Commit Graph
15 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh 32e3ed65e1 fix(u6): fold the cold contract panel — the import selection gap, and a document arguing with itself
/heid-contract-review panel 01M35BWCJ806MT75NA630Y4WFH. The headline arrived
from all four arms independently and it is a missing feature, not a wording
problem.

`bench import --apply` registered every candidate, while the same contract says
roughly 14 of 35 are reference bookmarks that must stay on the board. There was
no selection mechanism between the dry-run report and the write -- so the write
path did the exact thing this unit's rationale calls impossible, tell a bench
from a bookmark by its URL, silently, to rows that belong where they are. The
report existed precisely because the decision is not mechanizable. `--apply`
now takes the ids the operator names; a bare `--apply` is refused and an
unknown id is refused, both writing nothing.

Two solo findings, both real:

- A successful registration could push the registry past the size its own
  reader refuses, so the LAST bench added would make every other bench
  invisible while reporting success. The writer now respects the reader's cap.
- The credential ban covered bench URLs and not `booth link`, the door this
  unit did not touch -- and the board renders on an unauthenticated LAN
  surface. A password can no longer reach it through either door. A small
  deliberate widening, named rather than smuggled.

Cap semantics were readable three ways (refuse / clip-for-display /
truncate-and-store) with a different build behind each, 4-of-4. Now stated per
field: name and owner truncate, url and state are refused at the write and are
DAMAGE at the read. url is not a display budget -- INV-7 promises the click
goes to the posted address byte for byte, and a clipped URL keeps that promise
in the type system while breaking it in the browser. The code had been clipping
it; fixed.

Two passages disagreed about one character: INV-7's specimen named "a trailing
slash on a non-empty path" as something normalization changes, while the rule
list keeps it and INV-6 makes the two spellings two benches. The rule list is
right; the specimen was wrong. Found by 3-of-4.

Also: INV-6's component list was illustrative where it had to be exhaustive and
was short scheme and port; "writes nothing" appeared twice with different
lists; the dead marker's predicate was readable two ways with 221 rows riding
on it; and INV-2's falsifier read as though three callers agreeing pinned
something, when three callers of one wrong predicate agree perfectly -- the
table's expected values are the real check and now say so.

597 -> 604 tests.
2026-09-22 14:12:36 -07:00
vh 8a7af3eb08 fix(u6): fold the cold code-review panel — four-arm convergence on three surface clauses
/heid-code-review panel 01M35CK8YKEKMV7T15JXEF6A8N, verdict NOT drift-zero.
Three findings arrived from all four arms independently, and they share a
shape: a contract clause written as prose and never converted into an
assertion. That is the lens working.

- The panel dropped the added date the contract promised to show.
- `bench ls` printed no ids, and the URL it printed was truncated to 52 columns
  so the line was not pasteable into `bench state|rm`. The test's docstring
  claimed it printed ids and asserted nothing of the kind.
- `bench import` printed the description instead of the raw URL beside each
  normalized id, hiding the collapse the clause exists to expose.
- An IPv6 literal lost its brackets: http://[::1]:8080/a normalized to
  http://::1:8080/a, a broken identity that no re-post can match. Bracketed
  literals are re-wrapped; an unbracketed one is refused rather than guessed.
- A deeply-nested JSON RecursionError escaped read_benches' except pair. The
  byte cap does not help -- 200k open brackets is 200 KB.
- An empty board hid the whole benches panel, registration form included.
- The link refusal classified by captured-text emptiness, which bash can erase;
  it now answers with a B:/N sentinel so no name reads as "not a booth".

INV-4's tie-break falsifier could not fail: _write_all serializes with
sort_keys=True, so both insertion orders came back already id-sorted and
removing the tie-break left the test green. It now calls order_benches
directly. Same class as the five vacuous U4 falsifiers, found by a cold reader
rather than by us.

Also from the arms' per-invariant vacuity pass: INV-6 had no vector pinning a
non-default port as part of the identity; INV-3 asserted only that links/ was
absent; INV-8's hashed sequence omitted a read verb; INV-9's AST walk is
defeated by a string import. All closed.

Contract amended where the code was right: `updated` means last mutation, the
id cap is write-only because the id is the locator controls post back, INV-8's
file list includes the lock sidecar it always mandated. Every line number is
out of the prose -- the panel found two already stale.

565 -> 593 tests. Nothing declined.
2026-09-22 13:50:40 -07:00
vh 1c3ce5ddb5 feat(u6): benches — a registry with identity, and the rule enforced
The standing link board carried three jobs because only one of them had a
surface. Re-measured before contracting, its 221 rows split into 178 booth
announcements (156 already dead) and 43 non-booth rows, of which 8 are the same
bench re-posted. U5 gave the booth announcement a home; this gives the running
service one, and refuses the one shape that now has somewhere better to go.

- booth/benches.py (new, stdlib-only and sibling-free): the Bench record, URL
  normalization as the identity, a lenient read on the render path and a strict
  read on the write path, atomic replace under an flock, and a stated total
  order (state rank, name casefolded, id).
- links.booth_target: ONE predicate for "is this a booth URL", consumed by the
  CLI refusal, the board's dead marker and bench import. Host-agnostic,
  path-shaped, percent-decoded, never raises.
- booth link refuses a booth URL, names `booth new --why`, and writes nothing —
  not the row, not the board directory, not the announcement.
- The board marks rows whose booth has been swept. Nothing here deletes a row:
  removal stays the operator's two clicks through the existing bulk control.
- booth bench add|ls|state|rm|import. import writes nothing without --apply and
  never edits links.md.
- docs/archive/links-2026-09-22.md: the board archived verbatim into git.

Identity is the FULL normalized URL, not the origin, and that was measured:
origin identity collapses the 43 non-booth rows to 19 groups by merging eight
distinct gitea repositories into one row, three unrelated HuggingFace model
cards into one, and the two LRPG surfaces on 10.100.10.50:8321 — the design
doc's own example of two real benches — into one. Full-URL identity still
collapses both cases that doc names: talk 5 to 1, Peedlar 3 to 1.

booth link is NOT deprecated. Roughly 14 of the 35 distinct non-booth targets
are reference bookmarks for which the board is the right and only home; the
design doc's plan to deprecate it would have evicted a third of its live
content. Corrected there, along with what "normalized URL" means.

The seam review found three real defects in the contract before any code: the
claim that test_stdlib_only already forbids sibling imports (it exempts `booth`
on purpose), naming resolve_booth as the dead marker's existence check (it
raises HTTPException(404), so one swept booth would have 404'd the whole board
page), and silence on percent-encoding (booth links are emitted through
quote(name, safe=""), so a raw comparison marks every encoded booth dead
forever). That both list_booths and sweep_once skip the registry was verified
against the real functions rather than assumed.

444 -> 555 tests. Deployed and verified live: 23/23 booths 200, and the board
renders 156 dead of 221 rows, matching an independent pre-implementation count.

NOT TAGGED: both cold gates are in flight (contract review
01M35BWCJ806MT75NA630Y4WFH, code review 01M35CK8YKEKMV7T15JXEF6A8N) and the
bug-hunt has not run. Per the v0.2.0 lesson, the tag waits for the gates.
2026-09-22 13:25:32 -07:00
vh 5c20e2f4d5 fix(u3): seven defects two cold panels found in the declared seam
The /heid-code-review and /heid-bug-hunt panels, artifact-only over the U3
diff, between them found four real defects and three vacuous falsifiers. Both
snapshots predate the contract-review fixes, so two of their findings were
already closed; the rest are here.

Prototype pollution in the placement maps. A mark id and a question key are
both [A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9._-]*, so `toString` and `constructor` are legal in
each. Against a plain `{}` an anchor naming NO mark returned an inherited
function, passed the guard meant to reject it, and threw on .questions.length
-- aborting placement before the tail, so one typo in author markup cost the
page every ask. The `placed` set had the mirror bug: inherited
`got.constructor` read as already-placed and silently dropped a question.
Object.create(null), three times. Found independently by both panels.

A declaring page was not served as written. read_text() opens in
universal-newline mode, so a CRLF report came back LF, and errors="replace"
replaced every byte that was not valid UTF-8. That is this unit's headline
promise, broken by the read itself, and the test could not see it because its
fixture was LF-only ASCII. The verbatim branch reads and serves bytes now; the
decoded copy answers only "does it declare the seam?".

A submit anchor inside the author's own <form> lost ours -- the parser drops a
nested form element outright -- while the code still recorded the pick as
submitted, so no fallback was appended. Every control's form= pointed at
nothing and the button did nothing. It counts as submitted only if the form
survived.

A broken pick's diagnostic never rendered from a submit-only anchor: an errored
pick's submit block is empty, and mounting that then marking it placed made the
tail skip the "broken ask" box entirely. The anchor is left alone instead.

An author's own element could hijack the open-ask chip -- id="bk-ask-winner-
background" satisfies any prefix rule, hyphen boundary included. The chip now
searches only elements this script mounted, which is the identity the deleted
bk-ask-<id>-top anchor used to guarantee, and takes the earliest by
compareDocumentPosition.

No error boundary around fragment rendering. A .marks.json that is well-formed
JSON with a wrong-shaped answer hydrates with no error and then raises in the
macro; this endpoint renders every pick on every load of the report, so that
was the whole seam gone while hold_read called the file readable. Reproduced
before building for it. _safe_fragments gives it the per-mark leniency
_hydrate_safe already applies one layer down.

The gallery and marks pages still 500 on that same entry. Measured at 42ea67f
-- it predates this unit, they render the same macro with no guard, and the
gallery is named out of scope in the contract. Recorded, not quietly widened:
persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-a-wrong-shaped-answer-500s-the-gallery.md

Also corrected: several comments claimed a multi-question pick POSTs a 400
unless every question is answered. It does not -- an empty submission is
refused, a partial one is recorded on purpose. The real reason an unplaced
question must still be appended is that a question which never reaches the page
cannot be answered at all.

Vacuity pass rebuilt around the rule this session learned: the mutation comes
from the invariant's claim, never from the falsifier's example. 21 mutations,
21 caught, unmutated control green. Getting there took three rounds -- it
passed INV-3 with the contract's own mutation, then found its own fix's hole,
then flagged seven stale mutations and one genuinely vacuous fixture whose
sibling-mark arrangement made the right answer also the first answer.

444 tests. Deployed and verified: 23/23 booths 200, and all four live verbatim
reports served at exactly +46 bytes -- len(EMBED_SCRIPT_TAG) -- with the
authors' own wrappers and headings intact and no console errors.
2026-09-22 11:22:37 -07:00
vh 87e2c5364c feat(u3): a verbatim report declares the seam, the Booth mounts into it
A booth that ships its own index.html was served through ten regular
expressions applied to markup the Booth did not write: six in
wrap_verbatim_html hunting for somewhere to hang a favicon and a chip, four
in booth/inline.py substituting rendered ask markup into the author's own
tags. Both worked. Both were the most fragile thing in the service, on the
path the operator uses most.

The whole class is replaced by a declared seam. A report carries one line —
<script src="/_booth/embed.js" defer></script> — and the chrome mounts
through DOM APIs. What the server does to author HTML is now, in full:

    return html if declares_embed(html) else html + EMBED_SCRIPT_TAG

Two substring tests and a concatenation. Both of the old wrapper's hard
constraints stop existing rather than being satisfied more carefully:
nothing can displace a leading doctype into quirks mode and nothing can push
the charset meta out of its detection window, because nothing in front of
them ever moves. A page that declares the seam is served exactly as written.

Fragments are still rendered by the _ask_inline.html macros and handed over
GET /b/<name>/embed.json; embed.js places them and decides nothing. Openness
comes from open_marks, order from (created, id), questions in declaration
order. A single-question pick normalizes to key None, so the payload carries
questions as a list rather than an object — keying by name would serialize
that as the string "null".

Placement is an anchor fill, not a replacement: el.insertAdjacentHTML(
'beforeend'), so an author's wrapper and its contents survive. The regex it
replaces was eating the opening tag of dfa-concepts' styled .ask blocks and
orphaning their headings, live, unreported.

data-booth-mark is canonical; data-booth-ask stays a kept alias because two
live reports use it. The comment placeholders are dropped — no users.

Declared cost: the verbatim path now needs JavaScript. The never-invisible
guarantee holds through the index badge and /b/<name>/marks, both of which
render server-side.

Deleted: booth/inline.py entire, wrap_verbatim_html and its six patterns,
_BACK_CHIP, asks_chip, inject_asks, FAVICON_LINK, the styles() macro.

Tests 410 -> 434. tests/test_embed_browser.py drives a real Chromium: the
placement algorithm and the form= binding of a scattered multi-question form
cannot be observed any other way, and that binding was measured rather than
assumed (N=3 per condition, with a form-first positive control and a
points-at-nothing negative control).

Contract: docs/contracts/u3_declared_embed_seam.contract.md, with the
in-session seam review and the cold contract panel both recorded. Two of the
panel's findings were code fixes: a vacuous INV-3 falsifier that a renamed
regex walked straight through, and a bare-substring seam detection that read
a report merely quoting the path as declaring it and silently served it with
no chrome.
2026-09-22 10:43:41 -07:00
vh c3a97c1b64 feat(u4): a booth's lifetime is derived from its state, not from a boolean
`.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
2026-09-22 09:44:25 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 95beede3c3 fix(manifest)!: the size cap opened a service-wide hang; close it
The diff-scoped bug-hunt panel, four arms, artifact-only. Its strongest
finding is one I created two hours earlier while hardening the reader.

`stat` reports size 0 for a FIFO and 0 for a symlink to /dev/zero, so both
sail under the byte cap added for the RecursionError round — and then
`read_text` either blocks in read() with no EOF, so the except never runs,
or allocates until the kernel intervenes. `list_booths` reads every booth
on every GET / and /healthz, so ONE such file stalls the front page for the
whole service, with no error and no recovery short of a restart.
Reproduced before believing it (timeout returned 124). S_ISREG is checked
BEFORE the size in both modules now; verified against the live service with
two FIFOs planted, which answered 200 in 36ms.

The shape worth carrying: st_size answers a different question than "can
this be read", and a bound that trusts it inherits everything it does not
mean. A hardening fix opened a worse hole than the one it closed.

THE UPLOAD PATH WROTE ABOVE ITS OWN CLEANUP GUARD (4/4)

A failed manifest write orphaned a .uploaded half-booth with no files in
it — and because the temp name now carries a random suffix, nothing ever
overwrote the leak, and .booth.json.<hex>.tmp is not a .lock, so
_newest_mtime counted it and kept that empty booth past every sweep. The
uniqueness fix from the previous round is what made the leak permanent.
Both writes moved inside the guard; the temp is removed on every exit path.

DAMAGED BYTES ARE KEPT, NOT REPLACED (4/4, INV-6)

Marks made this explicit in v0.2.1 and this write path contradicted it: a
manifest that failed on ONE field lost the others with it, including a why
the re-announcer may never have kept anywhere. It diverges from marks in
HOW it honours the rule — marks refuse and answer 409 because the
operator's judgment is not restatable; a manifest quarantines and proceeds,
because refusing would fail `booth add` and lose the files it was copying.

ONE OPENNESS PREDICATE, AS U2 SAID (2/4)

`booth answer` spelled out `if m.answer is None` while `booth marks` asked
`open_marks`, so a partially-answered pick read as done to one verb and
open to the other — at the same instant, on the same booth. U2's INV-2 put
openness in one function precisely so they could not drift. The mirror case
is fixed too: a pick that hydrates broken is refused by the web route, so
`answer --wait` polled an hour on a form nothing could ever land.

ALSO

- now_stamp was whole-second while the importer had moved to microseconds,
  and '-' sorts before '.', so a later mark came out ahead of an earlier
  import inside the same second. One format; the previous round's ordering
  fix had opened this one.
- `_broken` was the third of three directory-name fallbacks and the one
  still handing a raw name into a card's sub-line.
- An identical re-announce rewrote the file and reset the TTL. `booth link`
  does this on every post to the standing board.
- The importer's return went through the bare _hydrate, not _hydrate_safe.
- A marks document could be written larger than it can be read back, and
  then read as no marks at all. Refused at the write instead.
- `choice` reached the answer builder raw while `notes` beside it did not.

AND ONE FINDING DELIBERATELY NOT FULLY CLOSED

The mtime-restore race is real. The clean fix — ignore a booth directory's
own mtime whenever the booth holds anything — also silently retires the
documented rule that releasing a kept board resets its clock, which the CLI
header, the README and a deliberately-written test all pin. That is a TTL
doctrine change, not a bug fix, and an existing test caught the attempt.
The concrete half is fixed (a failing os.utime escaped and 500'd the
route); the race is stated in the code where the next reader will meet it.

341 tests. Live service restarted, 24/24 booth pages verified.
2026-09-22 02:27:18 -07:00
Vuong Hoang c015a917ee fix(manifest): fold in both cross-frontier panels — and a live hole in v0.2.2
Two four-arm artifact-only rounds landed together: the contract paraphrase
(against the pre-seam-review capture) and the code-vs-contract conformance
review (against the amended one), correctly firewalled from each other.
The conformance round found ZERO drift in the strict sense — the code is a
clause-for-clause implementation of the contract — and the weight of both
rounds landed one layer down, in what green tests structurally cannot
report. Full triage in persistent-memory.d/.

A LIVE HOLE IN RELEASED CODE, FOUND ON THE SIBLING MODULE

v0.2.2 adopted the RecursionError finding from the bug-hunt round and
closed half of it: `_hydrate_safe` guards hydration, but `json.loads` runs
above it in `_read_raw`, whose catch list covers neither RecursionError nor
MemoryError. A 400 KB file of nothing but brackets in any ONE booth
therefore still returned 500 for `/` and `/healthz` across every booth on
the service. Confirmed by running it before believing it.

Both modules now bound the read by `stat` before touching the bytes and
catch both classes anyway, so raising a bound later cannot quietly re-open
the hole. The strict half of the marks asymmetry refuses everything the
lenient half tolerates, or a file that reads as "no marks" gets replaced by
a write that believed it.

THE WHY-WIPE

`booth new x --why "..."` then `booth add x out/*.png` erased the sentence
the first command existed to record. Omitted flags meant empty strings and
empty strings overwrote. Two arms predicted it from the contract's wording
alone; every test here passed --why on both calls and so could not see it.
Omitted now means unchanged and an explicit --why "" still clears — the
shell carries the distinction by leaving the variable UNSET, not empty.

--title WAS WRITE-ONLY

Stored, flag-surfaced, rendered nowhere. 4/4, and independently top-ranked
by every arm of the paraphrase round. It lands on the booth page heading
with the directory name beside it, because the directory name is the
identity the operator navigates by and refers to positionally.

THREE TESTS THAT COULD NOT FAIL

- test_the_write_is_atomic asserted no *.tmp survived, which a plain
  write_text passes. It asserts the inode changes now. (The first
  replacement was ALSO vacuous — it spied on os.open, which Path.write_text
  reaches through io.open in C and never touches. Recorded in the test,
  because writing a second vacuous test while fixing the first is exactly
  the failure this round is about.)
- The INV-3 preservation test passed against an implementation that
  regenerated `created` every time, because _now() is whole-second
  resolution and back-to-back writes share a stamp. Seeded from 2019 now.
- test_announcing_is_activity passed whether or not _newest_mtime counted
  the manifest, because writing it bumps the directory mtime either way.
  The directory's clock is put back, leaving the file as the only thing
  that can keep the booth alive.

ALSO

- The title fallback skipped the normalizer the explicit value gets; a
  directory name may legally carry a newline and run to 255 bytes.
- Every writer derived the same .booth.json.tmp. Marks are protected from
  that by their flock; the manifest has none, so uniqueness stands in.
- test_stdlib_only was blind to relative imports in all four modules.
- INV-1 had no guard at all; INV-5 named two different promises; the
  negative render states were asserted on the index only.

Contract amended throughout: the 4 GB case is a stat-checked bound rather
than a return constraint, every field of an error-carrying record has a
stated value, INV-1 no longer contradicts INV-3, repo-wide rules are named
in words instead of by a colliding number, and touches admits the macro
partial the implementation added.

329 tests.
2026-09-22 01:29:27 -07:00
Vuong Hoang fac83de8f4 docs(u5): name the verbatim-booth boundary as U3's, not a gap
Five live booths serve the author's HTML raw and the Booth owns no
header there to put a provenance line into — it reaches those pages
through six regexes injected into arbitrary markup, which is the defect
U3 exists to fix. Their index cards carry provenance like everything
else. Written down so the boundary reads as a boundary rather than as
something this unit forgot. Verified on pewpew-ui-brief.
2026-09-22 01:05:05 -07:00
Vuong Hoang ac35f2441f docs(u5): state what the contract deliberately leaves out
The out-of-scope block is load-bearing for the cross-frontier review
gates — without negative constraints their signal-to-noise drops sharply,
and both /heid-code-review and /heid-bug-hunt refuse to fire without one.
Written for the reviewer, but it is the same list the roadmap gate
produced: the what-landed feed is parked for v1.1, nothing enforces that
a booth must announce itself (rsync is a documented path and never runs
the CLI), and the manifest describes rather than decides — U4 owns
lifetime.
2026-09-22 00:49:22 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 109190b0d6 docs(u5): contract for self-announcing booths, plus its seam review
Blast-radius pass first (graphify explain list_booths + grep over every
mkdir and every dotfile skip), then the contract, then a caller-side seam
review against the real sibling module surfaces.

The seam review earned its place again: the contract asserted that the
upload path's filename dedupe set must gain MANIFEST_FILE or an uploaded
file could collide with the manifest. safe_upload_name strips leading
dots, so that collision is unreachable — and the UPLOAD_MARKER entry
already sitting in that set has never been able to matter either. A
scope item the contract reasoned its way into and the sibling refutes.

Operator calls settled 2026-09-22: flags on the existing new/add verbs
rather than a second announce verb; unannounced booths get a quiet
marker rather than nothing; U5 adds provenance only and does not add a
second index ordering keyed on announcement time (parked for v1.1).

Cold contract panel dispatched to heid before this landed; its findings
fold in before any code ships.
2026-09-22 00:37:35 -07:00
vh 5e41108cd3 fix(marks): a write over a damaged mark file was wiping the booth's judgment
Three defects and a missing test, all surfaced by the cross-frontier contract
panel dispatched before implementation and triaged after it (heid, four arms,
artifact-only, thread 01M33VSNFER4N1554G0Y0VC9C8). v0.2.0 was already tagged and
announced to fifteen handles when they landed, which is the argument for running
the gate at all.

DATA LOSS. `marks_for` is deliberately lenient — an unparseable `.marks.json`
reads as "no marks" so a review page still loads. The write path inherited that
leniency through the same reader, so one flag click appended a single entry to an
empty list and atomically replaced the file: every mark in the booth gone,
silently, from a click. Reproduced first, then fixed.

The fix is an asymmetry, not a retreat from leniency. Reads stay lenient; writes
go strict through `_read_raw_strict`, which distinguishes bytes-present-but-
unreadable from absent and valid-but-empty, and raises `MarksCorrupt`. The
damaged bytes are left on disk. Routes answer 409 rather than 500 — the service
is fine and the request was well-formed, the state on disk is not — and the body
says what to do, because the alternative the operator reaches for otherwise is
deleting the file, which is the thing being protected. The CLI says it in one
line instead of a traceback.

A PICK COULD NOT TARGET AN ITEM. `Mark.target` carried one, `marks_for_target`
retrieved by it, and the panel already rendered "on <item>" — but `declare_pick`
had no parameter for it, so no session could produce one. A question about one
artifact is the whole point of the 2026-09-09 inline-placement ruling; the door
was simply missing.

THE IMPORTER STRANDED AN ANSWER. A stem already present as a mark was skipped
wholesale. If a session had re-declared that stem through marks while the
operator's choice sat in the legacy sidecar, that choice was lost permanently —
reads are forbidden from looking at sidecars. The declaration is still skipped
(idempotence holds) but a legacy answer is now adopted when the existing mark is
an unanswered pick, and an answer made through marks is never overwritten.

INV-3 NAMED A SURFACE NOTHING TESTED. All four arms converged on it: the rule
protects gallery tile, zoom view and doc view; the falsifiable check covered one.
The doc view was implemented and untested, so shipping it unmarked would have
passed. Three tests now, one per surface.

The contract carries the full triage, including two findings accepted and NOT
closed: INV-2's and INV-5's checks comply in letter — openness can be re-derived
without spelling the grepped pattern, and importlib inside a function defeats the
AST walk. Both describe a future careless change, and the honest statement is
that these checks raise the cost of drifting rather than making it impossible.
Recorded rather than papered over.

Also pins the three prose ambiguities the panel found, normatively and once each:
what counts as open, the three distinct broken-declaration cases, and INV-6,
which had named a helper that does not exist and forbidden the calls that helper
must make.

253 tests.
2026-09-21 23:54:42 -07:00
vh c7f9437a64 feat(marks): one primitive for operator judgment, so the loop stops running through chat
Five mechanisms existed to get one question next to one artifact. Three of
them were the same thing wearing different clothes, and the third of the three
had no code at all: the operator picked winners out of a 270-image set and
told the session in conversation. `sindra-finalists` is 86 items, every one
captioned, with the selection encoded in the booth's NAME.

A MARK is operator judgment attached to a target — the booth, or one item in
it, addressed by the `rel` U1 established as item identity. Three shapes:

  pick — one of N options a session declared in advance   (was: an ask)
  note — free text the operator volunteered               (had nothing)
  flag — this one                                         (had nothing)

One file per booth, one read path, one place openness is computed, one slot
beside the artifact. The storage shape is the operator's call (2026-09-21) and
follows from U4: "does this booth still owe an answer?" gets asked per booth
per sweep tick and per card per index render, so it has to be one read and not
a walk of a booth holding 270 files. Marks are also not links.md — that is an
O_APPEND content-hash log because 17 handles write it concurrently, whereas a
booth's marks see one session and one operator, so locking the common path
costs nothing.

The 2026-09-09 pick semantics are preserved by NOT rewriting them: partial
answers legal, a blank question lands in `unanswered`, `complete` false until
every question has a pick, the only refusal a submission carrying nothing.
`write_answer` split into the pure `build_answer` plus the storage that went
away with the sidecar; `normalize_ask` untouched.

Three findings worth naming, because each was caught by a gate rather than by
reading the diff again:

  * The seam review found `inline.place` indexes asks by SUBSCRIPT — the only
    consumer in the service that does — so a frozen dataclass breaks it, and
    `inline.py` had been missing from the contract's scope entirely.
  * A retargeted test found a regression in the legacy importer: a malformed
    sidecar that renders "broken" today would have silently vanished on
    migration. It now imports carrying its reason.
  * A partially-answered pick counted as CLOSED on the index while the panel
    beside it rendered it "partial" — the two disagreed about one booth. Open
    is the reading U4 needs, and it is declared rather than smuggled in.

`GET /b/<n>/marks.json` is new and load-bearing: sessions on other hosts polled
`<stem>.answer.json` over HTTP, so removing the sidecar without it would have
taken that capability away. `/b/<n>/asks` 308s to `/marks`. Legacy sidecars are
imported, never deleted — four are live and unanswered.

Also records the operator's deterministic-order directive as a cross-cutting v1
invariant, in ROADMAP.md with the per-collection rule table and as CLAUDE.md
invariant 6. The Booth's job is comparison; an order that moves between renders
does not crash, it misfiles the judgment.

242 tests. No version bump — a release tier for this is the operator's call.
2026-09-21 23:38:27 -07:00
vh ce598b3cf6 feat(items): one item record, so an annotation survives the zoom
The operator reported that zoomed-in images lose their annotations. That was
never a rendering bug. Three functions independently walked a booth and derived
overlapping subsets of the same facts -- build_gallery (kind, caption, blur,
doc), booth_view_file (kind, doc, image ring) and list_booths (kind counts,
cover) -- and the zoom route's subset was the smallest. Caption resolution lived
inside build_gallery's loop and nowhere else, so there was no code path by which
a caption could reach the zoom template. It was never sent.

booth/items.py is now the one truth: booth_items() returns the full record --
rel, kind, section, caption, blur, doc kind, size -- and the gallery, the zoom
view, the doc view and the index all read it. Patching view.html would have
fixed the symptom for images and left the next surface starting from the same
missing truth.

Two things fall out of the consolidation:
  - the index and the booth page now agree on what an item IS. list_booths
    counted every non-dot file, so an A/B pair with two caption sidecars read
    as 4 items on the index and showed 2 tiles when you opened it.
  - "section" (the item's subfolder) is computed and carried but nothing renders
    it yet. That is deliberate: it is U7's whole input, and shipping the field
    now makes U7 a template change rather than a resolver change.

Doc bodies are NOT rendered by the resolver -- the index touches every booth on
every page load, and rendering every markdown file in every booth would be the
price of that convenience. render_doc_body is a separate step for the one
surface that inlines them; an invariant test monkeypatches it to raise and
loads the index.

Verified beyond the suite, because this repo has shipped two dead controls that
every test passed: the caption was measured in a real browser at 1280x41 px,
visible, with elementFromPoint at its centre returning the caption itself.
layout-probe reports all controls hittable across index, gallery, zoom and doc.

192 tests pass (173 before, 19 new).

Contract: docs/contracts/u1_item_record.contract.md
2026-09-21 22:04:07 -07:00
vh 726822b2b9 docs: the information architecture, and a v1 target to gate it against
The Booth was built as a file-shuttle on a whim and turned into the fleet's
operator-review surface without anyone deciding that. This is the decision,
written down, with the measurement that forced it.

The defect behind every bolt-on: one lifetime and one shape serving five jobs.
Five separate mechanisms exist to put one question next to one artifact.

Numbers that drove the model, taken against the live service:
  - 211 link rows, 145 (69%) pointing at booths that no longer exist
  - 22 rows that are the same bench re-posted (talk 5x, peedlar 4x)
  - 13 of 24 booths (54%) on the .forever escape hatch
  - 270 images rendered as one flat wall, subfolders discarded at render
  - 5 commits in one day to ship the asks primitive

Four nouns replace the accretion: booth (derived lifetime), item (one record),
mark (pick/note/flag -- asks, comments and votes were always one thing), and
bench (a registry, not an append log).

v1 is seven capabilities, each closing a measured defect. Compare mode is the
best idea in the set and is parked anyway, because it is the only one that is a
new capability rather than a fix.
2026-09-21 21:57:21 -07:00