M8: the browser becomes the storyteller

The interface was AI-DnD's with this product's features bolted into it. The
navigation read Home · Adventures · Scenarios · Settings · AI Chat; starting a
story meant first picking a *world*, and making a world meant a JSON stat-schema
form, a story-card table and an art picker. The play screen had a Branches tab.
The input had three modes. Sixteen of the sixteen controls on a two-turn story
had no accessible name — they were single glyphs with a tooltip.

All of that was measured in a real browser before anything was changed, and the
measurements are in planning/reports/M8-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md §C. Almost
nothing underneath was wrong: the play loop, the history controls, the takes,
the Save Points, the state correction and the knowledge library all worked. What
was wrong was what a reader was asked to understand in order to use them.

So the shape now is one entry point and one screen:

  Campaigns -> Campaign -> Story
                           State · Knowledge · Context · Save Points · Settings

Everything that is not the story lives in a panel that starts closed. The
top navigation bar is hidden on the story screen entirely, because on that one
screen the story is the interface.

Play is one natural-language field. An action and a piece of quoted dialogue are
both just what the reader wrote, and B01/B02 confirmed against a real narrator
that the model reads the quotes without being told which kind of turn it is.
What survives from the old Story mode is a Story direction toggle, which is not
a fourth mode: it changes who is being spoken to, not what kind of action is
taken, and the box is visibly marked while it is on.

Branch, fork, node, merge and head appear nowhere a reader can see them. The
branch panel and the tree overlay are gone from the browser. The mechanism is
untouched — takes, divergence, retained futures and Save Points all still work,
and their endpoints are still tested. This is a decision about what a reader is
asked to understand, not a reduction of what the product can do.

The two defects worth the space:

A player action is stored with AI Dungeon's "> You " prefix. That was right when
the Do mode asked for a bare verb phrase. With one field the spec tells the
reader to write "I enter the tavern", and the result was "> You I enter the
tavern." — in the transcript, in the replayed history, and therefore in the
narration, where a small model imitates it and writes "You I thank her". M8's
own design surfaced it, so M8 fixed it: the prefix is added only when the reader
has not already written a subject. The ">" marker, which is what actually
identifies a player turn in the prompt, is unchanged in every case.

And a stale `.input-bar { display: flex }` in play.css overrode the new
composer, because that sheet is imported after the new one. The direction row
and the input row laid out side by side and the box was unusably narrow. Found
by opening the product in a browser, not by reading the CSS — which is the
argument for having done that first.

Failures now have the taxonomy the spec asked for rather than one toast: model,
generation, state, knowledge, server, each with the thing to do about it. A
failed turn leaves the reader's words in the box and says so. The classification
reads backend strings, so it is a fallback ladder rather than a lookup — an
unrecognised message still classifies, still shows the server's own words and
still offers Retry.

`Settings.model` could be empty with nothing saying so until the first turn
failed with a provider error. The header now reports Ollama in five states, and
an unconfigured or missing model offers the models actually installed on the
endpoint, from the connection test that already knew them. Nothing is chosen
automatically: an endpoint's first model may be an embedding model, which cannot
narrate at all.

Narrator prose is rendered as safe Markdown — headings, emphasis, lists,
blockquotes, code. The safety is structural rather than filtered: every node is
a React element built from parsed text, and there is no dangerouslySetInnerHTML
in the file. A sanitizer is not needed to make markup safe if markup is never
produced from input. Link schemes are checked with the URL parser rather than a
pattern, because the bypasses are all in the parsing. A remote image is a
placeholder naming the blocked address; the knowledge and context panels
deliberately do not use this renderer at all, because they exist to show a
reader exactly what is in their file.

Backend, and only what the browser could not otherwise reach:

  AdventureCreate.opening   a start action could only come from a Scenario, so
                            every campaign made in the new setup flow opened on
                            a blank page. Same node, same code path.
  canon_rules               campaign_canon has been the highest authority in a
                            campaign since M5, read by the prompt builder and
                            the state validator, and had no API at all — a
                            fixture had to write it with SQL.
  a 401 and a 429 message   the last user-facing text describing a hosted
                            deployment. One told the reader to check an API key
                            that has not existed since M2.

No schema change and no migration: proved by building a database with a server
running the M7 commit's own code and opening it with this one.

The project had no frontend tests. It has 132 now, across ten files, running
in about six seconds — the enabled state of every history control, the take
selector, the confirmations, the panels, the five model states, the failure
taxonomy, the focus trap, accessibility, and that the reserved dictation control
never touches the microphone. Writing them found a real defect: the focus trap
filtered candidates with offsetParent, which is null inside the fixed-position
ancestor the dialog has and which jsdom never computes — it would have behaved
differently in the tests from the browser.

They do not replace the real-browser runs, and both kinds of evidence are in the
report. The browser suites drive the production build served by the real backend
with a real local narrator, including a genuine process restart.

A verification pass over all of it then found three more, each by driving the
product rather than reading it:

Stepping between alternate takes did nothing. The pager asked whether a take
lived on another line by comparing `target.branch_id !== action.branch_id`, and
`ActionOut` has never carried `branch_id` — so the comparison was permanently
`number !== undefined`, always true, and every step took the branch-switch path.
For two takes of an ordinary retry, which share a line until one is written
below, that meant switching to the line already being read: the same window came
back and nothing moved. D07 is a required v1 acceptance test. The fix needed no
new field — the variants list already carries every attempt's branch and marks
the live one.

The first regression test for that passed against the broken code, because its
fixture gave the action a `branch_id` the real payload never sends. That is the
exact failure M7's review was about, so the fixture was corrected, the tests were
re-run against the reverted code and failed for the right reason, and the
fixture now carries a docstring saying why the field must never come back.

And the knowledge panel pointed readers at an "embedding model" while the
setting is called "Model for meaning-based search" — a reader sent looking for a
field that does not exist by that name.

Campaign canon was measured rather than assumed. Editing it after play is a
configuration change: every turn already played keeps the canon it was actually
given, in its own context snapshot, and the accepted story, the state document
and the state audit log are byte-identical across an edit. It is not routed
through M5's state audit, because canon is not narrative state and doing so
would create the second representation the spec forbids. What the editor does
now is say so, once a campaign has moments.

`BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md` §38 asked for a "Show Hidden Story State" toggle. There is
no hidden story state — a secret lives in a narrator-only knowledge source and
never enters the state document. The section is rewritten to require what it
actually meant: ordinary surfaces must not carry narrator-only information,
advanced inspection must withhold it by default behind an explicit warned
choice, and no second store may be invented to give a toggle something to
reveal. The protection is stricter than before, not weaker.

Closeout. An independent review returned M8 IMPLEMENTATION: PASS subject to
evidence and documentation cleanup, and this commit carries that cleanup:

The report named two frontend bundles as the artifact behind its acceptance
evidence. The saved run logs settle it. index-Ii-lARp9.js, built at 18:53:02
from this tree, is the one final frozen artifact behind all 157 browser checks;
index-C6E5Uvtu.js is superseded — it predates the D09 fix and its acceptance
suite ended 54/55 on exactly that defect. No tracked file under backend/app or
frontend/src has a modification time after the freeze, so the whole final
campaign describes one build. §P sets the two side by side.

Finding 14 — the app budgets 16,384 prompt tokens while an Ollama that sees no
VRAM enforces 4,096 — is resolved operationally, with no application change.
The OpenAI-compatible endpoint this app speaks accepts num_ctx and ignores it,
and reloads the model at its own default, so a native call cannot prime it
either. A model derived with POST /api/create carries the parameter, is honoured
through the app's own OpenAI-compatible path, and appears in /v1/models — which
is the listing the Settings model picker already reads. Measured end to end.
The procedure is in DEVELOPMENT.md; nothing in the repository depends on any
particular derived model existing. Adding provider code to work around this was
declined deliberately: it would mean either a second native request path,
against ADR 011, or a parameter the endpoint provably ignores.

The §38 rewrite is ratified as a requirement clarification aligned with the
implemented architecture, and the spec gains the clause finding 3 was really
about: withheld material must be absent from the rendered DOM, not merely
collapsed in it.

The report's §U carries the M9 handoff — what a portable campaign has to include,
whether historical context snapshots belong in the bundle, what happens to
inherited story cards, and that a restored campaign may meet a different context
window than the one that wrote it. None of it is implemented here.

Final: backend 950 passed / 14 skipped; frontend 132 passed; lint, production
build and Docker build clean; 157 browser checks across six suites, zero
failures. M8 is implemented, verified, reviewed and accepted (2026-09-06).
M9 has not been started.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017HdaXiFbscatQaLS7dJk6b

DEVELOPMENT.md

@@ -214,13 +214,44 @@ visible from within.
 ## Tests
 
 ```bash
-cd backend && .venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q     # 920 tests, 10 skipped
+cd backend  && .venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q   # the backend suite
+cd frontend && npm test                               # the component suite (M8)
 cd frontend && npm run lint && npm run build
 ```
 
-Ten tests skip without something the machine may not have: seven need a second
-machine or an environment the suite cannot create, and three are M7's real-model
-tests below.
+Fourteen backend tests skip without something the machine may not have: seven
+need a second machine or an environment the suite cannot create, and the rest
+are the real-model tests below.
+
+### The frontend component suite
+
+M8 added one, because until M8 there was none — the browser was covered by real
+Firefox runs at each milestone's closeout and by nothing in between. It is
+Vitest and Testing Library over jsdom, and it runs in about two seconds:
+
+```bash
+cd frontend && npm test          # once
+cd frontend && npm run test:watch # while working
+```
+
+It covers the deterministic browser behaviour M8 owns: which history controls
+are enabled and why, the take selector, the Save Point and delete confirmations,
+what the State panel shows and does not, knowledge classification and semantic
+status, the context inspector's sections, the model-empty and model-unavailable
+states, how failures are presented, the dialog focus trap, and that the reserved
+dictation control never touches the microphone. Several tests assert the absence
+of branch vocabulary in the surfaces a reader uses.
+
+`markdown.test.jsx` is the security one. Narrator prose and imported text both
+reach the renderer, so it is where H06 and H07 are decided: markup in the source
+never becomes markup in the page, a `javascript:` URL never becomes an href, and
+a remote image is a placeholder rather than a request.
+
+**It does not replace the real-browser runs.** jsdom has no layout, no
+navigation and no network, so scroll behaviour, streaming, a genuine process
+restart and the CSP are all outside its reach. Each milestone's closeout drives
+a real Firefox over WebDriver, and that evidence is recorded in the milestone
+report.
 
 Two files are the M1 regression guards.
 
@@ -297,6 +328,58 @@ subsystem comes back as a route, if an API key becomes settable again, if the
 model timeout stops being configurable or becomes unbounded, or if a supported
 start path stops binding loopback.
 
+## The context window your Ollama actually enforces
+
+**Check this before a long campaign.** The application budgets a prompt up to
+`Settings.context_token_budget` (16,384 by default). Ollama enforces its own
+input window, and when it sees no VRAM it defaults to **4,096**:
+
+```
+level=INFO msg="vram-based default context" total_vram="0 B" default_num_ctx=4096
+```
+
+Confirm what yours is:
+
+```bash
+curl -s http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/ps | python3 -m json.tool | grep context_length
+```
+
+If that number is smaller than your budget, Ollama silently truncates the input
+— and `llama.cpp` drops the **oldest** tokens, which in this application is the
+system block: the narrator rules and the campaign canon. The symptom is a
+narrator that forgets canon deep into a long session, with nothing on screen
+explaining why.
+
+**Setting it per request does not work from this application.** Ollama's
+OpenAI-compatible endpoint accepts `num_ctx` — nested in `options` or at the top
+level — returns HTTP 200 and ignores it. Worse, it *reloads the model at its own
+default*, so priming the server with a native `/api/chat` call first does not
+help either: the app's next request resets the window.
+
+**Bake it into a model instead.** The window travels with the model, and this
+needs no shell access on the Ollama host — it is a normal API call:
+
+```bash
+curl http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/create -d '{
+  "model": "qwen2.5:3b-instruct-16k",
+  "from":  "qwen2.5:3b-instruct",
+  "parameters": {"num_ctx": 16384}
+}'
+```
+
+The derived model shares the base model's blobs, so it costs a manifest. It then
+appears in `/v1/models`, which is the listing the Settings model picker reads —
+select it there and the storyteller gets the full window through its ordinary
+OpenAI-compatible path. Remove it with `POST /api/delete` when you are done.
+
+Where you *do* control the server environment, `OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=16384`
+does the same job. Either way a larger window costs roughly proportionally more
+KV cache.
+
+If you would rather not raise it at all, set **How much story to send** in
+Settings to the number `/api/ps` reports, and the prompt will be assembled to
+fit.
+
 ## What was made offline-safe, and how to check
 
 Two runtime downloads were removed in Milestone M1. Both were invisible on a
@@ -350,5 +433,10 @@ left of upstream that a newcomer might report as a defect:
 - **`.github/workflows/ci.yml`** is upstream's GitHub Actions pipeline. This
   repository lives on a self-hosted Gitea; the workflow is kept for provenance
   and is not what runs the tests here.
-- **No frontend tests.** `npm run lint && npm run build` is the whole frontend
-  check. A test runner is M8's job.
+- **A thin `components.jsx`.** What is left of upstream's shared component
+  module is a toast host, a file picker, a JSON download and an auto-growing
+  textarea. M8 removed the rest with the screens that used them — the scenario
+  art generator, the placeholder modal, the story-card row.
+
+(Removed from this list by M8: **no frontend tests**. There is a component suite
+now — see Tests above.)