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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.
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3.6 KiB
The Booth — roadmap
Design: docs/design/information-architecture.md.
Current version: 0.1.15 (the accreted service, 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 | One item record — resolved once, carried to gallery, zoom, doc, zip | captions never reach the zoom view (never sent, not lost) | U1 |
| 2 | Marks — pick / note / flag, one primitive, one read path |
5 mechanisms for 1 job; operator→session loop runs through chat | U2 |
| 3 | Declared embed seam — /_booth/embed.js, chrome mounts via DOM |
6 regexes injected into arbitrary author HTML, load-bearing for asks | U3 |
| 4 | Derived lifetime — open marks pin; viewing is activity | 54% of booths on the .forever escape hatch |
U4 |
| 5 | Self-announcing booths — .booth.json, provenance on the index |
job 5 had no home, so it lived on the link board as 145 dead rows | U5 |
| 6 | Benches — registry, identity, enforced rule, migration | 69% link-board rot; the same bench posted 5× | 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.
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.