Adds docs/architecture.html (a standalone walkthrough of the context
budget, world-state engine, story tree, egress fix, and pen-test
findings) and links it from the landing page. Also clarifies in
GUIDE.md §1.8 that "no branching" describes per-turn control flow,
not the story tree's branching data.
The README, the project page and the engineering guide all describe a linear
story. The tree shipped two days ago. Every published surface is a phase
behind, and the guide is not merely behind — it is wrong in a way that costs a
reader time.
Its 2.2 was "Two coordinate systems, and the bug class they create", and it
explained the codebase through position_of_index, note_action_removed and
settled_story_actions. All three were deleted in SP3. 2.3 explained retry
through Action.variants and state_before. Somebody reading either would go
looking for machinery that is not there, which is worse than a gap.
So 2.2 is now "The story is a tree", written at the depth 1.2 and 1.3 are
written at: the seven bugs that turned out to be one bug, the lineage clause
and the two properties that make fork count free, why takes group by parent_id
rather than by coordinate, cursors becoming anchors, and a closing list of what
the design is honest about. 2.3 is rewritten around state_after and takes, and
1.1 and 1.5 follow, because the pipeline no longer snapshots before the call
and the memory bank no longer holds an action back.
The numbers were simply old: 151 tests where there are 440, 37 migrations where
there are 64, twelve phases where there are fourteen. They appear in four
places across the README, the project page's stat tiles and the guide's results
table. The measured branch cost — 103 B, and 1.007x the page load of the same
story flat — is added beside the egress and turn-cost figures it belongs with,
since it is the number that answers "what does branching cost me".
Three screenshots, on a new tools/shots_fixture.py: the Bandit Camp demo driven
through eight written turns with written deltas, three discarded takes forked
onto branches of their own, one off a branch so the map has to nest. Same
reason tree_fixture.py is committed — the shots have to be reproducible and the
frontend still has no test runner. play-world-state.jpg is reshot because it
predates the entire tree UI; the map and the branches panel are new.
Note for next time: docs/guide.html is hand-written, not generated from the
Markdown, so every guide edit is two edits in two vocabularies. Both files were
checked for tag balance and both pages rendered locally before this landed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DfMCsN1KBLsTqMkj5hSgrY
The README says what the project does; nothing said why any of it works the
way it does. This adds design notes written to be read end to end: each
section states the decision, the reasoning, and what it cost.
docs/GUIDE.md is the readable source. docs/guide.html is the same material as
a self-contained reading page for the project site — no webfonts, no scripts
beyond a progress rail, so it also works saved to disk and opened offline.
Covers the context budget allocator, the propose-and-referee world-state
engine, the measured length-hint result, the memory bank's settled-action and
cursor rules, the two coordinate systems behind the summarization bugs, the
retry variant machinery, the egress fix, and the demo-key pinning. Closes with
the measured numbers, the known limitations, and a pointer to the cleanup
backlog in self-review.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PoBAfwRzHozF2bhZumxjPk
The demo sleeps on Render's free tier, so a cold link looks broken to
anyone who won't wait 30-60s. A static page on GitHub Pages is never
asleep: it shows the screenshots immediately and sets the expectation
before the visitor clicks through to the demo.
Served from main:/docs, reusing the screenshots already committed there.
Palette and type match the app so the two read as one product.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015sygnUWH8WnaoKPDp7hXM1