Every attempt at a turn is now its own row at the same (branch, depth),
with `live` naming the one the story tells. The JSON repeating group on
`actions.variants` is read one last time, by a migration that writes it
out as the sibling rows it always described, and then goes unread.
The snapshots turn around with it: an action carries the state it left
behind rather than the state it started from, because attempts at one
turn share a starting position and differ exactly in their outcome.
Rolling back is "what the node in front left behind", one lookup on the
path, and it is what undo and retry now both read.
And the memory holdback goes. It existed because retry rewrote a row
under a mark that had already moved past it; a retry writes a sibling
now, and replacing what a coordinate says withdraws what was derived
from it — the same repair undo and delete already made.
The assembled prompt is still stored once per turn: it moves with the
live flag, so a superseded attempt keeps only the few hundred bytes that
were its own. Measured on the 600-action fixture: 700 rows for the same
600-turn story, prompt archive byte-identical at 0.50 MB, index 1.8 kB
and page load 62.7 kB unmoved.
347 tests green. `tests/test_story_tree_baseline.py` and
`tests/test_retry_variants.py` pass unmodified — SP4 was allowed to move
the baseline for the variant-count semantics and did not need to.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017Dvvqn9ZDR4ixeFPHNbww7
The memory bank and the story summary each kept a cursor: how many story
actions they had already covered. A count is a position in a list, and this
list moves — delete an action in front of the mark and every later one slides
down a slot, so the mark now covers one it has never read. All the cursor
bookkeeping existed to patch that up.
Both marks are now (branch_id, depth): the node up to and including which the
work is done. A depth is a coordinate along a path, not an offset into a list,
so nothing in front of it can move it. That deletes rather than rewrites
`position_of_index`, `note_action_removed`, `_rewind_cursors_to_index`,
`prune_dangling_memories` and the every-pass clamp in `run_post_turn`.
A memory hangs off the node its block ends on, so a fork inherits its
ancestors' memories without copying any, and retrieval selects through the
branch clause over the *whole* lineage — recall is long-range by definition and
cannot be windowed. Measured: 1,807 B on a story forked twenty times against
1,823 B on a flat one of the same length.
Migrations 53-56 translate the old counts into nodes. They rewrite `adventures`
and not `actions`, so this one needs no VACUUM FULL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017Dvvqn9ZDR4ixeFPHNbww7
Three fallout bugs from keeping the retried action row alive (906ba42),
plus two long-standing cursor bugs the same investigation turned up.
Retry context leak: the row being regenerated is still attached to the
adventure, so it was replayed as established story and the model wrote a
continuation of the attempt it was meant to replace — the story visibly
blended both takes. It leaked into four places, not one: history replay,
story-card trigger matching, in-scene NPC detection, and the memory-bank
similarity query. Adds a shared context.story_actions(exclude_action_id),
threaded through build_context and retrieve_memories.
Memory holdback: a memory could summarize the just-generated turn; retry
rewrites Action.text but memory_cursor has already advanced, so the memory
was never regenerated and went on describing narration no longer in the
story. settled_story_actions() holds the newest action back one turn —
only the last action is retryable, so that makes it unreachable. The
settled list is always a prefix, so cursors stay valid and nothing is
skipped. The run_post_turn clamp deliberately still uses the full count:
clamping to settled rewinds legacy adventures a step and double-covers an
action.
Cursor bookkeeping: memory_cursor is a position into story_actions() while
Memory.source_* are Action.index values, and the two diverge as soon as
anything is deleted. Deleting a middle action slid a never-summarized
action into the covered range, skipping it forever; and pruning a memory
left the actions it covered stranded behind the cursor. Adds
note_action_removed() (called before the delete in delete_action and
undo_turn) and a rewind in prune_dangling_memories. delete_action also
now prunes at all, which it never did.
Not addressed: editing an already-summarized action still leaves its
memory stale, and the cumulative story summary can't have one fact
un-mixed from it.
117 backend tests pass, including new test_memory_settling.py (12) and
two retry-context regression tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UeQVy5bEjLhfgWNc27Efet
