THE START BUG (owner report, reproduced live both kinds): new sessions
(?prompt flow — practice and teach alike) sat dead until a second
message, which then persisted WITHOUT the first. Root cause, proven
both directions: the submit POST rode the view's consumeAbort
controller; React StrictMode's simulated remount fires Diet A's
unmount cleanup (model.stop()) ~8ms in and killed the POST mid-flight;
the page's sentInitial guard had already flipped, so it never retried.
Teach was equally broken — only unnoticed, because every teach chat in
use predates the diet and practice starts are always fresh. Fix: the
submit law — POSTs are not abortable by view teardown (they are ~100ms
acks since Diet B and cannot starve the pool); after the ack, a
consumeAbort identity check guards the stream attach. Pinned with the
stop-mid-submit regression test. Live: StrictMode on, practice draft
POST 200/67ms, stream attached, message persisted, problem posed.
PRACTICE PROMPT (00-base): the opening rule — material arrives two
ways, both first-class (picked propositions primary; free-form —
topics, course material, files/PDFs — fully supported, never refused);
as soon as material exists the reply poses, at most one short line
before the problem call, no warm-up interview. Plus the hard law: no
problem is ever conversation — every problem through the tool (no
thinking field/no reveal/no verdict attaches to prose).
GRAPH-CONTEXT PREAMBLE: custom markers flatten to user-role on the
wire, so the old "Contextualization — the learner picked…" read like a
system broadcast in the learner's voice channel. Now the bracket
convention: "[Session context] — picked from the learner's knowledge
map…".
SIDEBAR: busy rows unify to "Working…" for both kinds (the spinner's
default label included); "Practicing…"/"Teacher is working…" retired.
Gates: 1490/1490, typecheck, lint. doctrine's stale doc pointer fixed.
The relational-databases incident, diagnosed and fixed:
TRIGGER — pi's estimator law, adopted exactly: anchor on the last
assistant message's provider-reported usage (totalTokens || the field
sum) and chars/4-estimate ONLY what was appended after it. The anchor
scan skips aborted/zero-usage assistants and STOPS at the newest
compaction marker (pre-cut usage described context the next request
will not carry — pi's distrust rule). The old estimator
(JSON.stringify of every message /4) tripled the true context
(measured: 84,412 'tokens' estimated vs 38,799 provider-reported on
the incident record) — scaffolding, escaped LaTeX, thinking blocks
and app-side details all counted. estimateMessageTokens now counts
wire text only (text + thinking + toolCall name/args; content text
for user/toolResult/custom). The unanchored fallback runs the plain
heuristic over the CUT-HONORED projection plus the additive prompt
term; the anchored path adds nothing (usage already billed prompt
and tools).
OBSERVABILITY — compaction is a visible session-wide state (owner
spec): the transcript-bottom placeholder register gains COMPACTING
CONTEXT… (BrailleSpinner + Shimmer, the THINKING placeholder's twin,
mutually exclusive by construction — the gate precedes beginTurn),
and the sidebar row shows 'Compacting context · <ago>' with the
spinner (sessionMeta outranks busy; compacting-changed joins
turn-started/turn-settled as refresh triggers). Liveness rides the
API like turn-busy: ChatListItem.compacting + compactionInFlight on
both GET /api/chats and GET /api/chats/[id] (initiallyCompacting
covers the navigate-back-mid-compaction mount — the event already
fired), exported through the server barrel.
Also: the relational-databases record rolled back to pre-compaction
(marker, post-marker turns, tree reset; backup in /tmp) for a clean
retest. The summarizer-usage 'gap' was a misread — steps[] was
populated all along.
- needsContinuation: a persisted problem-pose ack (terminate:true ended
the turn deliberately) owes no continuation — reloads after a pose no
longer wake a phantom turn; error results stay owed like any
interrupted tool.
- Chat header: practice sessions swap the phase chip for a quiet
Practice tag (no probe→teach arc applies) and hide the coverage ring
(practice never extracts — an ever-filling ring would lie).
- ChatSummary gains pendingProblem (activeProblemOf at projection); the
sidebar meta says 'Problem waiting' for a practice row with a posed
problem. Kind threads through Chat/[id] page.
- Home picker chip gains Clear (picks were otherwise irremovable).
- Sidebar: the three-way kind filter (Teaching/All/Practice, persisted
in localStorage) above the search; two new-session doors (Teaching →
/chat/new, Practice → /chat/new?mode=practice); practice rows carry
the dumbbell badge and 'Practicing…' busy meta.
- Draft: ?mode=practice swaps the copy (title, empty state, 'What do
you want to practice?') and startDraftSession posts kind:'practice'.
- Graph entry (home composer): teach|practice switch on the stats row's
left edge (StatsBar leadingSlot); practice mode shows the propositions
chip that opens the chain table as a picker (its floating bar becomes
'Practice these' — no delete fence); the picks seed the opening prompt
('Propositions from the map:…') while the title stays the typed text.
Practice sessions (owner, 2026-10-04): the marker rides the record and
the normalized summary (absent field reads as teach — pre-practice
records never migrate); POST /api/chats accepts {kind: 'practice'}.
The agent branch, tools, and UI land in the following slices.
Three declutter moves, all trivially reversible:
- The meta line drops the message count (idle meta is now just how long
ago). The count informed no decision — clutter. messageCount still
rides the API payload, so this is a one-line flip in sessionMeta if
it's ever wanted.
- The active row is marked by the background alone: weight was a second
channel doing the same job, and the flip made selected titles jump.
- Dates beyond the week render ISO (YYYY-MM-DD, zero-padded) instead of
M/D/YYYY — the US convention swapped for the international standard:
unambiguous in any locale, sorts lexically. A user-locale setting can
come later — it's a format-function swap.
Also dropped the row's vestigial text-sm: both lines carry explicit
sizes now (16px title, 11px meta).
Live: active weight 400 + bg-accent, metas '17m ago' /
'Waiting for your answer · 1d ago', no counts. Gates: typecheck, lint,
469/469.
Nothing exists purely for decoration: phase color-coding is retired
app-wide (phases only advance — every session ends Teaching — so
phase-as-signal was decoration with a one-time function), and what
state genuinely deserved — 'a turn is in flight' — is now carried by
MOTION alone, in the terminal's own glyph language.
- BrailleSpinner (components/braille-spinner.tsx): the canonical
cli-spinner sequence (⠋⠙⠹⠸⠼⠴⠦⠧⠇⠏) as exact dot bitmaps in a 2×4
braille cell, 80ms/frame (800ms cycle). Pure CSS: one shared keyframes,
frames staggered via animation-delay; no JS timer, no re-render per
frame — cheaper than the old breathing dot. Static contexts (SSR,
prefers-reduced-motion) show frame 0 — a legible glyph, not a blank.
- Sidebar rows: spinner ONLY while a teach turn is in flight; idle and
question-pending render NOTHING (a resting state has no scan value —
the meta line's 'Waiting for your answer' text carries it). The
three-state phase dot (pulse/solid/hollow) and PHASE_FILL/RING maps
are gone.
- Top bar PhaseChip: label-only pill; the old dot slot becomes the
spinner's home while a turn is in flight (busy prop wired from
ChatView's busy = localStream || turnInFlight). Transcript
PhaseDividers drop phase colors for monochrome rules + labels.
- API narrowing (app/api/chats/route.ts + ChatListItem contract):
busy = isTurnRunning ONLY — background jobs no longer count (the
sidebar's Background agents section is their channel; a per-row
spinner would double-signal them).
- globals.css: --phase-* tokens + lh-dot-breathe removed (dead after
the sweep — no remaining users).
Live-verified: idle/pending rows render no indicator, /chat/new chip is
label-only, 10 CSSAnimations at 800ms with correct 80ms stagger, static
frame 0 under reduced motion. Gates: typecheck, lint, 470/470, build.
Lane crossings to flag at merge: app/api/chats/route.ts + the
ChatListItem contract comment (src/core) — the busy-semantics narrowing;
components/chat.tsx one-line busy prop.
Redesign per review feedback: the colored phase strips were too busy —
removed. One small dot now carries two channels:
- COLOR = phase (sky/violet/emerald, same system as chip + dividers)
- FILL + MOTION = what's owed:
- pulsing = teacher is working (the only state that deserves motion)
- solid = a question awaits the learner's answer — the dominant
resting state of real sessions, so deliberately calm
- hollow = idle, nothing owed
The amber attention channel is gone entirely (it would read as a
phantom fourth phase). The meta line now leads with the useful fact:
"Waiting for your answer · 5m ago" / "Teacher is working…" — the
message count only shows when idle. Ordering stays pure recency.
- SessionRow (extracted, exported for tests): leftmost phase strip
(bookmark tick, per-phase color: probe/plan/teach) + status dot left of
the title — pulsing amber attention dot when an answer is owed, quiet
breathing dot while the teacher works, nothing when it's the learner's
turn. A pending answer outranks 'working'.
- globals.css: phase + attention color tokens (one system shared with the
upcoming header chip and dividers) and the two dot animations, both
disabled under prefers-reduced-motion.
- SessionsSidebar polls /api/chats every 2.5s while open (payload is tiny
now that busy/phase/pendingQuestion come from the list) and pauses while
the tab is hidden; fetch-on-navigation preserved.
amosblomqvist