vh/booth

Files

T

vh 37d859c0fd memory: snapshot for context clear — the arc mid-flight, and the one thing that blocks

In-flight rewritten to what is actually live: design-dev's blur merge is HELD
at 5ded5ff awaiting his explicit 'merge it' ping (both panels dispatched 17:53,
unfolded), the redesign and thumbnails and dates are shipped, and the browser
suite is flaky under load and NOT fixed.

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

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

Recent decisions and Tried and abandoned preserved intact (49->51 by addition,
7 unchanged); the index is back under the soft cap at 141 lines from 285, all
of the reduction from settled history leaving the volatile section.

2026-09-23 17:56:50 -07:00

19 KiB

Raw Blame History

Persistent memory — booth

Last updated: 2026-09-23

Always check for /tmp/booth-dev-handoff.md — if it exists and its Written: stamp is under 8 hours old, read it (it carries the in-flight handoff from the previous session), then delete it. Older than 8 hours: stale — delete it unread.

Repo purpose

The Booth is the fleet's operator-review surface: agents post work by making a folder under ~/booth-data, the operator looks at it and judges it in the browser, and the judgment gets back to the agent that posted it. It was built as a file-shuttle and is being converged, unit by unit, onto the review loop it turned out to actually be.

Current state / in-flight

As of 2026-09-23:

🛑 THE ONE THING BLOCKING: design-dev's blur merge is HELD, awaiting his ping. design-dev/svos-retheme @ 5ded5ff (Reveal all + the booth-blur control) is fetched, merge-tree against 091f4b5 is CLEAN, and his commit records the contract panel 4/4 folded, 14/14 mutations, 765 passing — but the heid code-review and bug-hunt panels were dispatched 17:53 and are NOT folded. He said explicitly: "Hold… I will ping 'merge it' when both are folded; whoever picks it up after a clear should look for that ping before merging." DO NOT MERGE IT WITHOUT THAT PING. The operator's "merge everything" predates this and was not about overriding his gate.
🔶 After that ping: merge, restart, verify 30 booths. Then his SECOND merge (Desk row revisions + the dark/light/system theme toggle) follows the same way.
⚠ THE BROWSER SUITE IS FLAKY UNDER LOAD AND IT IS NOT FIXED. Three different tests, one failure each, all passing in isolation. Two real defects were fixed chasing it and NEITHER is proven to be the cause. Do not read a green suite as proof. Operator ruled design-dev diagnoses it properly. → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-browser-suite-is-flaky-under-load.md
✅ THE REDESIGN IS LIVE. R2 (the Desk, the lightbox, the reel) merged and deployed; release/wipe moved onto the facts line. 30 booths at 200.
✅ BOOTH BLUR: STORAGE, ROUTE AND CLI ARE LANDED — ONLY THE UI IS PENDING (it is what 5ded5ff holds). Marker <booth>/.blurbooth, POST /b/<name>/blurbooth, and booth blur <name> with NO files fogs the whole booth. COMPOSES with .blurred, never overrides. All 17 handles can self-blur at post time.
✅ THUMBNAILS ARE LIVE. 77.5 MB → 0.78 MB on the biggest gallery; the Desk ~100 MB → 1.12 MB. Four surfaces (tile, Desk strip, flag tray, filmstrip); the review stage keeps the original. → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-cache-that-aged-the-thing-it-cached.md
✅ CREATION + UPDATE DATES ARE ON THE RECORD for all 30 booths (created_at via statx, landed_at already existed). design-dev renders them when his sequencing reaches it; None must render as nothing. → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-dates-and-the-guess-wearing-a-facts-clothes.md
⚠ THE DESK EXPOSES 84 IMAGES ACROSS 22 BOOTHS on the page he opens first. The pre-redesign index showed ONE cover per booth; four-up multiplied exposure by four and nothing posted before the redesign opted into it. ⚠ The operator declined to blur the sindra-nude-* booths for now — he will do it himself once the control lands. Do not blur them on his behalf.
🛑 NO 1.0.0 YET (operator, 2026-09-23). The tag stays 1.0.0b1; no further pre-release 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 ROADMAP looks complete — it has looked complete twice already.
🔶 COMPARE MODE (r3) is ruled INTO this arc and unparked; design-dev starts it after the two merges land. The item-record work it needs is ours, not deferred — he tells us what a compare view wants from booth_items.
🛑 STANDING: NO ANNOUNCEMENTS out of this repo until the whole arc is done, and the operator sends that one himself. Do not offer, draft-and-await, or raise it.
⚠ booth/__init__.py IS A FOURTH STDLIB-ONLY MODULE — scripts/booth executes it before every documented one. Covered by test_stdlib_only.
⚠ Read the staged ref, never a SHA written here — design-dev rebases and rewrites it in place. git show-ref | grep svos, then git merge-tree.
770 green on a clean run; 49+ falsifiers proved across three mutation tables (scripts/mutation_check.py). Tree clean, pushed, 0 ahead.

Recent decisions

[2026-09-23] ✅ The four flow rulings, and what they cost the beta — all four taking design-dev's recommendation; READ BEFORE CUTTING ANY RELEASE, because v1.0.0b1's "no new features" promise no longer describes the arc and an alpha drop-back is illegal → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-flow-rulings-and-what-they-cost-the-beta.md
[2026-09-23] ✅ Creation dates came from a syscall, after three guesses wearing a fact's clothes — READ BEFORE REACHING FOR A PROXY; the system already recorded what looked unavailable, and one of the rejected proxies was a shape we had just finished paying for → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-dates-and-the-guess-wearing-a-facts-clothes.md
[2026-09-23] ⚠ The browser suite is flaky under load — OPEN, owned by design-dev — three tests, two real defects fixed, NEITHER proven causal; do not read a green suite as proof → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-browser-suite-is-flaky-under-load.md
[2026-09-23] ⚠ The cache that aged the thing it cached — thumbnails 77.5MB→0.78MB; READ BEFORE PARKING ANYTHING ON A MEASUREMENT (we counted images and the cost was in bytes), and BEFORE PUTTING A SERVER-WRITTEN CACHE INSIDE A BOOTH (excluding its contents does not stop it aging the booth) → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-cache-that-aged-the-thing-it-cached.md
[2026-09-23] ⚠ The probe that nearly dismissed a live injection vector — the link board rendered javascript: hrefs; READ BEFORE TRUSTING A NEGATIVE RESULT FROM AN OBVIOUS PROBE, and before assuming an existing scheme check is the guard you are looking for → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-probe-that-nearly-dismissed-a-live-vector.md
[2026-09-23] ✅ The bug-hunt panel found six defects and five vacuous falsifiers — READ BEFORE BUILDING ANY FRAGMENT ANCHOR (browsers match raw before decoded, so both sides must be encoded), and before trusting a well-commented diff's guards → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-23-the-bug-hunt-panel-and-five-vacuous-falsifiers.md
[2026-09-22] ✅ v1.0.0b1 — the v1 target staged as a beta, and a version that was two copies — READ BEFORE DERIVING A VERSION FROM importlib.metadata HERE; it reports a different artifact, and booth/__init__.py turns out to be stdlib-only → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-v1-staged-as-a-beta-and-a-second-copy-of-the-version.md
[2026-09-22] ✅ U7 landed — and the number that justified it did not reproduce — all seven v1 units are in; READ BEFORE TRUSTING A MEASUREMENT INSIDE A CONTRACT, and before assuming a degeneracy guard covers the degeneracy you actually have → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u7-landed-and-a-table-that-did-not-reproduce.md
[2026-09-22] ⚠ A mutation harness certified a broken test, twice, for two reasons — no green baseline, and the pyc cache silently reverting same-size mutations; READ BEFORE WRITING ONE → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-a-mutation-harness-that-certified-a-broken-test.md
[2026-09-22] 🛑 STANDING: no announcements out of this repo until the arc is done, and he sends that one himself — verbatim "no announcements until the entire arc is done, and even then i'll do it myself." Stricter than the house broadcast gate: the send is not the agent's to make, so asking is also out of scope. The drafted 17-handle note is REASSIGNED to him, not blocked — see the in-flight row above; do not raise it again.
[2026-09-22] The operator ruled on all five open items at once — four executed incl. the first push; the broadcast was blocked by the permission layer and is drafted at docs/pending/ → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-operator-ruled-on-the-open-five.md
[2026-09-22] U7 is three-quarters built and blocked on one word — the ratified three landed; the sections-vs-groups departure is NOT built and is the operator's call, tracked at docs/contracts/u7_navigation.contract.md → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u7-three-quarters-and-one-ruling.md
[2026-09-22] An approved directive misrouted because pane_find addresses by a rolling pane title — resolved; the MECHANISM is the durable part, reported to infra-ops, untracked by booth-dev → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-a-directive-misrouted-by-pane-title.md
[2026-09-22] U7 re-measured before scoping — sections are dead, filename prefixes are not — PRE-WORK ONLY, no unit started; read before writing U7's contract → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u7-remeasured-before-scoping.md
[2026-09-22] The last open defect closed, and building its falsifier found another — the wrong-shaped answer fixed at _hydrate; _safe_fragments lost its natural trigger and its handler could not survive the failure it handled → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-a-wrong-shaped-answer-500s-the-gallery.md
[2026-09-22] U6 released as v0.6.0 — benches, and the number that was two defects — six of seven v1 units landed, NOT PUSHED → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u6-benches-released.md
[2026-09-22] Three cold panels on one unit, and what each lens could only see alone — READ BEFORE DECIDING TO SKIP A GATE; all five passes found something the others structurally could not → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-three-cold-panels-on-one-unit.md
[2026-09-22] U6 landed — three surfaces, three jobs, one predicate — the seam review caught three real contract defects incl. a per-row resolve_booth that would have 404'd the board → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u6-benches-landed.md
[2026-09-22] The 69% link-board rot was two defects wearing one number — READ BEFORE SCOPING ANY LINK-BOARD WORK; U5 closed the larger half and full-URL-vs-origin identity is a measured call → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-one-number-was-two-defects.md
[2026-09-22] U3 landed — the page declares the seam, the Booth mounts into it — ten regexes against author HTML replaced by a substring test and a + → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u3-declared-embed-seam-landed.md
[2026-09-22] A wrong-shaped answer 500s the gallery and the marks page — PRE-EXISTING (measured at 42ea67f), NOT U3; the v0.2.2 lesson is only half-implemented → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-a-wrong-shaped-answer-500s-the-gallery.md
[2026-09-22] The browser became a test surface — READ BEFORE TOUCHING playwright IN pyproject; the pinned upper bound is the foot-gun, and these tests SKIP rather than fail → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-the-browser-became-a-test-surface.md
[2026-09-22] A vacuity pass that tries the contract's own mutation agrees with itself — U3 ran one, reported 7/7, and a cold panel then showed one of the seven was vacuous; READ BEFORE WRITING A Falsifiable: LINE → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-seven-of-seven-falsifiers.md
[2026-09-22] U4 landed — lifetime is derived, not declared — three states, viewing is activity, and no new arithmetic anywhere → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u4-derived-lifetime-landed.md
[2026-09-22] The .forever diagnosis got a live positive control — 3 of the 4 booths awaiting an answer were ALSO hand-pinned — RE-COUNT 2026-10-06 → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-forever-had-a-live-positive-control.md
[2026-09-22] No fleetwide notice for U4, and what that does to the prediction — READ BEFORE THE 2026-10-06 RE-COUNT; a flat rate does not falsify the diagnosis → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-no-notice-and-what-it-does-to-the-prediction.md
[2026-09-22] Four independent paths to one fail-open delete — the bug-hunt panel's class, and the zsh word-splitting trap that shipped an empty bundle → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-four-paths-to-one-fail-open-delete.md
[2026-09-22] Two reads of one file are not one read of one state — a TOCTOU seam that composes two correct readers into a fail-open delete → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-two-reads-are-not-one-state.md
[2026-09-22] Five of seven INV falsifiers did not falsify anything — read before writing a Falsifiable: line; a green test cited one rather than being one → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-vacuous-falsifiers.md
[2026-09-22] The third one-branch template miss — this repo's recurring blind spot; read before adding a fact to any template → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-third-one-branch-template-miss.md
[2026-09-22] The size cap opened a service-wide hang — a FIFO has st_size 0; a bound that trusts it inherits what it does not mean → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-size-cap-opened-a-hang.md
[2026-09-22] An existing test stopped me retiring documented behaviour — the clean fix for the mtime race would have silently changed TTL doctrine → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-doctrine-not-defect.md
[2026-09-22] Two U5 panels, and prose reached a released outage — read the detail before assuming a conformance finding stops at its own module → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u5-panels-reached-a-released-bug.md
[2026-09-22] U5's adoption prediction split in two — the handle rides for free, the why must be learned — RE-MEASURE 2026-09-29 → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u5-adoption-split-in-two.md
[2026-09-22] The U2 bug-hunt panel was not ceremony — the lock-unlink race and the TTL guard that was failing at its own job → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-u2-bug-hunt-panel.md
[2026-09-22] The lenient reader's blast radius was the whole service — marks_for runs per booth per index load; a raise there is an outage → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-lenient-reader-blast-radius.md
[2026-09-22] booth marks / booth answer got real exit codes — read it before changing anything the 17 consuming handles call → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-cli-exit-codes.md
[2026-09-22] scripts/booth went from zero tests to five — they run the real script under system python3, so they also check INV-1 → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-22-scripts-booth-got-tests.md
[2026-09-21] v0.2.0 was tagged while a gate was in flight — the sequencing lesson: if a gate is outstanding, the tag waits → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-v020-tagged-with-a-gate-in-flight.md
[2026-09-21] A write over a damaged .marks.json wiped the booth — the reads-lenient / writes-strict asymmetry, and why it exists → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-marks-write-wiped-judgment.md
[2026-09-21] Seam review and cold panel had zero overlap, twice — evidence for running both; neither substitutes for the other → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-two-gates-are-complementary.md
[2026-09-21] Every code-changing finding came from the AMBIGUITY pass — a finding about the /heid-contract-review skill, not about this repo → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-ambiguity-pass-did-the-work.md
[2026-09-21] Deterministic order is a cross-cutting v1 invariant — operator directive; read before adding ANY ordered surface → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-deterministic-order-invariant.md
[2026-09-21] U2 (marks) landed — one primitive for three mechanisms — what moved where, and the HTTP mirror remote sessions poll → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-u2-marks-landed.md
[2026-09-21] A partially-answered pick counts as OPEN — declared, not smuggled; it is the reading that makes U4 correct → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-partial-answer-counts-as-open.md
[2026-09-21] The U2 seam review earned its place, and how — inline.place indexes by subscript — the miss a cold panel cannot see → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-u2-seam-review-earned-it.md
[2026-09-21] Marks are one .marks.json per booth — operator decision with two rejected alternatives; read before restructuring → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-marks-storage-decision.md
[2026-09-21] U7's section premise is half wrong — every booth that needs navigation is FLAT — read before starting U7 → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-u7-section-premise-half-wrong.md
[2026-09-21] sindra-finalists is U2's flag motivation, caught live — evidence, not argument → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-sindra-finalists-is-the-motivation.md
[2026-09-21] The information architecture and the v1 gate landed — the single defect the seven units decompose → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-ia-and-v1-gate-landed.md
[2026-09-21] The .forever diagnosis is a falsifiable prediction — U4's success criterion — re-count a fortnight AFTER U4 lands → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-forever-diagnosis-is-a-prediction.md
[2026-09-21] Extracted from eshpfi into its own repo — test_booth.py is the regression net the v1 rewrite is checked against → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-extracted-from-eshpfi.md

Tried and abandoned

[2026-09-21] Tagging a release while a review gate was in flight — cost a same-hour v0.2.1 and a correction to 15 handles → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-tagging-with-a-gate-in-flight.md
[2026-09-21] Letting the write path share the read path's leniency — a tolerant reader and a tolerant writer are not the same decision → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-tolerant-writer-over-tolerant-reader.md
[2026-09-21] Letting Jinja hot-reload templates in the deployment root — caused a live outage: 19 of 25 booths at 500. Why auto_reload=False → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-jinja-hot-reload-outage.md
[2026-09-21] Five mechanisms to get one question beside one artifact — the accretion signature this whole v1 rewrite is undoing → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-five-mechanisms-one-job.md
[2026-09-21] Regex-injecting chrome into arbitrary author HTML — the defect U3 exists to close → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-regex-injecting-chrome.md
[2026-09-21] A boolean escape hatch as the lifetime mechanism — why .forever is a symptom; the defect U4 exists to close → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-boolean-escape-hatch-as-lifetime.md
[2026-09-21] Letting the link board absorb the announce job — 69% rot; U5 gave the job a home, which is what unblocks U6 → persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-link-board-absorbing-announce.md