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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.
7.8 KiB
CLAUDE.md — the Booth
Mechanical conventions for this repo: how the code here is written.
Timeless by design — temporal state and dated decisions live in
persistent-memory.md, the v1 gate lives in ROADMAP.md, and the model the
code is converging on lives in docs/design/information-architecture.md.
House-wide rules (SemVer cadence, attribution, roadmap gate, the House Code
Discipline) come from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md and are not restated here.
What this is
A standing FastAPI service on :8090 that scans ~/booth-data for
drop-folders and renders each as a review surface. Agents post work by making
a folder; the operator looks at it, judges it, and the judgment gets back to
the agent.
Read docs/design/information-architecture.md before any structural change.
It supersedes README.md, which still describes the accreted file-shuttle
model and is rewritten as the v1 units land.
Persistent memory
persistent-memory.md at the repo root captures durable intent and supporting
evidence (goals, decisions, foot-gun warnings, in-flight state) across context
resets. Read it at session start; treat it as one input alongside this file and
the auto-memory system, not as the single source of truth.
It is a lean index: the dated log sections keep each over-threshold entry's
full body in persistent-memory.d/<slug>.md. Pull a detail file only when its
index line is relevant to your work — never bulk-read persistent-memory.d/.
When you commit, include any pending persistent-memory.md and
persistent-memory.d/ updates in the same commit. Never leave them as a
floating uncommitted change while shipping other work — durable memory that
lags the code defeats its own purpose.
The six invariants
These are the ones a casual change breaks silently. Each has a test.
1. links.py, asks.py and marks.py are stdlib-only, on purpose
scripts/booth — the CLI every fleet session uses — imports them directly:
BOOTH_SRC=… python3 -c 'import sys; sys.path.insert(0, …); from booth.marks import declare_pick'
It runs under the system python3 with no venv. A single third-party
import in any of the three breaks booth ask / booth marks / booth answer /
booth unlink on every host, and the failure surfaces in an agent's session,
not in ours.
items.py and app.py are free to import what they like. Those three are not.
test_stdlib_only walks each module's AST imports and asserts it — the CLI
imports through a python3 -c heredoc that no AST extractor can see, so that
test is the only thing standing here.
2. The filesystem is the state
No database. ls ~/booth-data tells you everything the service knows.
Per-booth operator state is a dotfile inside the booth: .forever (keep),
.blurred (one rel per line), .marks.json + .marks.lock (judgment), .pins
(link-board pin ids), .uploaded (upload-booth marker). booth_items() skips name.startswith("."), so a new
dotfile costs nothing in item counts, galleries or zips. That skip is why the
dotfile is the right shape for new operator state — use it rather than
inventing a sidecar-per-item.
3. One resolver for item facts
booth.items.booth_items(booth) is the only place a file is classified, a
caption resolved, a section derived or blur state read. No route body
derives an item fact. Every surface — gallery, zoom, doc view, index card,
zip manifest — reads the Item record.
Contract: docs/contracts/u1_item_record.contract.md, INV-1. Falsifiable and
tested: no call to classify / doc_kind / read_blurred / render_doc
survives inside create_app.
This exists because the zoom view once re-derived the item from scratch and, in doing so, never resolved the caption — the operator's "zoomed images lose their annotations" bug. It was not a rendering bug; it was three readers of one truth.
4. Re-export, don't move-and-break
Names that moved from app.py to items.py (classify, doc_kind,
render_doc, CAPTION_MAX, the extension sets) stay importable from
booth.app. 20+ test sites import them by name from there. The re-export is
load-bearing and asserted by a test, not left to convention — a silent drop
would be found by a consumer, not by us.
5. Sidecar writes are atomic; text bodies stay raw
Anything a session may read while the browser writes it goes through temp file
os.replace(seemarks._write_raw). A reader never sees a partial file, and a crash mid-write cannot truncate a file into a shorter — and therefore quieter — set of marks or a more revealing blur set.
render_doc returns raw text for the non-markdown case on purpose: the
template escapes it inside <pre>, and pre-escaping here double-encodes under
Jinja autoescape.
6. Every ordered collection has a stated, deterministic order
Operator directive, 2026-09-21. Not "usually stable" and not "whatever rglob
yields" — a rule you can write down in one line, producing the same sequence on
every render of the same state. Any defensible rule qualifies: byte order over a
path, creation time, an explicit number, an arbitrary-but-recorded sequence. No
rule at all does not.
The Booth's job is comparison, which makes this load-bearing rather than tidy.
The operator judges tile 47 of pancake-v3-full against tile 47 of
pancake-v4-full, and refers to artifacts positionally — "the third one", "the
one after the banded one". If the order moves between renders, or differs
between the gallery, the zoom ring, the zip and the marks read, a flag or a
note lands on the wrong artifact. It never shows up as a crash; it shows up as
the operator's judgment being quietly misfiled.
Current rules: items sorted(rel); the zoom ring is that order filtered to
images; captions resolve over a sorted scan; marks (created, id); legacy
import (mtime, name); link rows pinned-then-newest. ROADMAP.md carries the
table and the two places still undecided (U7 sections and compare pairing, U6
bench listing).
When you add an ordered surface, state its rule in the docstring. If you cannot state it in one line, it does not have one.
Multi-writer vs single-writer — don't inherit the wrong shape
links.md is a multi-writer append log: 17 agent handles post to it
concurrently, so it is an O_APPEND write with content-hash row identity and
an fcntl lock only on the rewrite path. Index-based removal would delete a
neighbour's row when another session appends mid-operation.
Marks, blur and keep state are single-writer — the operator, in one browser — with many readers (sessions polling). That is a different problem and must not inherit the append-log design. Per-booth file, atomic replace, lock the read-modify-write.
Ask which one you have before choosing a storage shape.
Non-goals, standing
- No auth. LAN/mesh-internal. Blur is cosmetic and the UI says so. Anything
that must not be seen by whoever can reach
:8090must not be in a booth. - No database. See invariant 2.
- No upload API for booths. A session makes a folder. That is the whole API, and it is why every agent family can use this without a client.
- Nothing deletes the operator's data on a timer beyond the documented 24h TTL. Liveness is flagged, not enforced.
Working in here
.venv/bin/python -m pytest -q # the suite; keep it green
curl -s localhost:8090/healthz # the live service (systemd --user)
systemctl --user restart booth.service # after a code change, to see it live
booth.service is a user unit installed to ~/.config/systemd/user/. The repo
copy is the source; edits there need a daemon-reload.
Tests are the spec for behaviour the contracts don't cover yet — test_booth.py
carries the accreted service's behaviour and is the regression net for the v1
rewrite. Don't edit an existing assertion to make a change pass; if the
behaviour genuinely changes, the contract says so first.