Commit Graph
161 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh 8c7f2127eb fix(u6): a FIFO at the registry path hung the render, and unquote leaked control characters
Both found by the in-session adversarial pass while the cold panels were still
out. The first is this repo's own 2026-09-22 lesson recurring in a new file.

_read_bytes bounded the READ and its docstring claimed that closed the
named-pipe hole. It does not: open() blocks on a FIFO with no writer, before
any byte cap can apply. read_benches runs on the board page's render path, so
one FIFO there is a request that never returns and, with enough hits, the
threadpool behind every route. Guarded with S_ISREG before the open, which is
what marks.py has done since it learned the same thing. The bounded read stays
for the case a stat cannot answer: a regular file that grew between the two.

booth_target handed back whatever unquote produced, including NUL and newline.
Neither can name a directory, and unfiltered they reach is_dir() -- which
raises ValueError on an embedded NUL, and ValueError is not an OSError, so it
escapes the dead marker's guard -- plus the refusal message the CLI prints and
the marker the board renders.

Both tests are written to go red under the exact change that defeats them: the
FIFO test blocks rather than fails if the regular-file check is removed, and
the control-character rows need their own case because %2e%2e and %2f stay
green without the clause.
2026-09-22 13:30:22 -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 91fd8bc69d memory: snapshot — U3 released at v0.5.0, pushed and deployed
First push of this repo's history: main was 26 commits ahead of origin/main, so
v0.2.0 through v0.5.0 all reached the Gitea remote in one motion. A future
session can assume a remote exists, which no earlier one could.

Records the open defect U3 found and deliberately did not fix -- a well-formed
.marks.json with a wrong-shaped answer 500s the gallery and marks pages,
measured at 42ea67f so it predates the unit -- and marks it explicitly as
awaiting an operator decision with no issue filed, rather than letting it sit in
a detail file nobody is routed to.

No recommendation is recorded for the next unit. U6 and U7 are genuinely
independent and close different defects; the last two before a 1.0 cut are a
scope-direction call.
2026-09-22 13:00:34 -07:00
vh 7996fbd597 chore(release): v0.5.0 — U3, the declared embed seam
Minor rather than patch, and the tie-break rule says default to patch, so the
reason is worth stating: a capability arrived AND one left. Report authors gain
a declared public API -- one line, `<script src="/_booth/embed.js" defer>`, plus
the `data-booth-mark` anchor syntax -- and the verbatim path loses
no-JavaScript operation, which it had since it existed.

That asymmetry is what makes it not a tie. Either half alone would have been
defensible as a patch.

Operator approved 2026-09-22.
v0.5.0
2026-09-22 12:58:35 -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 42ea67f33f memory: snapshot — U4 released at v0.4.0, next unit undecided
Current state rewritten for the post-U4 position: 410 tests, v0.4.0 tagged,
tree not pushed, all three gates closed. Carries the session's U3 recommendation
with its three grounds AND its counter-argument, so the operator can take the
call without reloading the unit.

The methodology-proposals row goes from three to four and is now marked
explicitly untracked by operator choice — the new one is the contract-time
vacuity pass, which is the only one of the four with measured evidence behind
it after five of seven U4 falsifiers turned out not to discriminate.
2026-09-22 10:06:30 -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 c75d7a2797 fix: four defects the U4 bug-hunt panel found in code it did not add
All four pre-date U4 and sit in files it touched, which is why a diff-scoped
robustness lens saw them. They are separated from the unit's own commit so the
feature history stays readable; the release tags both.

* A booth name reached a JS string context. The confirm dialogs interpolated
  the name into a string literal inside `onsubmit`. Jinja's autoescape is
  HTML-attribute escaping, not JS-string escaping: the browser decodes the
  entity back to a quote before the JS parser sees it, so a name crafted to
  close the string executed on submit. Booth names are agent-authored — making
  a folder under the data dir is the whole API — so this was a live path, not a
  theoretical one. The name now travels as a data attribute to a delegated
  handler, where escaping is escaping.

* An unreadable `links.md` returned 500 for the whole booth page. `is_file()`
  then an unguarded `read_text()`. The board is one tile on that page, and a
  page that will not load is worse than one missing a tile — the posture
  `read_blurred`, `marks_for` and `read_manifest` already take.

* The index order had no tie-breaker, which violates the deterministic-order
  invariant. Equal-mtime booths fell back to whatever `iterdir()` yielded, and
  two booths landed by one `rsync` batch share an mtime exactly. Now
  `(mtime, name)` reverse: newest first, then name. The operator refers to
  cards positionally, so a sequence that moves between renders misfiles his
  judgment rather than crashing.

* `/b/<n>/marks.json` reported damage as empty success. `booth marks` exits 3
  on an unreadable file precisely so a caller can tell "not yet" from "broken";
  the HTTP mirror — the only reader a remote session has — returned the same
  empty list for both. It now carries `error` and `detail`. The status stays
  200 deliberately: reads are lenient here, and a pinned status code is a
  promise to remote clients this fix has no business breaking.

Each has a regression test. 410 tests.
v0.4.0
2026-09-22 09:51:14 -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 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.
v0.3.0
2026-09-22 02:27:18 -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 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 aa61fcf5fd test(probe): teach the layout probe about <details>, and guard the flag parser
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.
2026-09-22 01:01:20 -07:00
Vuong Hoang c9a175ba4a memory: U5 adoption is a prediction with a re-measure date
Operator declined the fleetwide announcement (2026-09-22) and chose to
let the convention propagate through the README alone, specifically so
adoption can be distinguished from design. Baseline 0 of 26 booths at
landing; re-count 2026-09-29. Near-zero means nobody heard about it,
which is a different failure from nobody wanting it.
2026-09-22 00:56:25 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 75dca53483 docs(probe): the probe covers the index only, and says so now
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.
2026-09-22 00:54:54 -07:00
Vuong Hoang 67ab7d1cd5 docs(readme): --why, on the page the 17 consuming handles actually read
The quickstart is where a session learns the CLI, so the announcement
verb has to be in the first code block rather than in a section further
down that nobody scrolls to. States the trade plainly: optional, nothing
breaks without it, and a booth that cannot say what it is has no way to
ask for attention except by posting its URL somewhere else.
2026-09-22 00:50:02 -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 a48ef83ef5 feat(manifest): U5 — booths that say who posted them and why
The index card showed a name, an item count and a countdown, and nothing
the poster chose. An agent with something to show therefore had no way to
make the booth say "look at this" and posted a URL to the link board
instead — which is why 145 of that board's 210 rows (69%) ended up
pointing at booths that had already been swept. The board was absorbing a
job it was never shaped for. This is the shape.

Each booth carries `.booth.json` — {handle, title, why, created} — written
by the CLI from $ALTHING_HANDLE, and the provenance line renders on both
index lanes and on the booth page header.

WHAT IS WHERE

- booth/manifest.py, stdlib-only and importing nothing from booth.* either:
  scripts/booth imports it under the system python3 with no venv, and a
  cross-import between two stdlib-only modules is a second way for that
  invariant to break. It joins the shared test_stdlib_only list and keeps
  a stricter copy of its own.
- The read is lenient and cannot raise. list_booths touches every booth on
  every index load, so a manifest that cannot be parsed costs that booth's
  provenance and nothing else. That is the v0.2.2 lesson applied before the
  same mistake rather than after it.
- Absent and damaged render differently — `unannounced` and `unreadable`.
  Folding "cannot be read" into "never said" would hide the one case
  somebody has to go and fix.
- Re-announcing preserves `created`. A second `booth add` sharpening the
  why is not a second appearance of the booth.
- The write is atomic (invariant 5); the temp file is itself a dotfile, so
  no listing can see it mid-write.

THREE OPERATOR CALLS, 2026-09-22

Flags on the existing new/add verbs rather than a separate `announce` verb
(a second step is the step that gets forgotten, which is the rot's own
mechanism). Unannounced booths get a quiet marker rather than nothing — the
convention is only adoptable if the gap is visible. U5 adds provenance only
and does NOT add a second index ordering keyed on announcement time; that
is a different surface needing its own stated rule, parked for v1.1.

NO EXEMPTION LIST

A pickup booth and the standing link board are created by the service, so
they announce themselves with handle `booth`, which is true rather than
manufactured. One rule — a booth with no manifest is unannounced — instead
of a growing set of special cases.

ALSO

tests/test_booth.py's keep/release assertion was slicing the page on the
bare word `boothhead`, which has lived in the stylesheet far longer than
the assertion has; it was reading CSS and passing on luck, and went red the
first time a new rule landed above the old one. Same assertion, aimed at
the markup. A U5 test had the mirror-image bug: pytest derives tmp_path
from the test name and the index renders data_dir, so a test named
`test_an_unannounced_booth_says_so` put the needle in the haystack itself
and passed against a template that did not yet exist.

310 tests (304 before this unit's CLI half). Live service restarted, 26/26
booth pages verified 200, end-to-end smoke through the real CLI.

NOT TAGGED. The cold contract-review panel is still in flight and the
code-review and bug-hunt gates have not run. Tagging with a gate
outstanding is what made v0.2.0 premature.
2026-09-22 00:48:41 -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
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.
v0.2.2
2026-09-22 00:20:58 -07:00
vh 70fb15886b memory: snapshot — U1 and U2 released at v0.2.1, U5 next
Records what this session learned that the code does not say on its own: the
read-lenient/write-strict asymmetry and why pointing both at one reader silently
collapses them; that the seam review and the cold contract panel had zero overlap
in BOTH directions on one unit, so neither substitutes for the other; that every
code-changing panel finding came from the ambiguity pass rather than the
paraphrase; and the timing lesson that a tag waits for an outstanding gate.

In-flight is set up for U5 with the two things already settled about it, so the
next session does not re-derive them: .booth.json is a dotfile and so is already
excluded by booth_items, and the deterministic-order invariant applies to whatever
it adds to the index card.

No version bump — memory snapshot, on the SemVer skip list.
2026-09-21 23:58:25 -07:00
vh a0448bdc24 fix(booth): list the deprecated asks alias in the usage string
Reported by draupnir. The v0.2.0 note told consumers the alias survives, and the
usage line is exactly where a session checks that claim — a deprecated-but-live
verb that is invisible at its own discovery surface reads as removed.
2026-09-21 23:56:10 -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.
v0.2.1
2026-09-21 23:54:42 -07:00
vh 54c1e7c60f feat(marks)!: v0.2.0 — marks replaces asks, and the CLI surface moves with it
The release that closes U2. Consumers have to adapt, which is what makes this a
minor rather than a patch: three things a scripted session can notice.

  * `booth asks <name>` now emits JSON, not the old aligned human table.
    Anything parsing those columns breaks. `booth marks <name>` is the name to
    use; `asks` survives as a deprecated alias for the muscle memory.
  * Polling `http://…/b/<n>/<stem>.answer.json` will 404 forever. There is no
    per-question answer sidecar any more. `GET /b/<n>/marks.json` replaces it and
    answers for the whole booth in one request — including an `open` list.
  * `#ask-<stem>` page anchors are now `#mark-<id>`, and `/b/<n>/asks` 308s to
    `/b/<n>/marks`.

What a session GAINS: the operator can now attach a note to any item or to the
booth, and flag individual items — both readable with `booth marks`. Selecting
winners out of a set used to be a chat message.

Nothing a session already wrote is lost. Legacy `*.ask.json` / `*.answer.json`
sidecars are imported by `booth marks-import <name>`, idempotently, and are
never deleted.

No lockfile step: this repo tracks none (uv.lock is gitignored, 790d5ba).
v0.2.0
2026-09-21 23:48:30 -07:00
vh bb1e3cfcd7 fix(booth): templates were hot-reloading into a live service running older Python
19 of 25 live booths returned 500 with `UndefinedError: 'item_marks' is
undefined`. Neither the old code nor the new code was broken — the service was
running both at once.

`booth.service` sets WorkingDirectory to this repo, so the repo IS the
deployment root: no build step, no staging copy, the live service imports these
files. Python is read once when the process starts. Jinja's FileSystemLoader
re-reads a template on EVERY render. So the two halves of the service had
different staleness rules, and editing booth.html deployed it instantly against
Python from 22:03 that had never heard of the context the new markup wanted.

The failure mode is worth naming precisely, because it is invisible to the
suite by construction: the skew exists between a running process and the disk
underneath it, so every test can pass against a tree that is simultaneously
serving 500s. No amount of green catches this. The operator found it.

Fixed at the source rather than with a reminder to restart. The template
Environment is built here with auto_reload=False, so templates are cached at
startup exactly like the Python, and there is ONE rule: nothing takes effect
until you restart. The price is that template work needs a restart to see —
that price is the entire point, and it is cheaper than a page of 500s while
someone is reviewing.

Building the Environment by hand means autoescape no longer comes from the
Jinja2Templates constructor, so it is explicit and load-bearing: booth names,
item names and mark text are all agent- or operator-authored strings that land
in HTML. Verified escaped, not merely configured.

Two tests hold the line — one on the snapshot property, one on the `dur` filter
that is no longer incidental to the constructor. The environment is reachable at
app.state.templates because a promise about the deployed service needs an
assertion, and an assertion needs the env the app actually renders with.

Also records the foot-gun in CLAUDE.md and persistent-memory: anyone editing
this repo while the operator may be using the service is editing production.

244 tests. No version bump — the release tier for U2 is still the operator's
call, and this rides with it.
2026-09-21 23:44:37 -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 9272c9872e docs: the conventions a fresh session can't infer, and the state it can't reconstruct
The repo came out of eshpfi one day ago with neither piece of its house
furniture, so everything non-obvious about it lived in docstrings inside a
998-line app.py — which is a bad place to keep an invariant that breaks
silently on every fleet host when someone violates it.

CLAUDE.md carries the five that do exactly that:

  * links.py and asks.py are stdlib-only because scripts/booth imports them
    under the system python3 with no venv, so one third-party import breaks
    `booth ask` everywhere and fails in an agent's session, not in ours
  * the filesystem is the state, and booth_items()'s dotfile skip is why a
    per-booth dotfile is the right shape for new operator state
  * booth_items() is the only thing that classifies a file or resolves a
    caption (U1's INV-1) — the zoom-loses-the-annotation bug was three
    readers of one truth, not a rendering bug
  * moved names stay importable from booth.app, asserted by a test
  * sidecar writes are atomic; render_doc returns raw text on purpose

Plus the distinction that decided this session's storage call: links.md is
an append log because 17 handles write it concurrently, and marks have one
writer. Different problem, different shape — ask which you have first.

persistent-memory.md carries what CLAUDE.md is structurally unable to: the
dated decisions, the `.forever` prediction and its re-measure date, and the
foot-gun log. Two entries are load-bearing for the next unit — the settled
mark storage shape with the reasoning that picked it, and a measured
correction to U7's premise: every booth that actually needs navigation is
flat, so subfolder sections are worth shipping but are not the nav fix.

No version bump — docs and memory, both on the SemVer skip list.
2026-09-21 22:58:00 -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
vh 5f2c9a6a60 fix(booth): release was painting over the delete ×, which was unclickable
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.
2026-09-21 08:54:56 -07:00
vh 21f4afc033 fix(booth): the reveal button was inert; add kept-lane wipe and in-booth keep
Three operator reports, one of them a real defect I had claimed was working.

THE REVEAL BUTTON DID NOTHING, for a day. Its handler sat after the content
block's closing tag, and a child template's out-of-block content is silently
DISCARDED by Jinja. The button rendered. The handler never reached the browser.
Two commits and a README paragraph said click-to-reveal worked, and the suite
passed the entire time because nothing asserted against the SERVED page -- the
template really did contain the code.

Two guards, both confirmed to FAIL when the defect is reintroduced rather than
merely added and assumed protective:
  * test_reveal_handler_actually_reaches_the_served_page greps the response
  * test_no_orphaned_markup_after_the_content_block guards the structure

While moving it, caught a second instance of the same class: the explanatory
comment I wrote for the fix contained a literal Jinja endblock tag, which Jinja
would have parsed as a real tag and used to close the block early.

KEPT-LANE ×. Wiping a kept booth required release-then-find-it-in-the-other-
lane. That protected nothing and cost a hunt -- the board you just released is
loose in a feed that turns over, and you have to go find it to finish a job you
had already decided on. Protection now lives in the confirmation, which names
the booth and says KEPT, instead of in the number of lanes you must traverse.
Release stays as the reversible option.

IN-BOOTH KEEP. `☆ keep` / `★ kept — release` beside "Wipe now", so promoting
does not mean navigating back to the index. The booth page did not previously
know its own kept state; it does now. Both post a `next` field to stay put --
and `next` is a form field, so it is attacker-controlled: only same-site
absolute paths are honoured, with `//host`, schemes and backslashes refused,
tested.

173 tests pass.
2026-09-21 08:40:26 -07:00
vh 59ba9f5c10 fix(booth): put the blur toggle on every item kind, and make it look like a control
The operator asked "no UI option to blur/unblur?" and was right twice over.

MISSING ENTIRELY ON TWO OF THREE BRANCHES. booth.html renders docs, media and
everything-else through separate <figure> blocks. The toggle went into the
media branch only, so inline docs -- the branch that puts readable text straight
on the page, the one that needs blur most -- had no control at all, and `other`
files only got a caption row if they happened to carry a caption.

This is the SECOND time this feature shipped having patched some branches and
not others; the blurred class itself had the same gap one commit ago. So the
toggle is now a single Jinja macro called from all three sites, which makes
"patched two of three" impossible rather than merely unlikely, and
test_every_item_kind_gets_exactly_one_blur_toggle counts toggles against figures
across mixed kinds so a fourth branch cannot quietly skip it.

INVISIBLE WHERE IT DID RENDER. v1 was a bare `◌` at 0.78rem in --muted with no
border, no label and no hover affordance. It now reads `◌ blur` / `◉ blurred`
with a border, matching the other per-item controls. A control nobody can find
is a control that is not there.

Docs get it in the doc bar beside ⤢ ⬇ ✕, with stopPropagation so submitting it
does not collapse the <details> it lives inside.

Verified live on all three kinds: 3 figures, 3 toggles, and the POST round trip
blurs and un-blurs. 167 tests pass.
2026-09-19 23:50:32 -07:00
vh b569a5bb50 feat(booth): close the keep round trip, and add cosmetic per-item blur
Two operator requests.

KEEP, BOTH DIRECTIONS. The kept lane could already release a booth back to
ephemeral, but an ephemeral booth could only be promoted from a shell -- so the
round trip was closed only if you had ssh. The /keep route and the `booth keep`
verb both already existed; only the button was missing. Adds ★ to the ephemeral
card, mirroring × on the other shoulder.

BLUR. Per-item cosmetic censoring: `booth blur <name> <file>...`, a ◌/◉ toggle
in each caption row, and 👁 click-to-reveal. State is `.blurred` in the booth
dir, one booth-relative path per line -- the same filesystem-is-the-state idiom
as .pins and .forever. An empty set deletes the marker rather than leaving a
zero-byte file, so `ls -a` tells the truth.

⚠ BLUR IS NOT ACCESS CONTROL, and the code, the docs and a test all say so on
purpose. A blurred item is still served at its own URL, still in the zip, still
on disk. The Booth has no auth by design. test_blur_is_cosmetic_the_file_is_
still_served asserts the 200 deliberately: if someone later "hardens" this into
a 403 that test fails, and it should, because half-implemented access control is
more dangerous than none.

Reveal is per-viewer and never persisted; a reload re-hides. With JS off an item
stays blurred, which is the safe direction to fail in.

Two things the first pass got wrong, both caught by checking rather than
assuming:

  * The cover thumb. index.html has IDENTICAL markup in the kept and ephemeral
    lanes, so a single-occurrence replace patched only the kept one and the
    ephemeral front page happily displayed the thing someone had hidden. The
    test that caught it was itself wrong first -- it matched the bare string
    "blurred-thumb", which is in base.html's stylesheet on every page and so
    passed in both states. It now asserts the attribute.
  * Inline docs render through their own <figure> branch and were left
    unblurred -- the branch that puts readable text straight on the page, so it
    needed blur more than images do. The suite passed; a live curl caught it.

165 tests pass (154 pre-existing, unchanged).
2026-09-19 23:47:18 -07:00
vh 88d3cf436e fix(booth): a partial ask answer is recorded, not refused
Operator: the form failed when a question was left blank. Refusing the whole
submission over one blank threw away the picks that were made, and the HTML
`required` on the radios blocked it in the browser before the server saw it.

- answered questions recorded; blank ones land in `unanswered`; `complete` says
  whether the set is finished; a blank question carrying a note keeps the note
- `required` dropped from both templates so the browser cannot block a partial
- refused only when there is no pick anywhere AND no notes (a 400 — that would
  flip an open ask to answered with no decision recorded); a choice outside the
  option list is still an error
- new ◐ partial state with an n/N count; skipped questions render as skipped
- README + global CLAUDE.md tell reading sessions to check `complete`
- 154 tests; v0.1.15
2026-09-09 15:05:18 -07:00
vh 6d36119bc5 docs(booth): record WHEN inline ask placement earns its markup — the artifact-in-working-memory test, not just the placement rule (framing from tts-dev) 2026-09-09 14:23:19 -07:00
vh 2206229ebf docs: refresh what today's work made stale — booth asks (inline placement promoted to its own section), ana-ml2 nvme7 settled by the scrub result, nh3-dev booth entry + the CLI-on-PATH fix, run-07 runbook outcome + serving state 2026-09-09 14:18:34 -07:00
vh d7361e8b44 feat(booth): asks render INLINE in a verbatim report, placed by the author
Operator verdict on the separate /asks page: the question belongs with the
artifact it is about. A four-voice audition wants each voice's radio group
under that voice's audio, and one submit for the lot.

- booth/inline.py: data-booth-ask="stem" | "stem:key" | data-booth-ask-submit,
  plus <!-- booth:ask ... --> comments; unknown stem left alone, not blanked
- _ask_inline.html: self-contained fragments (own scoped styles, no JS), per-question
  groups bound to one form via the HTML5 form= attribute so a scattered
  multi-question ask still POSTs once
- unplaced questions and a missing submit block are appended, so a partially
  marked-up page can never produce an unsubmittable 400
- chip becomes a jump link to the first open ask; /asks page kept as a fallback
- 6 tests (one caught the partial-placement drop); v0.1.14
2026-09-09 14:16:03 -07:00
vh f99faabb80 fix(booth): asks were invisible in a booth serving its own index.html
A custom index.html is returned verbatim, so booth.html's asks panel never
rendered there — a valid ask (emmie-anchor/anchor.ask.json) was listed by the
CLI and shown nowhere, with nothing to say so.

- panel extracted to _asks.html; new GET /b/<name>/asks standalone page
- verbatim pages get an amber '? N open asks' chip beside the back chip
- POST /answer honours back=asks so answering returns to that page
- single-question asks now keep an optional 'title' (was silently dropped)
- README + routes table; 8 regression tests; v0.1.12
2026-09-09 10:39:18 -07:00
vh 047749c3cf fix(booth): CLI resolves its source through the ~/.local/bin symlink (readlink -f), so ask/asks/answer/unlink work from any cwd 2026-09-09 09:21:34 -07:00
vh 125a1b7fc5 feat(booth): multi-question asks — a questions list renders one form with a radio group per question and lands as one answer sidecar keyed by question
- asks.py: single {prompt, options} and multi {title, questions:[{key, prompt, options, notes?}]} both normalise to questions[]; per-question notes; every question required on submit
- /answer reads choice.<key> / notes.<key> / notes for multi; single shape unchanged
- booth asks prints per-question picks; README + CLI header; install step symlinks the CLI to ~/.local/bin; v0.1.10; 135 tests
2026-09-09 09:20:35 -07:00
vh 97589dd062 feat(booth): asks — a multiple-choice question a session poses in a booth, answered by the operator as a radio form + notes, written back as an answer sidecar
- booth/asks.py (stdlib): <stem>.ask.json question / <stem>.answer.json answer; normalise+validate, atomic write, list with answer folded in, broken asks surfaced not hidden
- POST /b/<name>/answer: validates choice against the ask (400), unknown stem 404, re-answer overwrites
- booth.html asks panel above the gallery; amber open / green answered; JS-off form POST; index card + booth header badge for open asks
- CLI: booth ask / asks / answer [--wait [SECS]]; remote sessions poll <stem>.answer.json over HTTP
- ask/answer files excluded from gallery items and item counts; 23 tests; v0.1.9
2026-09-09 07:24:16 -07:00
vh 8060f8cb9a feat(booth): pin/favorite, multi-select delete, newest-first link board
The standing link board grew from a flat oldest-first list with a per-row
× into a manageable board: newest links lead, favorites stay on top, and
several dead links can go in one pass.

- Ordering: order_for_display() renders pinned rows first, then newest-first
  within each group (the board is an append log, so newest = most recently
  posted — the row you usually came to grab).
- Pin/favorite: a per-row ★ toggles pinned state via POST /b/<name>/pin.
  State lives in a .pins sidecar dotfile (one content id per line), NOT
  inline in links.md — so links.md stays a pure atomic-append log (many
  sessions post concurrently) and a row's content id never changes just
  because it was pinned. remove_link_entry drops a removed row's pin;
  orphaned pins are inert (renderer only stars a live id).
- Multi-select delete: checkboxes feed POST /b/<name>/unlink-many (repeated
  'sel' content ids), with a select-all box and a live count. The per-row ×
  stays for single removal.
- One <form> with formaction buttons, so checkboxes, ×, ★, and bulk delete
  coexist without nested forms AND all work with JS off; JS only adds
  select-all and the live count. Per-row × confirm reads desc/url from
  data-* attrs, so an arbitrary posted description can't break into the JS.
- Every action is keyed by content id, never row position — same race-safety
  the existing × has, extended to the bulk path.
- Fixed pre-existing undefined --fg/--bg CSS refs in the board styles.

Tests: +19 (pins round-trip, ordering, orphan-inert, remove-unpins, /pin
and /unlink-many endpoints, board render + order). Full suite 102 passing.
Deployed to nh3-dev booth.service; verified live (newest-first, pin
round-trip, bulk delete) against the real 31-row board with no data loss.
2026-09-06 02:29:22 -07:00
vh 22ec06fcaa feat(booth): per-row link removal + render the link board as real UI
The standing link board is the one MULTI-WRITER booth -- every agent session
appends operator-facing URLs to it. "Delete the folder" was the only
granularity available, so removing one dead link meant hand-editing markdown.
It is 32 rows and only grows.

  booth links                 row number, entry id, raw row
  booth unlink 3              by row number
  booth unlink 8b40e0a5       by entry id (what the UI's x posts)
  POST /b/<name>/unlink       form field `entry` = content id

ROWS ARE ADDRESSED BY CONTENT ID, NEVER BY POSITION. The board is append-only
and multi-writer: another session can post between listing it and clicking x,
and an index would then delete a neighbour. An id either matches the row you
saw or matches nothing. A row number typed at the CLI is resolved to its id
BEFORE anything is deleted. Appends and prunes now take the same flock on
.links.lock, so a post cannot be lost inside a prune's read-modify-write.

UI: a booth carrying links.md renders as rows -- description, URL, provenance,
copy button, per-row x -- instead of a markdown blob. links.md is filtered out
of the gallery so it does not appear twice; the header counts LINKS not files;
the empty-state and the one-click "Wipe now" both stand down for a board (same
rule as the kept lane: nothing durable is one click from gone).

booth/links.py extracted, STDLIB ONLY. The CLI needs this logic and must not
require the service venv -- importing app.py drags in FastAPI, so deleting a
line from a text file would have needed a web framework installed.

THREE BUGS FOUND BY TESTING, all in the shell wrapper while the module was
correct throughout -- module-only tests would have caught none of them:

- `[ "$n" -eq 0 ] && echo ...` as the LAST statement made `booth links` exit 1
  whenever the board had rows. `unlink`'s index lookup calls it inside $( )
  under `set -e`, so a successful listing killed the caller and the removal
  silently did nothing while reporting success.
- ids are 8 hex chars and roughly one in forty is ALL DIGITS; those were read
  as row numbers, resolved to nothing, and removed nothing. Now disambiguated
  by the id's actual shape, not by "is it numeric".
- filtering links.md out of the gallery left `items` empty, so a full board
  rendered "This booth is empty" and an empty <div class="gallery"> under 32
  visible rows.

87 tests (was 76): parser tolerance of hand-written prose, content-id
stability across concurrent appends, removal precision, UI branch behaviour
for board/normal/empty booths, and subprocess CLI tests pinning the two shell
bugs. Deployed to nh3-dev and verified against the live 32-row board
read-only; board file byte-identical afterwards.
2026-08-23 12:55:33 -07:00
vh d88f235688 feat(booth): kept boards can be deleted from the UI; document the TTL-reset trap
Kept boards had no delete path in the UI at all. The kept lane deliberately
omits the wipe control -- a one-click wipe next to the durable stuff is a
footgun -- but "deliberate" had been implemented as "impossible": the only
routes out were ssh or a hand-written API call.

Now it is two deliberate acts. A `release` control on kept cards drops the
sentinel, the board moves to the ephemeral lane, and the existing x wipes it
from there. Release is reversible -- POST /b/<name>/keep pins it again.

  POST /b/<name>/unkeep   release the pin
  POST /b/<name>/keep     pin it (round-trip, so release is not a one-way door)

FOUND WHILE TESTING, and it invalidates the previously-documented workaround:
removing the sentinel BUMPS the booth directory's mtime, and booth age is the
newest mtime in the tree -- so a released board's clock RESETS from 10,000s to
0s and it survives another full TTL. The old comment said "remove the sentinel
first (it rejoins the sweep)", which is true but means the board lives another
24h, not that it gets reaped. Unkeep-and-wait is a delay, not a delete.

test_releasing_a_board_RESETS_its_ttl_clock pins that behaviour deliberately so
nobody re-derives the workaround. Release is what unlocks the x; the x is what
deletes.

CLI: `booth rm` already worked on kept boards but said nothing about it. It now
announces "(was KEPT -- durable board)" so wiping something durable can never
look identical to wiping run output. Not a block -- a CLI user naming a booth
is being explicit.

5 new tests (67 pass). Verified live on nh3-dev: release renders on all four
kept boards, the ephemeral lane keeps its x, and the links board is untouched
with its sentinel intact.
2026-08-23 10:42:32 -07:00
vh 299b52458b feat(booth): render .md/.txt/.log inline in the gallery, collapsible + closable
Docs used to render as a clumsy link that navigated to a separate page. They
now render in place: build_gallery pre-renders each doc (markdown -> HTML,
plain text raw) and the gallery shows it inside a native <details open>
disclosure that spans the full grid width so prose has a readable measure.

The doc bar carries: a collapse chevron (the whole <details> summary toggles,
works with JS off), a full-page link (still reaches the standalone viewer), a
download link, and a session-close ✕. The ✕ needed stopPropagation +
preventDefault because it lives inside <summary> — otherwise its click would
toggle the disclosure instead of hiding the item. Close is JS (progressive
enhancement); collapse is native.

Two design points:
- Plain text is returned RAW from build_gallery and escaped by the template
  inside <pre>. Pre-escaping in Python plus Jinja autoescape would
  double-encode angle brackets; a test pins the single-escape.
- Inlining is bounded by DOC_MAX_BYTES. A doc over the limit keeps the old
  link-out behaviour rather than being rendered into every index load; a test
  covers the fallback.

The shared .markdown-body / .textview typography moved from doc.html's scoped
<style> into base.html so the inline body and the full-page view render
identically; doc.html keeps only its page-layout wrapper.

Updated the pre-existing test_gallery_links_docs_to_view: it asserted the old
link-out behaviour the operator asked to change, so it now asserts the inline
render plus the surviving full-page and download affordances. 61 pass.
Verified live: markdown renders with headings/table/blockquote/code, txt
preserves whitespace and single-escapes, collapse and ✕-close both work.
2026-08-19 11:06:36 -07:00
vh 95228299bc feat(booth): kept boards — a .forever sentinel and a standing link board
Agent sessions hand the operator URLs and they drown in terminal
scrollback. The Booth is the right home for them — it already has the one
property that decides adoption, which is that a session can publish with
mkdir and cp, no API key, no schema, no deploy — but everything in it dies
in 24h.

So: a booth containing `.forever` is never swept, and renders in its own
Kept lane at the top of the index. Opt-in per booth, so the ephemeral
default is untouched and nobody inherits a cleanup chore. `rm` the
sentinel and the board rejoins the sweep; the CLI verbs are sugar over
exactly that, which keeps the filesystem-is-the-state model honest.

The pin is deliberately NOT wired into is_expired(). That stays a pure age
question feeding the `expires_in` countdown; only sweep_once() honours the
sentinel. Keeping expiry arithmetic and reaper policy apart means they
cannot drift into each other.

Kept cards are visually separated per Australis: a 2px top edge in aurora
blue, the one accent border the system sanctions. They show "kept" instead
of a countdown, and they deliberately lose the one-click wipe button — a ×
next to the durable stuff is a footgun, so removing a kept board is a
two-step act.

`booth link <url> [description]` appends to the standing `links` board,
creating and keeping it on first use. Entries carry provenance (handle or
hostname, plus a timestamp) because a bare URL is unreadable three days
later. The append is one printf of one line to an O_APPEND fd — atomic
under PIPE_BUF on POSIX — which matters because many agents post to one
board and interleaved half-lines would be the obvious failure mode.

Seven tests cover the sentinel: detection, survival of a sweep that wipes
its neighbour, the deliberate is_expired/sweep_once split, the listing
flag, the sentinel not inflating item counts, and both lane-rendering
directions. Two of them originally asserted on the bare strings "Kept" and
"kept-grid", which passed for the wrong reason — those also appear in the
inlined stylesheet served on every page — so they now assert the full
class attribute. 55 pass.

Also corrects the Homepage card's description, which advertised a flat 24h
TTL that is no longer the whole story.
2026-08-19 09:34:53 -07:00
vh 36a79ff453 fix(booth): lazy-load gallery media — preload=none on video/audio
A booth of a dozen webms fetched them all at page load
(preload=metadata still pulls real byte ranges per file); nothing
loads now until the viewer hits play.
2026-08-14 23:18:47 -07:00