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
