booth/ROADMAP.md

The Booth — roadmap

Design: docs/design/information-architecture.md. Current version: 1.0.0b1 (U1 through U7 landed; extracted from eshpfi 2026-09-21).

⚠ THE BETA'S PREMISE IS SUPERSEDED AND THE TAG CANNOT BE UNSAID. v1.0.0b1 was cut 2026-09-22 promising "feature-complete, no new features, the remaining work is bugs." On 2026-09-23 the operator ruled a flow redesign and compare mode into the arc, which are emphatically new features. The tag stays as written — it is an immutable record of what was believed at the time, not a claim about now — and no further pre-release is cut until the arc lands. Dropping back to an alpha is not available: 1.0.0a2 sorts BELOW 1.0.0b1, and versions do not go backwards.

🛑 RULED 2026-09-23: NO 1.0.0 YET. Verbatim: "no v1.0 yet." The tag stays at 1.0.0b1, no further pre-release is cut until the arc lands, and the arc now includes the flow redesign, compare mode and the Desk revisions still in flight. Do not cut a release because the suite is green and the roadmap looks complete — it has looked complete twice already.

v1 target

What must be true to cut 1.0. Seven capabilities, each closing a measured defect — not a wish. The measurements are in the IA doc.

#	capability	closes	unit
1	One item record — landed ce598b3	captions never reach the zoom view (never sent, not lost)	U1
2	Marks — landed c7f9437, released v0.2.0	5 mechanisms for 1 job; operator→session loop runs through chat	U2
3	Declared embed seam — landed 87e2c53, released v0.5.0	6 regexes injected into arbitrary author HTML, load-bearing for asks	U3
4	Derived lifetime — landed c3a97c1, released v0.4.0	70% of booths on the .forever escape hatch (54% when first counted)	U4
5	Self-announcing booths — landed c015a91, released v0.3.0	job 5 had no home, so it lived on the link board as 145 dead rows	U5
6	Benches — landed 1c3ce5d, released v0.6.0	69% link-board rot (re-measured: 178 booth rows + 8 bench re-posts)	U6
7	Navigation — sections filename groups, rail, filters, grid keyboard — landed, unreleased	one flat wall; 0 of 11 galleries have subfolders, so grouping comes from the filename	U7

Ordering is dependency-driven, not priority-driven: U1 → U2 → {U3, U4, U5} → U7, with U6 independent of all of them (different storage, different surface) and therefore the safest thing to land first or in parallel.

ALL SEVEN UNITS ARE LANDED. U7 closed last; its only dependency was {U3, U4, U5} and that closed with U3.

⚠ What U7 actually shipped is not what this row first described, and the difference is measured. Sections were dropped for filename-prefix groups (operator-ratified 2026-09-22) because zero of eleven gallery booths have a subdirectory. Then the grouping rule itself changed at implementation: the contract's strip a trailing digit run yields 24 groups for sindra-bakeoff's 40 images and 27 for sindra's 30 — a rail with a row per tile — because it keys on the end of the stem, where the instance number lives. The shipped rule keys on the first separator-delimited segment, where the family lives, and gives 4 and 2. The full re-measurement across all 17 live booths is in docs/contracts/u7_navigation.contract.md.

The v1 target is met. What remains is a release decision the operator owns: cut 1.0, or take a 0.7.0 staging release first. Nothing in the code is waiting on it.

U5's adoption is a measured prediction, not a finished result, and it is TWO predictions rather than one. The operator declined a fleetwide announcement so that adoption could be told apart from design; within fifty minutes of the deploy a peer that had been told nothing (comfy-dev) created a booth and it announced itself with a handle and an empty why. That is the split:

• The handle rides for free. It is written by booth new and booth add, so every existing caller starts announcing without learning anything.
• The why has to be learned. It needs someone to know the flag exists.

Both get re-measured on 2026-09-29:

find ~/booth-data -maxdepth 2 -name .booth.json | wc -l            # free
grep -l '"why": "[^"]' ~/booth-data/*/.booth.json | wc -l          # learned

A high first count with a near-zero second is the predicted shape of "nobody was told" — an adoption failure fixed by announcing, which is a different thing from nobody wanting it. Same instrument as U4's .forever prediction below.

Cross-cutting invariant — deterministic order, everywhere

Every ordered collection the Booth renders must have a stated, deterministic order. Not "usually stable", not "whatever the filesystem yields" — a rule someone can name, that produces the same sequence on every render of the same state. The rule itself is free to be anything defensible: byte order over a path, creation time, an explicit number, even an arbitrary-but-recorded sequence. What is forbidden is no rule.

This matters more here than in most services because the Booth's whole job is comparison. The operator is judging pancake-v3-full against pancake-v4-full, tile 47 against tile 47. If the order shifts between two page loads — or differs between the gallery, the zoom ring, the zip manifest and the marks read — then every positional reference the operator makes ("the third one from the left", "the one after the banded one") is silently wrong, and a flag or a note lands on the wrong artifact. Non-determinism does not present as a bug report; it presents as the operator's judgment being quietly misfiled.

Where it already binds, and what the rule is in each case:

collection	rule
items in a booth	sorted(rel) — byte order over the booth-relative path (U1 INV-3)
the review prev/next ring	the item order, filtered to media — image, video and audio (review_chain, R2). Supersedes image_chain, which stays importable and unchanged for its other callers
an item's ordinal (#NN)	its position in sorted(rel) — counted across ALL items, so #07 is the same tile under every filter. This is what makes the operator's "the third one" mean one thing, which the filters had quietly broken (R2)
the filmstrip and the tape	the review ring
the flag tray	by ordinal — the tray reads in the same direction as the grid (R2). The notes list keeps (created, id)
the Desk's sections	fixed: needs you → new since you looked → everything else (R2)
within needs you	(open_since, name)
within new since you looked	(-landed_at, name)
within everything else	(-landed_at, name): last updated first, the date each row shows. Was list_booths' activity order, which counted a look (operator, 2026-09-23)
the Desk's bookmarks column	order_for_display — pinned first, then newest
caption sidecar resolution	sorted scan, so two media files sharing a stem resolve the same way every time (a real non-determinism U1 removed)
marks in a booth	(created, id) — time, with the id as tie-break so two marks written in the same second cannot swap
legacy ask import	(mtime, name), which is the order list_asks gave them
link board rows	pinned first, then newest-first
a booth's announcement	not a collection — one flat record per booth, nothing to order (U5)
groups among themselves	the position of each group's first member in the rendered sequence — sorted(rel) narrowed by the filter, never re-sorted. Walking the rendered list once into an insertion-ordered dict IS the rule, so there is no second sort to drift from it (U7)
items within a group	not a separate order — a group is a label on a tile, not a container. The grid stays sorted(rel) and groups interleave in it freely (U7)
the bench registry	(state rank, name casefolded, id) — live before promoted before retired, then alphabetical, with the id as a TOTAL tie-break so two benches sharing a name cannot swap (U6)
the link board's dead marker	not an order — a per-row stamp read from the existing order_for_display sequence, so marking cannot move a row (U6)
embed anchors in a verbatim report	document order — what querySelectorAll yields, so the author's markup decides (U3)
the embed tail (fragments the author did not place)	payload order, which is the marks order (created, id) — one rule, whether a fragment lands at an anchor or at the end (U3)
questions within a pick	declaration order, in the payload's questions LIST — carried by the format rather than by object-key insertion order (U3)
the compare filmstrip	the compare ring: the review ring (item order, media only) less any rel compare cannot open, so no strip link offers a pair that 404s (r3)
compare stepping	along the compare ring, modulo its length; linked moves both sides one place and keeps their distance, unlinked moves the active side only (r3)

U3's three rows are the first case where the rule binds across a language boundary: the order is decided in Python and honoured in JavaScript, and a browser test asserts it rather than a string assertion that could not see it.

U4 added no ordered collection — a booth's lifetime is one state per booth, not a sequence — so the rule above did not need a new row. The three lifetime surfaces (index card, booth header, marks page) render through ONE macro precisely so they cannot disagree, which is the same property stated for ordering: one rule, one place, every surface reading it.

U7's group ordering is SETTLED and SHIPPED (operator, 2026-09-22): groups order by the position of their first member in the rendered sequence, so the rail reads in the same direction as the grid. Subfolder sections were dropped in favour of filename-prefix groups on measured grounds — zero of eleven gallery booths have a subdirectory.

Nothing in this table is undecided any more. The two U7 rules that were (section ordering among themselves, compare pairing) resolved differently: section ordering is MOOT, because U7 renders no section rail — Item.section still exists and is still derived, it simply has no ordered surface. Compare pairing was ruled 2026-09-24: pairs are PICKED, never detected from filenames, and compare landed with r3 (rows above). U6's bench listing is settled — the row above.

The test for any new ordered surface: can you write the rule down in one line? If not, it does not have one yet.

Explicitly NOT in v1

• Backward compatibility with the ask CLI verbs. Pre-1.0, and ask / asks / answer become thin aliases over marks rather than a second code path. The 17 consuming handles get one althing note naming the change — the one case where telling peers is real coordination and not a broadcast.
• A migration that deletes anything. links.md is archived verbatim and committed before the registry is seeded from it.

Parking lot

Deferred with a home, per the anti-creep gate. Default is park; these were weighed against the v1 path and lost on purpose.

item	why parked
Compare mode — UNPARKED 2026-09-23, LANDED 2026-09-24 (r3)	Parked as "the only new capability rather than a fix for a measured defect", and that deferral was ours and the operator overruled it. design-dev argued it belongs in this arc because the ladders and bakeoffs already need it; the operator ruled this_arc. Lands AFTER the Desk and the reel, as a view toggle over the same item record. Recorded so nobody re-parks it by reading an older rule.
Virtualized / progressive grid loading	Speculative. 270 <img loading="lazy"> may be fine. Measure the real booth before optimising it — if it renders inside a second, this is invented work.
Bench uptime history + graphs	The v1 need is "is it dead", which one flag answers. A time series is a different product.
Cross-booth search	No evidence of the need in the usage data.
Per-viewer state (who has seen what)	The Booth has one viewer. Revisit if that stops being true.
Auth	Standing non-goal. LAN/mesh-internal. Blur stays cosmetic and says so.

The design arc — IN SCOPE, not post-v1

⚠ This section used to be "Post-v1, already committed" and it is not post-v1 any more. The operator's 2026-09-23 rulings put a flow redesign and compare mode inside the arc, so the work below is part of what ships, not after it.

• SVOS theme retrofit by design-dev — HANDED OFF AND ACCEPTED 2026-09-22 (althing thread 01M369321KNBPZ7FYDQGZG7AXP). Runs as a parallel track, not a v1 gate: we own the information architecture (it is driven by the measurement above), design-dev owns the visual and interaction system.

  🛑 OPERATOR RULING 2026-09-23 — THE OWNERSHIP BOUNDARY MOVED, AND IT MOVED OUR WAY OUT. The first concept round was ruled NOT ship-as-shown: "He didn't go far enough, still looks like the booth. I want him to consider the flow and the requirements — design touches, layout, usability all belong to him." Flow, layout, usability and the REQUIREMENTS are design-dev's. The information architecture is no longer fenced off from him: what belongs on which page, what groups with what, what the rail counts and whether a rail is the right object at all are his calls to propose and build.

  ⚠ The fence was OURS, and it is what produced a reskin. The handoff said "what we are not asking for: layout changes driven by information architecture", and design-dev's "markup changes are class additions only, no reordering" was that constraint honoured. The ruling corrects the brief, not his round. That paragraph is void — do not restate it.

  What survives is two tiers, deliberately separated because collapsing them is how we over-fenced the first time. Tier 1, correctness not taste: deterministic order (an operator directive — the RULE may change, but not into "whatever the layout yields"), autoescape, blur keeps admitting it is cosmetic, restart discipline. Tier 2, engineering defaults WE chose and he may now argue with: the gallery working with JavaScript off, virtualization parked, compare mode deferred. Tier 2 disputes go to the operator, not settled between agents.

  ⚠ The /vor-ui brief this row used to require was DECLINED, and rightly. The row predates docs/design/information-architecture.md; with that doc, the landed templates and the seven handoff constraints in hand, a /vor-ui pass would have cost the operator a serial Q&A to re-derive IA we had already measured — the exact operator-load this project exists to reduce. The handoff message is the brief. If the design system ever wants the IA different, design-dev raises it and we re-measure rather than either side guessing.

  Settled with it: we merge and restart (the deployment root stays in one pair of hands); design-dev works on svos-retheme in his own clone against a COPY of ~/booth-data, never touching :8090; a concept round goes to the OPERATOR before any fixup. Webfonts arrive by Google Fonts <link> with display=swap and a system fallback stack — the CDN-free property was accreted, not an invariant, and self-hosting is a v1.1 item because v1.0.0b1 promises no new features.

Gate

A proposed feature is on the v1 path or it is parked. Default: parked. When both are defensible, park it — same asymmetry as the patch-default in SemVer. Applies regardless of who proposed it.