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The sixth of seven v1 units. A bench is a running thing, registered: identity is the normalized URL so re-posting updates the row instead of appending a fifth, `booth link` refuses the one shape that now has a better home, and the board marks the rows whose booths are gone without deleting a single one. Minor rather than patch, approved by the operator. Two capabilities arrived and one verb changed behaviour for seventeen agent handles, which is the push-notification bar in the tier test: `booth bench` is new, the board gained a dead marker, and `booth link` now refuses a booth URL and a credentialed one. 444 -> 607 tests across the unit and its three cold gates. All four review gates closed: an in-session seam review (three real contract defects, including one that would have 404'd the whole board page), an in-session adversarial pass (four defects, one of them this repo's own FIFO lesson recurring in a new file), and three cold cross-frontier panels -- contract paraphrase, code-vs- contract, and a diff-scoped bug hunt -- folded in full with exactly one finding declined and its reasoning recorded. Measured before contracted, and the measurement changed the unit: the design doc's headline 69% rot was two defects wearing one number, and U5 had already closed the larger half. Identity is the FULL normalized URL rather than the origin because origin identity merges eight distinct gitea repositories, three unrelated model cards, and the two LRPG surfaces the design doc itself names as an example of two real benches.
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The Booth — roadmap
Design: docs/design/information-architecture.md.
Current version: 0.6.0 (U1 through U6 landed; extracted from eshpfi 2026-09-21).
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 | ce598b3 |
captions never reach the zoom view (never sent, not lost) | U1 |
| 2 | c7f9437, released v0.2.0 |
5 mechanisms for 1 job; operator→session loop runs through chat | U2 |
| 3 | 87e2c53, released v0.5.0 |
6 regexes injected into arbitrary author HTML, load-bearing for asks | U3 |
| 4 | c3a97c1, released v0.4.0 |
70% of booths on the .forever escape hatch (54% when first counted) |
U4 |
| 5 | c015a91, released v0.3.0 |
job 5 had no home, so it lived on the link board as 145 dead rows | U5 |
| 6 | 1c3ce5d, released v0.6.0 |
69% link-board rot (re-measured: 178 booth rows + 8 bench re-posts) | U6 |
| 7 | Navigation at 270 items — sections, rail, filters, grid keyboard | one flat wall; subfolder structure discarded at render | 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.
U1 through U6 are landed. U7 is the last unit before the 1.0 cut — its
only dependency was {U3, U4, U5} and that closed with U3.
⚠ Before starting U7, read
persistent-memory.d/2026-09-21-u7-section-premise-half-wrong.md, and re-count
the booths first. Half its premise is already known to be wrong — every booth
that actually needs navigation is FLAT — and the booth set churned again on
2026-09-22: the four large booths U7 was sized against (pancake-v3-full and
pancake-v4-full at 270 items, sindra20-engines, sindra-finalists) have all
been swept. The largest live booth is now miranda-is at 92 items, flat. Two of
23 booths have subfolders (pewpew-ui-brief, dfa-concepts) and both are
reports — the job where grid navigation matters least. Sections, one of U7's
four named components, buys close to nothing. The rail, the filters and the grid
keyboard are the unit.
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 newandbooth add, so every existing caller starts announcing without learning anything. - The
whyhas 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 zoom prev/next ring | the item order, filtered to images — same sequence, one source |
| 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) |
| 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) |
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.
Where it is still to be decided, and must be before the unit ships: U7's section ordering and its compare pairing (sections need a stated order among themselves, not just within; pairing by filename needs a rule for what happens to an unpaired file). U6's bench listing is settled — the row above. Compare pairing is parked to v1.1 with compare mode itself, so U7 carries one undecided rule, not two.
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
askCLI verbs. Pre-1.0, andask/asks/answerbecome thin aliases overmarksrather 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.mdis 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 — pair-by-name A/B across subfolders | The best idea in the set, and the only one that is a new capability rather than a fix for a measured defect. The four-booth pancake-v3/v4 dance still works. First thing in v1.1. |
| 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. |
Post-v1, already committed
- SVOS theme retrofit by
design-dev. 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. The handoff is a/vor-uibrief written against the landed v1 structure — the same shapehamr-devandpewpew-devused.
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.