A memory whose block ends on the newest action is the one memory a player
can reach: retry and take-switching both refuse anything else. Each retry
of that turn withdrew the memory and wrote it again, and a block closes
every six actions while a normal turn writes two, so that was one turn in
three.
SETTLE_SLACK asks for one action past a block before the block is
summarized. The block is still MEMORY_INTERVAL actions; only the moment
moves. This is not the pre-SP4 holdback returning: that one was about a
retry rewriting text in place, which sibling attempts and forget_node
settled, and correctness still rests on the withdrawal rather than on the
slack. Undo and delete can carry a summarized node back to the tip, so the
withdrawal path stays reachable, just rarely.
The slack buys nothing back. The block that just closed is still in the
history window in full, so a memory of it says what the model can already
read.
Tests: the settling suite asserts the new rule and that a retry at the tip
finds nothing to withdraw; the rewrite suite builds thirteen actions so
both of its blocks settle; the one path test that ended on a block boundary
sets the slack to zero, because it is about which actions a block is read
from rather than about when a block forms. 632 green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015NcrxCJjqgDvAkamKeLWdn
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 app had no cleanup of any kind: in multi-user mode every first visit
mints a users row, so the demo has been accumulating one permanent account
per visitor along with everything they generated.
cleanup.py sweeps guests idle for AIDND_GUEST_RETENTION_DAYS (default 5),
once at startup and then every few hours. Startup is the load-bearing
trigger — the free tier sleeps after ~15 minutes, so a long timer rarely
gets to fire.
Idle is COALESCE(last_seen_at, created_at), not last_seen_at: _touch only
writes that column hourly, and a guest minted by /auth/me has it NULL until
its second request, so the simpler query would have deleted brand-new
visitors mid-session.
It's one Core DELETE rather than db.delete(user), which would SELECT every
adventure, action and memory into Python purely to delete them — the same
egress pattern as the 189x fix. Every FK from users down is ON DELETE
CASCADE, so the database does the whole graph and returns a count.
The filter requires is_guest AND email IS NULL, so registered users (who
upgrade in place) and local mode's implicit user are both out of reach, and
is_public is output-only so a guest can never own content another user can
see. Session cookies have no expiry and can outlive a swept row; that path
401s and the frontend's existing retry re-mints a session.
Guests are told: /auth/me serves guest_retention_days and the signup modal
states the window, sourced from the server so it can't drift from what is
enforced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015CYEJKobJ2Re4Dv7qUoSA7
The guide linked straight to the Render hostname in three places. That URL is
an artifact of where it happens to be hosted; the project page is the stable
entry point and already carries the demo link.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PoBAfwRzHozF2bhZumxjPk
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
Claude