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.
A standing user-level web server (nh3-dev :8090) that renders drop-folders
under ~/booth-data as ephemeral media "booths" so Claude Code sessions can
surface A/B renders and smoke results to the operator, then let them self-wipe.
- Scan-and-serve model, no database, no upload API — a booth is just a folder.
A folder's own index.html is served verbatim; otherwise an auto-gallery of
images / webm+mp4 video / audio is rendered, with <file>.txt caption sidecars
folded in (labels A/B pairs).
- 24h TTL from newest mtime in the tree; background sweeper wipes stale booths.
- Path-traversal + symlink-escape guarded; delete via UI button or DELETE API.
- FastAPI + Jinja2, runs from the checkout under systemctl --user (booth.service),
alongside the other nh3-dev fleet sidecars. 15 tests, all green.
- Homepage tile added (Apps -> The Booth, siteMonitor /healthz).
- Harden the homepage rsync doc: exclude *.bak* and logs/ so --delete can't
wipe the host's dated services.yaml backups (footgun found deploying this).
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