interactive-story/planning/README.md

# Adventure Storyteller — Planning Package

**This file is the index. Start here.**

**Current state:** Phase 0 complete; AI-DnD forked as the production base;
milestones **M1 through M8 implemented and accepted**, and **M9 implemented and
awaiting review**. M1-M6 were accepted on the dates below (M3 and M4: 2026-09-03;
M5: 2026-09-04; M6: 2026-09-06). M5 and M6 were each accepted only after an
independent review found a real defect and a corrective pass fixed it.

**M7 — First-Class Imported Knowledge Library — is complete** (2026-09-06),
after an independent review, a corrective pass and a closeout verification. Its
report keeps all three in sequence, and is now in
`archive/milestone-reports/M7-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md`.

**M8 — Browser UX Completion for v1 Story Operations — is complete and
accepted** (2026-09-06), after an independent review and a closeout pass.
`reports/M8-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md` is the implementer's account and now
carries the closeout: the build-evidence classification in its §P, finding 14's
operational resolution, and the acceptance record in its §V. The M8 tree is
staged and awaits the repository owner's signed commit.

**M9 — Export, Backup, Recovery, and Migration Hardening — is implemented and
awaiting independent review** (2026-09-07).
`reports/M9-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md` is the implementer's account, written for
a reviewer: a set of claims with the measurements attached, not yet a record of
acceptance. M8's report has moved to `archive/milestone-reports/`, which is
where a milestone report goes once the next milestone's report replaces it.

**Next: M10 — Future Media Extension Hooks Only.** It has not been started, and
no brief for it exists.

**Package version:** see `VERSION.md`, which records what each revision changed
and why.

## Where documentation lives

```text
planning/
    active specifications and implementation planning — authoritative

planning/DECISIONS/
    active architectural decisions (ADRs) — authoritative

planning/reports/
    the current milestone's implementation report — evidence, not instruction

planning/archive/
    historical evidence and completed planning material;
    not authoritative for current implementation
```

You do not need to open `planning/archive/` to do ordinary milestone work. Go
there only when an active document sends you for a specific piece of historical
evidence. If an archived document contradicts an active one, the active one is
right.

Outside `planning/`: `README.md` describes the application, `DEVELOPMENT.md` is
setup and local operation, and `PROVENANCE.md` records what came from upstream
AI-DnD and what each milestone changed.

## Which document controls

When two documents appear to conflict, the one higher in this list wins:

1. `SPECIFICATION.md` — product requirements and required behavior.
2. The detailed behavior/design documents:
   `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md`, `CONTEXT-AND-MEMORY.md`,
   `IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md`, `SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md`,
   `MEDIA-EXTENSION-CONTRACT.md`, `BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md`, `DATA-MODEL.md`.
3. `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` — the observable pass/fail contract.
4. `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` — the selected implementation architecture.
5. The ADRs in `DECISIONS/`.
6. `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` — implementation sequence. It sequences work; it does
   not override product behavior.
7. The current milestone report in `reports/`, then `planning/archive/` —
   evidence and historical findings, authoritative over nothing.

Two standing qualifications:

- Candidate repositories and research reports are **not** specifications. In
  particular, ai-adventure is an implementation reference for selected patterns;
  its behavior does not override this package.
- Where an ADR records the architecture chosen to implement a requirement stated
  elsewhere, both stand: ADR 005 states the history requirement and ADR 012
  states the architecture that implements it.

## The active documents

| Document | What it is for |
| --- | --- |
| `SPECIFICATION.md` | What the product must do. The top of the authority order. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` | The selected architecture, including what M1-M9 built, recorded as fact. |
| `DATA-MODEL.md` | Entities, the stored head, branch disposition, and the v3 export contract. |
| `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` | Undo/Redo/Retry/branch/take behavior, including the M3 ratifications. |
| `CONTEXT-AND-MEMORY.md` | Prompt assembly, summarization, branch-safe memory. |
| `IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md` | Canon / Reference / Inspiration knowledge as a first-class subsystem. |
| `SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md` | The trust boundary, and the inference endpoint policy as implemented. |
| `MEDIA-EXTENSION-CONTRACT.md` | The contract future image/video/audio/TTS/STT work must fit. |
| `BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md` | The browser surface, and what is deliberately not in it. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` | M1-M11, what each delivers, what is done, and the notes each milestone leaves its successors. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` | The pass/fail contract v1 is measured against. |
| `TEST-CAMPAIGN-FIXTURE.md` | The standard campaign the acceptance tests are run on. |
| `VERSION.md` | Package revision history: what each closeout changed. |
| `PROJECT-SOURCES.md` | Which files to upload as ChatGPT Project Sources. |

## Reading order for a new coding agent

1. This file.
2. `SPECIFICATION.md`
3. `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md`
4. `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` — find the milestone you are being asked to do.
5. `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md`
6. `DATA-MODEL.md`
7. `CONTEXT-AND-MEMORY.md`
8. `IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md`
9. `SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md`
10. `BROWSER-UX-SPEC.md`
11. `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md`
12. `DECISIONS/` — all of them; they are short.
13. `reports/M9-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md`, for what the most recent milestone
    actually left behind — reading it as a claim to check, not a record, until
    it is reviewed. Nothing in `planning/archive/` unless sent there.

## Architectural decisions

Active ADRs, all of which still constrain current or future work:

| ADR | Decision |
| --- | --- |
| `001-browser-first.md` | The UI is a browser application. |
| `002-ollama-only-v1.md` | Ollama-compatible local inference only; trusted-LAN HTTPS with a private CA is verified, never bypassed. |
| `003-authoritative-local-state.md` | The application owns authoritative state; the model does not. |
| `004-local-only-production.md` | Local-only runtime; no cloud, telemetry or runtime remote assets. |
| `005-branch-preserving-history.md` | History is preserved, not overwritten. **The requirement.** |
| `006-genre-agnostic-core.md` | The core state model is genre-agnostic. |
| `007-future-media-extension.md` | Media generation stays optional and decoupled. |
| `009-ai-dnd-production-base.md` | AI-DnD at `d72f7c1b…` is the production base. |
| `010-explicit-typed-narrative-state-events.md` | Explicit typed events / absolute assignments, not relative deltas. |
| `011-local-inference-endpoint-policy.md` | Address allowlist, deny by default, checked twice, TLS mandatory. |
| `012-active-head-non-destructive-history.md` | The stored active head. **The architecture implementing ADR 005.** |
| `013-authoritative-narrative-state-document.md` | The authoritative state document, its pipeline, and where each part lives. **The architecture implementing ADR 010.** |

`008-phase0-before-build-plan.md` was a process gate — do not begin production
work until Phase 0 closes — which Phase 0 satisfied on 2026-09-01. It is in
`archive/decisions/` and constrains nothing now. ADR numbering continues from
012; 008 is not reused.

## Milestone reports

`reports/` holds the report for the milestone most recently completed, because
that is the one the next milestone's planning has to consult:

- `reports/M9-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md` — the M9 implementation: the measured M8
  portability baseline it started from, the final bundle contract, and the
  evidence for every acceptance test it claims. Written by the implementer for
  an independent reviewer, so it is a set of claims with the measurements
  attached and **not** a record of acceptance. Its §W carries the M10-M11
  handoff.

  **It stays here until M10's report replaces it.**

Completed earlier milestones are in `archive/milestone-reports/`, which M8's
report joined when M9's was written: a milestone report is useful during the
immediate next milestone and historical afterwards. M1-M8 are all there,
unedited.

## The decision this package rests on

Phase 0A static research and Phase 0B local validation closed on 2026-09-01 with
one decision:

> **Fork AI-DnD at upstream commit `d72f7c1bda0f34fccd84afb7a25c34eb01c901de`.**

It was chosen on measured behavior, not feature count: AI-DnD already had the
browser UI, the FastAPI service boundary, SQLite persistence, parent-linked
story history, alternate takes, branch-aware state snapshots, local Ollama
operation, branch-scoped memory, prompt inspection, streaming, export/import and
a substantial test suite. The composition of ideas selected around it:

```text
AI-DnD production base
  + ai-adventure state/event/commit/checkpoint/privacy patterns
  + Open Dungeon story-reading and future-media UX patterns
  + Chronicler memory-authority concepts
  + Interactive Fiction Framework canon/validation concepts
  + Gamentic provider-neutral media concepts
```

This is **not** a repository merge. AI-DnD is the ownership center; the others
are implementation references only.

Phase 0B also corrected several Phase 0A assumptions, and those corrections are
now built into the active documents rather than needing to be read from the
research: shipped Undo was destructive with no Redo (ADR 012 replaced it);
relative-delta world state can be semantically wrong while syntactically valid
(ADR 010); `tiktoken` and Google Fonts broke offline operation (fixed in M1);
export had to carry the head position (M3); Story Cards were not a sufficient
imported-knowledge store (`IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md`).

The evidence is in `archive/phase0/`, and `archive/phase0/PHASE-0B-RECOMMENDATION.md`
is the strongest single document there. It is research evidence, not a
specification, and it was not rewritten to match later conclusions.

## Foundational Decisions

The following are settled for v1:

- browser-first UI,
- local-only runtime across user-controlled local infrastructure,
- Ollama inference with same-host loopback as default and explicitly configured trusted-LAN inference supported,
- single-user deployment,
- AI-DnD production base at the pinned Phase 0B commit,
- application-owned authoritative state,
- complete retained transcript/history,
- simple user-facing Undo/Redo/Retry/Save Point semantics,
- non-destructive head-cursor history internally,
- new write after moving backward creates a new continuation while retaining the old future,
- abandoned history is retained and marked disposable; **no automatic cleanup is required in v1**,
- named checkpoints remain until explicitly deleted,
- genre-agnostic core state,
- explicit typed narrative-state events/absolute assignments rather than ambiguous relative deltas,
- hybrid state model: validated events plus state snapshots/cache,
- branch/lineage-safe summaries and memories,
- imported knowledge is a separate first-class subsystem rather than an extension of AI-DnD Story Cards,
- knowledge classes: Canon / Reference / Inspiration,
- local lexical retrieval plus local semantic retrieval where practical,
- prompt/context provenance and inspection,
- export/import must preserve active branch **and active head position**, including an undone position,
- no cloud/Internet inference, telemetry, automatic web retrieval, remote runtime assets, shell/MCP/general plugin execution,
- LAN inference is distinct from LAN exposure of the storyteller UI/API; the latter is not required for v1,
- future local image/video/audio/TTS/STT support remains optional and decoupled from the story engine.


## Still open, and deliberately so

These do not block the architecture and are not v1 requirements:

- comparative recommendation of narrator/state models for real users,
- multi-hour/100-turn long-run behavior,
- detailed concurrency behavior beyond the single-user turn lock,
- actual future image/video/TTS/STT provider integration,
- abandoned-history cleanup UI/policy (not required in v1).


## Where the work stands

```text
Phase 0 research and spikes         COMPLETE
Architecture/fork decision          COMPLETE
Planning package approved           COMPLETE
        |
        v
Milestone M1                        COMPLETE (2026-09-02)
  fork + offline baseline           archive/milestone-reports/M1-*.md
        |
        v
Milestone M2                        COMPLETE (2026-09-02)
  local-only surface + endpoint     archive/milestone-reports/M2-*.md
  policy
        |
        v
Milestone M3                        COMPLETE (2026-09-03)
  non-destructive undo/redo,        archive/milestone-reports/M3-*.md
  active-head export                and ADR 012
        |
        v
Milestone M4                        COMPLETE (2026-09-03)
  named Save Points                 archive/milestone-reports/M4-*.md
        |                           browser verification: PASS (M3 + M4)
        v
Milestone M5                        COMPLETE (2026-09-04)
  authoritative narrative state     archive/milestone-reports/M5-*.md
        |                           and ADR 013
        v
Milestone M6                        COMPLETE (2026-09-06)
  branch-safe context, summaries    archive/milestone-reports/M6-*.md
  and long-term story memory
        |
        v
Milestone M7                        COMPLETE (2026-09-06)
  first-class imported knowledge    archive/milestone-reports/M7-*.md
  library                           review + corrective + closeout, in sequence
        |
        v
Milestone M8                        COMPLETE / ACCEPTED (2026-09-06)
  browser UX completion for v1      reports/M8-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md
  story operations                  review + closeout, in sequence
        |
        v
Milestone M9                        COMPLETE — awaiting review (2026-09-07)
  export, backup, recovery,         reports/M9-IMPLEMENTATION-REPORT.md
  migration hardening               bundle format v3; SQLite online backup
        |
        v
Milestone M10                       NEXT — not started
  future media extension hooks      see BUILD-MILESTONES.md
        |
        v
Milestone M11                       see BUILD-MILESTONES.md
```

## Stop Rule

**One milestone at a time. Do not begin a milestone before its brief exists.**

**No M10 brief has been prepared**, and M9 is not accepted — it is implemented
and awaiting an independent review. Writing the M10 brief is the action after
that review closes, informed by the M9 report's §W.

All three questions the M8 debt raised against M9 are settled and recorded:
the bundle carries historical context snapshots (`DATA-MODEL.md` §29); story
cards are compatibility-only legacy data and no longer reach the narrator
(`IMPORTED-KNOWLEDGE-DESIGN.md` §73); and the deployment context ceiling is
documented in `DEVELOPMENT.md` with the note that an imported long campaign
meets it on its first turn rather than gradually. The window itself stays M11's.

**M8's own carried debt** is recorded under M8 in `BUILD-MILESTONES.md`. Two of
its five items are now closed by M9 — story cards have a settled policy, and the
bundle carries the provenance. The RPG world state is still read-only, copy is
still per-message only, there is still no discarded-history recovery screen, and
the tablet layout is still untuned. Each names the milestone that owns it; none
is an open M8 condition.

The M6 retrieval debt this milestone was warned about is partly addressed and
partly still open. Imported material does **not** compete with story memory for
one budget — M7 gave it a separate bounded budget of its own — and ranking for
imported knowledge is now relevance × class rather than similarity plus a pin.
Story-memory ranking is unchanged, and cross-layer duplication
(`CONTEXT-AND-MEMORY.md` §22) is still open: the same fact can still appear in
state, memory, history and now an imported passage at once.

**No conditions remain open on M1-M6.** The browser smoke condition that M3 and
M4 both carried was satisfied at M4 closeout: a real Firefox exercised the
rendered DOM for both milestones' controls, 44/44 checks passing. The M3 report's
§M.2 and the M4 report's §M record the condition as it stood; the M4 report's §W
records it closed.

## What each milestone closeout corrected

These tables are the audit trail: what implementation evidence forced back into
the planning package, milestone by milestone. `VERSION.md` narrates the same
changes.

### Post-M3 corrections applied (2026-09-03)

M3's review recommended planning changes and, following the M2 pattern, reported
rather than applied them. All are now applied, together with the closeout work
the milestone itself required:

| Document | Correction |
| --- | --- |
| `DECISIONS/012-active-head-non-destructive-history.md` | **New ADR.** The architecture selected to implement ADR 005: head stored not derived, one capped read path, one movement mechanism, state from the node, divergence on first write below the head, Redo decided by the lineage, advisory disposition metadata, and the head as an exported decision. |
| `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` §5 | Undo crosses fork points and continues to the campaign opening. The old refusal was a consequence of destructive deletion, not a product decision. |
| `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` §10 | Switching which take is live is refused while a later story is off screen, with the two resolutions the user has. |
| `STORY-BRANCH-SEMANTICS.md` §14A | **New.** In-place editing before §14-15 exist: refuse when story descends from the turn and is not on screen. States explicitly that the full narrator-edit requirement stands and is completed in M5. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §8.7, §9.1 | **New.** The implemented active-head model and bundle behaviour, recorded as fact. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §10.4 | Constraint from M3: the snapshot half of the hybrid state model is a requirement, or head movement becomes proportional to campaign length. |
| `DATA-MODEL.md` §4, §5, §29 | The head as campaign-stored rather than derived; the branch disposition as implemented and deliberately advisory; the export as carrying a chosen position. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M3 | Marked COMPLETE, with inherited capabilities, the open browser condition, and carried debt. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M4 | Note: a Save Point is a durable pointer; restore by reusing M3's head movement rather than building a second restore path. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M5 | Note: keep state efficiently recoverable at a position; move the test instrumentation rather than the assertions; complete the narrator edit. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` D03, D10, I07, L01 | D03's result recorded as a full pass; **D10's milestone ownership stated without weakening any pass condition**; I07's pre-M3 bundle clause added; the apparent L01/A05 conflict resolved. |
| `README.md` | Corrected to describe the current local-only single-user application. The scripting, accounts, analytics, hosted-demo, cloud-provider, Postgres and Render material described subsystems M2 removed. |

`SPECIFICATION.md` and `SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md` were deliberately **not**
changed. M3 altered no product requirement and touched no path in the threat
model.

### Post-M2 corrections applied (2026-09-03)

M2's review recommended six planning changes and reported rather than applied
them. All six are now applied, plus three additions drawn from the same evidence:

| Document | Correction |
| --- | --- |
| `SECURITY-THREAT-MODEL.md` | New §10A records the inference endpoint policy **as implemented** — address allowlist, enforced on save and before every request, TLS never traded against it — with both residual limits stated. §71A item 5 marked resolved; §77 notes the required defaults are now met. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §5.1 | Items 3 and 4 marked done; all five hardening items are now resolved. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §5.2 | New: the M1/M2 production architecture recorded as fact — SQLite, Ollama-only, loopback storyteller, trusted-LAN inference accepted, public endpoints refused. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §18.1 | New wiring rule from the M2 regressions: test a real consumer path when removing a setting, and prove a new setting reaches its component. |
| `DECISIONS/011-local-inference-endpoint-policy.md` | **New ADR.** Address-based allowlist over hostname matching, deny by default, checked twice, mandatory TLS — with the `ipaddress`-classification finding as the reason the CIDRs are spelled out. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M2 | Marked COMPLETE with the capabilities it delivered and the debt it carried forward. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M5 | Note: eight rollback tests now use the world-state engine as *instrumentation*, not as endorsement; move the instrumentation when M5 replaces the protocol, and rework rather than delete those tests. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` M6 | Note: background memory failure must be observable, at least one real provider-construction path must be tested, and derived-memory failure must not corrupt accepted story state. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` H10 | Strengthened: a wildcard origin must be rejected at startup, and an unknown `/api/...` path must 404 rather than returning the SPA with HTTP 200. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` H12 | **New.** Inference endpoint enforcement, including the defence-in-depth case: a public endpoint written into the database behind the settings API must still be refused at request time. |

`SPECIFICATION.md` was deliberately **not** changed. M2 altered no product
requirement; it removed capability the specification never asked for.

### Post-M1 corrections applied (2026-09-02)

Implementation evidence contradicted or under-specified six places in this
package, and a seventh was added on review. All seven are now corrected:

| Document | Correction |
| --- | --- |
| `DECISIONS/002-ollama-only-v1.md` | New section: a trusted-LAN Ollama may be HTTPS with a private CA; verify against the OS trust store; full certificate and hostname checking; no bypass option. |
| `DECISIONS/004-local-only-production.md` | New *Testing Consequence*: offline tests need a fresh cache and no route out. Vendored runtime artifacts should be integrity-verifiable. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` A05 | Pass conditions reworded around *accepted* history; explicit note that the user's submitted text is deliberately retained. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` A06 | Now requires a real second machine and an HTTPS endpoint with a locally issued certificate; a plain-HTTP LAN test is no longer sufficient evidence. |
| `V1-ACCEPTANCE-TESTS.md` §3 | Record CPU/GPU/RAM: cold model load on a CPU-only host exceeded the inherited 120 s timeout. |
| `BUILD-MILESTONES.md` | M1 marked COMPLETE with the capabilities it delivered; M2's endpoint-policy line reframed from inventing trusted-LAN support to narrowing it. |
| `TECHNICAL-DESIGN.md` §5 | Runtime boundary restated: the storyteller is loopback-only, inference may be same-host *or* trusted-LAN, and the two are independent. Adds the TLS/private-CA rule. |