4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh 5e41108cd3 fix(marks): a write over a damaged mark file was wiping the booth's judgment
Three defects and a missing test, all surfaced by the cross-frontier contract
panel dispatched before implementation and triaged after it (heid, four arms,
artifact-only, thread 01M33VSNFER4N1554G0Y0VC9C8). v0.2.0 was already tagged and
announced to fifteen handles when they landed, which is the argument for running
the gate at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

192 tests pass (173 before, 19 new).

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

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

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

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

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