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.
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.
sorokin.oleg.edu
amosblomqvist