it matters, generic otherwise.
2. Opt non-request contexts in explicitly — jobs, webhooks, and rake tasks set their own Current.source ("stripe_webhook", "job:x"), and LifecycleBuffer needs a flush path that doesn't depend on a controller.
3. Don't just delete the guard. Seeds, imports, and the test suite would start emitting events in volume, which is presumably why it's there.

Acceptance

• A logged-out recipient accepting a scholarship agreement produces an Ahoy event attributed to a named source.
• A model write inside a job produces an event (or is a documented, deliberate exclusion).
• Specs cover both, so the guard can't silently re-open the hole.

Start in ApplicationController, Events::CalloutsController, and Analytics::LifecycleBuffer to trace how Current.source is set and when lifecycle events are flushed. Reproduce the logged-out scholarship agreement flow and a model write outside a request, then add focused specs showing that the public action is attributed and non-request behavior is explicitly handled.