M4: add durable named Save Points

A Save Point is a name for a story position, and restoring one is head
movement. That is the whole architecture, and it is what ADR 012 and
BUILD-MILESTONES' note on M4 asked for: M3 made the head a stored
(branch, depth) and made arriving at one a row lookup plus a state restore,
so a Save Point needs no restore machinery of its own.

What the user gets:

- Name the moment they are reading, keep playing, restart the app, and come
  back to it. Restoring moves the story back and deletes nothing: the later
  turns stay, Redo still walks forward into them, and writing something
  different is what starts a new line while the old one is kept.
- Rename, delete, and a list, in a Save Points panel beside the branch panel,
  with a Save Point button next to Undo and Redo. Both confirmations say what
  is *not* destroyed, because that is the part the screen cannot show.
- Save Points survive export and import.

What was deliberately not built:

- No second restore path. `head.move_to_node` is the only new movement: its
  depth half is M3's `head.move_to` unchanged, and its branch half is the
  single assignment `switch_branch` already makes. No head field is written
  in the checkpoint router, nothing reconstructs state, nothing prunes a
  memory, nothing copies or deletes a turn, and restore never forks — the
  first write below the restored head does, through `fork_if_behind_head`.
- No automatic cleanup. A Save Point behind the head, or naming a line the
  story left, is doing its job (STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS §19). The one removal
  is a cascade: deleting a branch takes its Save Points, as it takes its
  memories, because the story they named went with it.
- No new ADR. ADR 012 already decides the architecture, and a table is not a
  decision.

The one call the planning package did not already make: restore moves the
branch half of the head only when the coordinate is off the path being read.
Doing it unconditionally would quietly hand back an abandoned continuation
whenever a Save Point in a shared prefix was restored; never doing it would
make a Save Point on a departed line unrestorable, which contradicts §19.
TECHNICAL-DESIGN §8.8 records it.

Schema: a `checkpoints` table holding a name, an optional note and a
(branch, depth) coordinate — no copy of any story. `create_all` builds it as
it did `memories` and `branches`; migration 80 adds the index. No backfill,
because nobody had named a position before M4.

The coordinate is deliberately not an action id: one coordinate holds every
attempt at a turn and exactly one is live, so a coordinate follows a retry
where a row id would pin a take the story no longer tells.

Tests: 680 pass (638 before). 42 new in tests/test_save_points.py covering
D11-D14, I04, L03, E-series lineage and memory isolation after restore and
divergence, the edge cases, and an M3-database migration. One pre-existing
fixture in test_tree_migration.py needed `checkpoints` added to its drop
list — SQLite refuses to drop a table another table references.

Not verified: the browser. No session has had a usable one, so the Save
Point panel's DOM behaviour is unobserved — as M3's Redo control still is.
The twenty-step sequence was driven over HTTP against a live server with a
real process restart instead, and all seventeen checks pass. M4 is
implemented, not accepted: no review has been written.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PWU4gTfLYY6Qq9U7aa9Qw2
This commit is contained in:
JesseMarkowitz
2026-09-03 18:48:54 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 3c8e91f644
commit e08d49c3eb
20 changed files with 2272 additions and 26 deletions
+54
View File
@@ -241,6 +241,60 @@ class Branch(Base):
superseded_depth: Mapped[int | None] = mapped_column(Integer, nullable=True)
class Checkpoint(Base):
"""M4: a Save Point — a durable named pointer to a story position.
"Save Point" is what the user reads; `checkpoint` is what the code calls it
(`BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md` §23).
The row holds a name and a coordinate, and no story. `DATA-MODEL.md` §8
describes the pointer as naming a turn; the coordinate here is
`(branch_id, depth)`, which is what M3 made the head and what
`head.node_at` resolves. Restoring one is therefore head movement with a
bounds check rather than a restore system of its own — see ADR 012 and
`head.move_to_node`.
A coordinate rather than an action id, deliberately. One coordinate can
hold several attempts at a turn and exactly one of them is live, so a
retry replaces the row a Save Point would have pinned. "Turn 42 of this
line" survives a retry; "action 918" would point at a take the story no
longer tells.
`branch_id` is the branch the node itself sits on, not the branch that was
being read when the Save Point was made. Those differ whenever the head is
resting in a shared prefix, and the node's own branch is the one that still
names the position after the reader has moved elsewhere.
Deleting a branch deletes its Save Points, by the same cascade that takes
its memories: the story the pointer names is gone with it. Nothing else
removes one. They are not cleaned up for going stale, for being behind the
head, or for pointing into a future the story has left
(`STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` §19).
"""
__tablename__ = "checkpoints"
id: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(primary_key=True)
adventure_id: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(
ForeignKey("adventures.id", ondelete="CASCADE")
)
name: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(String(120), default="")
# `DATA-MODEL.md` §8's optional notes, and `BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md` §24's
# optional second field. Empty is the ordinary case.
note: Mapped[str] = mapped_column(Text, default="")
branch_id: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(
ForeignKey("branches.id", ondelete="CASCADE")
)
depth: Mapped[int] = mapped_column(Integer)
created_at: Mapped[datetime] = mapped_column(DateTime, default=utcnow)
# Bumped by a rename, which is the only edit a Save Point allows. The
# coordinate is never rewritten: `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` §24 keeps a
# Save Point's meaning auditable by making "move it" delete-and-recreate.
updated_at: Mapped[datetime] = mapped_column(
DateTime, default=utcnow, onupdate=utcnow
)
class Memory(Base):
"""Phase 6: an auto-summarized (or hand-written) fact about the adventure.