diff --git a/docs/api.md b/docs/api.md
index d19361f4e..656b4093e 100644
--- a/docs/api.md
+++ b/docs/api.md
@@ -47,9 +47,13 @@ business semantics the raw spec does not carry.
 Business endpoints live under `/api/v2/memory/`, `/api/v2/ome/`, and
 `/api/v2/knowledge/`. Knowledge endpoints have their own dedicated
 reference at [docs/knowledge.md](knowledge.md) and are cross-referenced
-below. The operational endpoints `GET /health` and `GET /metrics` exist
-but are intentionally outside this reference — they are runtime probes
-for deployment, not part of the application contract.
+below. The operational endpoints `GET /health`, `GET /metrics` and
+`POST /api/v2/cascade/quiesce` exist but are intentionally outside this
+reference — they are runtime probes and shutdown hooks for deployment, not
+part of the application contract. `quiesce` drains the md → index queue and
+stops the watcher; calling it twice is safe, and it returns a bare status body
+(`quiesced`, `drained`, `pending_before`, `pending_after`,
+`failed_permanent`), see `docs/openapi.json`.
 
 `/api/v2` is the canonical prefix, aligned with the EverOS Cloud API. Every
 business endpoint is **also** served under `/api/v1`, kept as a legacy
@@ -74,7 +78,10 @@ before exposing the API on any other interface. See
 
 ### Response envelope
 
-Successful (`200 OK`) responses always wrap the payload in:
+Successful responses from the business endpoints (`/memory/*`,
+`/knowledge/*`) wrap the payload in the envelope below (`200 OK`, or
+`201 Created` for a knowledge document upload). `POST /api/v2/ome/trigger`
+and the operational endpoints return their body bare — see each section.
 
 ```json
 {
@@ -103,6 +110,28 @@ under load it can reach ~10–15 seconds. If you need read-your-write
 semantics, retry with backoff. The markdown file is durable
 regardless; index lag never loses data.
 
+The same applies one level up for everything an OME strategy produces
+**after** the extraction call returns: agent cases and skills (agent track),
+profiles, atomic facts. `/flush` returns once the episode is on disk; the
+`extract_agent_case` strategy then runs its own LLM call, and skill
+clustering runs after that, so `/get` with `memory_type: "agent_case"` can
+legitimately report `total_count: 0` for tens of seconds after a flush that
+returned `"extracted"` (14 s for the case and 32 s for the skill on a
+laptop with a hosted LLM). `GET /health`'s `cascade.pending` does **not**
+cover this window — it only tracks the md → index queue, which is empty
+while the strategy is still thinking. Poll `/get` with a budget instead.
+The agent track also has extraction gates of its own, applied before any
+LLM call: a trajectory with fewer than three tool-call rounds is rejected as
+too simple (`AgentCaseExtractor(min_tool_call_rounds=3)`, the EverOS
+default — so a session with no tool use never yields a case), and so is one
+that does not end on an assistant text message. Trajectories that pass
+those gates can still be dropped by the extractor's own "worth extracting"
+LLM filter. EverOS logs the skip as `agent_case_skipped_by_algo` with the
+memcell and session ids; the reason itself is on the adjacent everalgo log
+line, `skipping memcell (n_items=N): <reason> <detail>`. The same
+"seconds later" rule for every OME-produced kind is summarised in
+[how-memory-works.md](how-memory-works.md).
+
 ### Conventions
 
 #### Timestamps
@@ -199,7 +228,7 @@ parsing the human-readable `message` field.
 | `NOT_FOUND` | `404` | No | Requested resource does not exist |
 | `CONFLICT` | `409` | No | Operation conflicts with existing state (e.g. duplicate document) |
 | `INVALID_INPUT` | `422` | No | Request-body validation failure. Also covers `/search` / `/get` filter-DSL compile errors — the compile reason rides in `message` |
-| `EXTRACTION_EMPTY` | `422` | No | Document extraction produced no topics (empty or whitespace-only content) |
+| `EXTRACTION_EMPTY` | `422` | No | Knowledge document parsed but the extractor produced no topics. An empty or whitespace-only upload is rejected earlier as `INVALID_INPUT` (`"Uploaded file has no valid content."`) |
 | `BAD_REQUEST` | `400` | No | Path traversal attempt or other malformed input |
 | `UNSUPPORTED_FORMAT` | `415` | No | File format or modality not supported (e.g. unsupported `ContentItem` type, missing `ext` for `base64`) |
 | `EXTERNAL_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE` | `503` | **Yes** | An external service (LLM, embedding, rerank) returned an error or timed out |
@@ -1075,7 +1104,10 @@ Manually trigger a registered OME strategy.
 
 #### Response body
 
-`200 OK` returns:
+`200 OK` returns the body below **bare** — no `request_id` / `data`
+envelope. This is the one business-prefixed endpoint that behaves like
+the operational probes; clients that share a response parser with
+`/memory/*` must special-case it.
 
 | Field | Type | Notes |
 |---|---|---|
diff --git a/docs/knowledge.md b/docs/knowledge.md
index a7d7b1770..ee5aa90ea 100644
--- a/docs/knowledge.md
+++ b/docs/knowledge.md
@@ -547,6 +547,19 @@ re-embedding only happens when the content actually changes.
 
 Typical latency from file write to search availability: **1–3 seconds**.
 
+The read endpoints are served from what the cascade has populated —
+`GET /documents` and `GET /documents/{doc_id}` from SQLite, `/search` from
+the derived index — so they trail the write endpoints: right after
+`POST /documents` returns `201`, `GET /documents/{doc_id}` can still answer
+`404` (≈1 s observed on a laptop), and after `DELETE` returns `200` the
+document can stay readable for several seconds (≈11 s observed on the same
+machine) until the cascade has processed the removal. `PATCH` escapes the
+lag for `GET` because it updates SQLite synchronously and falls back to the
+markdown when the row is not there yet; a `category_id` change still reaches
+`/search` through the cascade like any other write. Clients that need
+read-your-write semantics should poll with a budget rather than assume the
+response is immediately visible.
+
 ## Supported file formats
 
 EverOS accepts text-based files natively. Binary formats require the