The hand-packed icns was pixel-clean (verified by unpacking and scanning
every size), but macOS 26 composites legacy .icns icons into the Liquid
Glass system at render time; stacked on Icon Composer's baked PNG-export
lighting, that clips the rim highlights into the near-corner specks and
abrupt highlight ends (owner report 2026-10-13). The fix is the real
layered icon: mac.icon now points at the Icon Composer document
(build/icon.icon, copied from ~/Documents/Affinity/lh-logo) and
electron-builder compiles it via actool into Assets.car — macOS 26+
renders the true Liquid Glass design (dark/tinted variants included).
actool's backwards-compat icns caps at 256px, so scripts/after-pack.cjs
swaps in the existing full-res build/icon.icns before signing: pre-Tahoe
macOS keeps today's quality, Tahoe gets the layered icon.
Windows/Linux get the owner's flat design (rounded squircle with baked
transparency): scripts/make-icons.mjs renders build/icon-flat.svg via
resvg into build/icon.ico (16→256 PNG entries) + build/icon.png (512),
and electron-builder.yml pins win.icon/linux.icon.
desktop:dist injects DEVELOPER_DIR (actool needs Xcode; the machine
selects CommandLineTools by default, CI's setup-xcode takes precedence
via the :- default). The release workflow's mac job selects Xcode 26+
explicitly. Verified locally: mac --dir build (Assets.car + checksummed
full-res fallback + CFBundleIconName/IconFile) and the win-unpacked exe
carries our ico bytes; NSIS/AppImage assembly is CI's (cross-build
tooling can't run on arm64 macOS). Runbook updated. 1610/1610.
Titles become text-sm font-semibold in destructive red — JetBrains Mono
via the UI default, matching the abort-turn/dismiss-question dialogs the
owner named as the ideal look. Node and session names below the title
drop the sized-up text-lg for normal text-sm, still white mono, no
code-block chrome. Settings and Setup keep their serif titles by owner
ruling; abort-turn already renders this way. 1610/1610 both configs;
verified live on the running dev server.
The mount-time jump never fired on real graph-link arrivals: the
transcript scroller's ref is attached by a later sibling, and the queued
rAF was cancelled outright whenever use-stick-to-bottom re-created its
context while the initial scroll settled — every link landed at the
bottom (owner report 2026-10-13).
Rewrite the mount path as a synchronous 64ms retry watcher that keeps
running past its first success (hydration/adoption can replace the
jumped-to node), with a ~20s watchdog for cold-compile SSR streams
(observed 6.8s). jump() now reads the stick-to-bottom context through a
ref so effect identities stay stable, and the unmount cleanup no longer
strips a live flash. Verified live on real data: full load, SPA link
navigation, and in-session hashchange all land the anchor 16px from the
scroller top with the 2s highlight.
Also gives the node card's session/file rows matching horizontal and
vertical padding (px-2 py-1.5).
micromark-extension-math's inline closer is code-span logic — any
size-matched $ run closes, backslash-escaped dollars included — so
"$x = \$5$" closed at the escape, errored in KaTeX, and could cascade
into later text. KaTeX itself renders the escaped dollar fine, and its
own auto-render scanner skips escaped dollars, so the author's intent
is unambiguous.
Fix at the render seam (transformMathDelimiters): inside a balanced
inline span, an escaped dollar becomes the dollar-free
\text{\textdollar} before tokenization, with an escape-aware closer
(odd-backslash dollars never close; even-backslash row-break closers
keep closing). Display spans are untouched (a lone $ can't close $$ —
the escape already survives there), prose escaped dollars, code, and
unbalanced spans pass through, and spans without escaped dollars emit
byte-identical text — corpus-verified over 489 dollar-bearing fields
in 40 real sessions (35 changed, all escaped-dollar spans; the
economics session's dollar-amount math now renders).
The latex-testing session's Test-6 question renders 14 KaTeX spans
with zero errors (was 12 + 2 errors). 1578/1578 tests both configs;
typecheck, lint, build, and Electron-runtime smoke green.
- switch the math authoring/rendering contract from \(...\)/\[...\] to the
standard $...$ inline / $$...$$ display: prompts (20-question-tools,
40-formatting), singleDollarTextMath on the renderer, legacy reader kept,
and escape-debris recovery extended to dollar spans (mirroring micromark
delimiter-run rules)
- exact answer membership now precedes debris cleanup in
coerceCorrectAnswer (calculus incident: an exact sentence-final-period
label was stripped as model debris, then rejected); option keys are
passed at the boundary/grading seams, the dock no longer pre-coerces
- a complete, phase-correct JSON-escaping example rides the probe/quiz
tool descriptions (serialized from one canonical body; quiz leads with
type+nodeId), plus the one-sentence JSON-escaping rule in 40-formatting
- ask option descriptions render markdown/LaTeX in the pending dock;
settled cards keep the details line and option descriptions
retroactively, read from the persisted call arguments (chat passes
part.input to AnsweredCard)
1566/1566 tests on both navigator configs; typecheck, lint, production
build, standalone packaging, and Electron-runtime smoke all green.
Demos execute JS and need a browser; the app's own binary now provides
one: main.cjs boots a hidden window + CDP port under --browser-service
(before the single-instance lock - a helper is deliberately a second
instance of this binary), lifetime tied to the server's stdin (EOF =
quit, no orphans). headless.ts connects over CDP as PRIMARY (owner
ruling 2026-10-10), system Chrome stays the fallback, graceful refusal
when neither. Electron's CDP has no Target.createTarget, so the helper's
pre-created window is THE page, reused and reset per job behind a
serialized queue. PDFs and SVGs never reach a browser anymore (native
since stages 1-2); stale Chrome wording in model-facing tool copy made
engine-neutral. Live-proofed end-to-end from the dev tree (helper seen
by process watch, js-ran 42 probe, no orphan). Gates 1523/1523.
Visual-maker SVGs never execute script, so a browser added nothing but a
process. resvg rasterizes in-process now (white background and fitTo
width mirror the old Chrome-page semantics; svgViewport unchanged,
quirks included for parity). The old Chrome path stays verbatim as the
fallback for exotic-SVG parse failures - it was the only path before,
so nothing regresses.
The resvg binary (4MB per platform, one per build) rides the standalone
via the same tracing pattern. Gates 1519/1519; native path pinned
against real SVGs (intrinsic size, viewBox-only 900 default, opts
override, system-font text).
The browser was never the PDF engine - pdfjs always painted the pages;
Chrome only hosted the canvas tab. Now pdfjs-dist v6's own Node
integration (@napi-rs/canvas, its optionalDependency) hosts in-process:
same paint code, Skia canvas, zero browsers, zero temp files, no base64
hop. The whole pdf-reader runs browser-free - the Chrome gate on
pdf_render is gone.
The Skia binary (27MB per platform, exactly one per build - npm installs
only the building machine's) rides the standalone via the same
outputFileTracingIncludes pattern as pdfjs-dist. Verified: builds green
(1515), native render pinned against the real fixture (canonical
single-IDAT PNGs, dpi/72 arithmetic, page-range skipping), and the
canvas loads + paints from inside .next/standalone.
Stages 2-3 (resvg for SVG, the --browser-service demo helper) follow.
Exposed by the update drill: a packaged launch whose stdout consumer
exits (piped run, launcher) died on its next log line with an uncaught
EPIPE dialog. The stdout write is now guarded; the durable channel is
userData/logs/main.log. Stray main-process exceptions log and continue -
the window + child server are the product.
electron-updater in the shell (packaged builds only; dev never updates).
Checks at startup + every 24h, downloads silently, and the renderer shows
a Restart banner once the update is staged (it installs on quit either
way). Manual "Check for Updates..." under the app menu answers via dialog.
Every updater event routes through the shell log and is caught - the
updater can never take the app down (verified live: a feed failure logs
three lines and the app runs on).
LH_UPDATE_FEED overrides the baked GitHub feed with a generic local
server - the pre-release drill: serve latest-mac.yml + zip + blockmap
from localhost and a real installed copy updates itself, no release, no
public repo.
The asar allow-list re-includes electron-updater + its 16-package runtime
tree explicitly (gitignore last-match-wins; asar verified at 2.1 MB).
The banner rides the preload bridge (onUpdateStatus/installUpdate) and
renders nothing in the browser. window.lh typing centralized in
sidebar.tsx's declaration.
Chat records gain version (CURRENT_CHAT_VERSION), stamped by a single
writeChat choke point in the store; absence reads as v1 — existing files
migrate on their next write, no mass rewrite. The graph family (four JSONL
ledgers, sources.json, render-settings.json) shares one lazy sidecar,
graph/format.json; positions stays unstamped (rebuildable) and jobs stay
unstamped (transient).
Downgrade scenario ruled honest-refusal: records stamped newer than the
running build read as absent (chats, logged) or throw (graph family) — a
read-modify-write store never rewrites what it doesn't understand.
Golden fixtures stay the unstamped legacy shape on purpose (lazy v1 is
current-valid by design); the stamped write path is pinned by
tests/schema-stamps.test.ts. Reads never write — the golden byte-identical
pin holds.
Owner-manufactured teach master (chat_mv27rrra: compaction, subagent-abort,
every teach tool) + practice lifecycle (chat_mv293wv5: the full marker cycle
including the first-ever problem-dismissed), the real graph ledgers, five
jobs across the kind x status matrix, and settings. tests/golden-fixtures
reads all of it through the stores via the LH_DATA_DIR seam and pins the
fixture law: real data parses, flattens to a legal LLM wire, derives the
graph, covers every custom-marker kind, and reads never write.
Fixture law: an intentional format change updates these files in the same
commit; an unintentional one fails the suite.
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 README becomes the storefront for the public repo — what it is, why
it exists, BYOK/local/inspectable values, download, quick start —
written from the canonical articulation (owner doc, 2026-10-05): the
dependency structure of understanding, measure-first teaching, one
reasoning step at a time, the accumulating world model. All developer
content (commands, env, architecture, mechanisms, testing, lineage)
moves verbatim to docs/development.md (stale suite count and a private
machine path dropped on the way).
Owner will edit before the release; this is the base coat.
amosblomqvist