`.forever` was the only way to say three different things — "this is durable",
"I have not answered yet", "I am still looking" — and the census said it was
carrying all three: 17 of 24 live booths (70%, up from 54% the day before).
Three of the four booths in the fleet awaiting an answer had been pinned by
hand as well, and 10 of the 17 were younger than the TTL, so the sentinel had
bought them nothing and was pressed pre-emptively.
Only the first meaning is what `keep` means. The other two are facts the
service already held and did not consult.
KEPT `.forever` present never swept (unchanged)
HELD an open pick, or marks we cannot read never swept (new)
EPHEMERAL everything else 24h (unchanged)
Viewing is activity: a deliberately-served response from a booth's own page
route writes `.viewed`, which is a dotfile and not a `.lock` dotfile, so
`_newest_mtime` already counts it. There is no new arithmetic — `booth_age_seconds`,
`is_expired` and `expires_in` are unchanged. Machine reads are excluded on
purpose: an agent must not be able to hold its own booth open by polling for
the answer it is waiting on.
The hold is unbounded, and what makes that safe is visibility plus two exits
that already existed. Every surface whose chrome the Booth owns says
`held until answered` where the countdown was, and `booth rm` / the UI x /
`DELETE /b/<n>` take a held booth exactly as they take a kept one. A hold is
protection from the timer, never from the operator.
Three cross-frontier panels ran and each found a class the others could not:
* the paraphrase panel found that two reads of one file are not one read of
one state — the contract's `is_held(marks_for(c), read_error(c))` could
resolve to `([], None)`, the pair that deletes. `hold_read` is one read.
* the code-review panel found, 4-of-4, that the booth header's board branch
rendered no lifetime at all; and that five of seven invariant tests passed
under the change that defeats them.
* the bug-hunt panel found four more paths where a failed read still
authorized a delete, and a `record_view` that followed a planted symlink.
`is_held` became `hold_reason`, which returns the reason rather than a bool
beside a string that can disagree with it.
Prediction, to re-count on or after 2026-10-06: the `.forever` rate falls to
the booths that are genuinely durable references. Only 4 booths carry marks at
all, so this rests on both halves of the unit; a null result cannot distinguish
a wrong diagnosis from a habit that outlived its need.
406 tests (341 before). Contract: docs/contracts/u4_derived_lifetime.contract.md
`page.locator("details:not([open])").all()` hands back POSITIONAL locators
that re-resolve against the current DOM, and `:not([open])` stops matching
an element the moment it is opened — so opening them one at a time shrinks
the set underneath the indices and leaves some closed. Those then report
OCCLUDED, which is exactly the false-positive class the block was added to
remove. One on booth-redesign, three on cr123a-to-d-sleeve, one on
denoise-first-run, and invisible as a bug because a false positive is
shaped like a finding.
Measured both hypotheses rather than guessing between them: per-element
loop against a single document-wide evaluate, at 150 ms and 1000 ms settle.
The loop reports them at either wait; the single pass reports none at
either. The variable was the method, not the timing.
One evaluate over the whole document now. All three pages clean.
Also carries the ROADMAP U5 row, the two-panel record in
persistent-memory.d/, and the memory index line for it.
THE PROBE. A control inside a CLOSED <details> is laid out but sits
outside its collapsed parent's box, so elementFromPoint at its centre
returns an ancestor and it reports OCCLUDED — 23 of them on sindra-set,
every one a false positive. Verified both ways before believing it:
closed, elementFromPoint returns div.gallery; opened, the button itself,
and a real trial click lands on it.
Opening every <details> rather than skipping them is the deliberate
choice. Skipping would make the probe quiet by declaring put-away
controls out of scope, and the add-note button inside
details.item-addnote is exactly the class of control this instrument
exists to check. Fourth false-positive class this probe has grown a
guard for; the other three are already in its header.
THE FLAG PARSER. Three cases that silently break and are cheap to
pin: the flags on either side of the glob (a session should not have to
remember which), a why carrying quotes, an em-dash, a newline and
non-ASCII, and --why with no value after it, which must produce usage
rather than eating the booth name and creating a booth called nothing.
313 tests.
The docstring claimed a no-argument run probes 'the booth index and
every booth linked from it'. main() probes argv[1:] or the default URL
and follows nothing — so a coverage claim that reads as 26 pages has
always been one. A probe that overstates its reach is worse than one
that states a small reach honestly, because this is the instrument
standing in for a class of bug the test suite structurally cannot see.
Also records the zsh trap that hid it: an unquoted $URLS holding twelve
space-separated URLs arrives as ONE argument, and the probe cheerfully
reports '2 page(s)' while covering two.
Operator: "release button covers delete button". Measured before touching
anything: release 58x24 at (323,266), × 30x30 at (349,268) — 30x22 px of
overlap on a 30px button, and `elementFromPoint` at the ×'s centre returned the
release form. The × I added yesterday was 100% unclickable from the moment it
shipped.
Cause: both were `position:absolute` on the same corner, each with its own
guessed offset, and `release` is the later sibling so it won. Replaced with one
flex row positioned once — release left, × right at the card corner where the
ephemeral lane's × already lives, so muscle memory transfers and neither can
drift back on top of the other when a label changes width.
Verified by measurement, not inspection: overlap 0 px, and clicks at each
control's centre now land on that control. The ephemeral lane's × and ★ were
re-checked and are unaffected.
ADDS scripts/layout-probe.py, because markup inspection STRUCTURALLY cannot see
this and I have now shipped two dead controls in two days by reading templates
instead of rendering them. It asks a real browser what a click at each
control's centre would hit.
It took four iterations to become trustworthy and the failures are the point:
1. `top.contains(el)` counted an ANCESTOR overlay as a hit -- the exact case
it exists to catch. Version one reported OK for a real overlay.
2. elementFromPoint is viewport-relative, so everything below the fold read
as occluded and buried the real findings.
3. getBoundingClientRect() on a WRAPPED INLINE element is the union of its
line boxes, whose centre lands in the gutter between them -- three zip
links reported occluded by their own parent. Real geometry, wrong question.
Only the fourth version fires on a genuine overlay while staying silent on the
clean page. Both controls were run; a probe never seen to fail proves nothing.
173 tests pass.
vh
Vuong Hoang