When the dashboard gateway has no local session cookie, it rendered a
click-through /login interstitial — even though the Nous portal's
/oauth/authorize auto-approves any current member of the dashboard's org
and is a silent 302 when the user already holds a portal session. For the
common case (clicking a hosted-agent dashboard link while signed in to the
portal) that interstitial click is pure friction.
This makes the gate auto-initiate the OAuth redirect on an unauthenticated
HTML document load instead of rendering the interstitial, when exactly one
interactive provider is registered. A one-shot loop-guard cookie
(hermes_sso_attempt, 60s TTL) ensures that a genuinely absent portal
session (the portal bounces back still-unauthenticated) falls back to the
/login page after exactly one bounce rather than ping-ponging forever. The
marker is cleared on a successful callback and whenever the gate falls back
to /login.
Security: this removes a human CLICK, not a security check. The redirect
lands on the existing /auth/login route and runs the unchanged PKCE
auth-code flow; token verification, audience checks, redirect-URI match,
and org-membership checks are all untouched. /api/* fetches still get the
401 JSON envelope (never a 302 a fetch() would follow opaquely), and with
two or more providers the /login chooser still renders.
Phase 1 of the cloud-auto-discovery work.