yellowjacket/.planning/NOTES.md

Notes

Gotchas, measured facts, and things already considered and rejected. Measurements carry the date they were taken — several of these are properties of someone else's server and can change.

MetaBrainz caps a client at ~2 MB/s (measured 2026-07-29)

data.metabrainz.org serves a single client at roughly 2.1 MB/s, and concurrency does not help: one Range stream and four concurrent lanes delivered 32 MB at 2,111,195 B/s and 2,209,000 B/s respectively, while the same machine pulled 66.9 MB/s from a CDN. One of the four lanes starved to 0.5 MB/s. The lanes divide a fixed cap; they do not raise it.

Consequences:

• No client-side concurrency change will speed up a dump download. Pushing harder earns 503s (the reason dumpLanes is 4).
• Stage 1 of a full import costs ~11.8 h at best (89 GB after column projection). Before projection it was 205 GB — about 27 h.

This is the entire reason the catalog is built centrally and shipped as an artifact rather than derived per install.

Further stage-1 reductions, not yet taken

Both are CI-side options; neither is safe as a silent client default because each changes what gets counted.

• Project recording_mbid only (24.1% of row-group bytes instead of 43.4%): ~49 GB, ~6.5 h. canonical_musicbrainz_data.csv already carries recording_mbid, release_mbid, artist_mbids and release_group_mbid, so release/RG/artist counts can be rolled up locally. Cost: listens with no recording MBID are dropped, and artist totals become "sum of their recordings" rather than direct attribution.
• Stride-sample members (1-in-4): ~12 GB, ~1.6 h. The dump is flat numbered members (0.parquet, …). Sampling is viable because the counts only feed a ranking for a top-N cut. Must be a stride, never a prefix — if members are time-ordered a prefix biases hard toward one era.

Incremental dump retention is 30 days (measured 2026-07-29)

The incremental directory held 30 dumps (series 2579–2610), and full dumps land roughly monthly. An artifact older than ~30 days cannot be topped up: the dailies bridging the gap are gone. That is a permanent undercount of that window, not corruption — but it pins the artifact republish cadence at monthly.

Anonymous package download is UNVERIFIED

The client fetches the artifact from a fixed latest URL because Gitea's package listing API requires a token while a plain file GET appears not to — a probe of the not-yet-published artifact returned 404 rather than 401. That is suggestive, not proof. No artifact has been published yet to test against. Confirm before relying on it.

Also worth deciding deliberately: every install pulling from a personal Gitea makes its bandwidth and uptime a user-facing dependency.

Migrations came back (2026-08-08), scoped to avoid the old failure mode

The "no migration chain" design below lasted until a real make sandbox DB (schema pre-dating the tagging_items.synthetic/parent_group_key columns) hit no such column: parent_group_key — IF NOT EXISTS had silently no-op'd the CREATE TABLE on the existing table, columns and all. A database written by an older build genuinely needed an upgrade path; there wasn't one.

What came back is not the old 48-step chain. sql/schemas/*.sql stays the single source of truth for the current shape (still what sqlc reads, still what a fresh install gets verbatim). sql/migrations/*.sql holds small numbered files — ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, CREATE INDEX, etc. — that run after the schema files, tracked in schema_migrations, tolerating "duplicate column name" as a no-op so the exact same files run unconditionally on both a fresh database and an old one and converge on one shape. See the "Schema changes need two things, not one" section in CLAUDE.md for the column-order and index-placement gotchas this implies, and backend/database/migrations_test.go for the regression tests. Squashing sql/migrations/ back into sql/schemas/ and deleting the migration files is fine pre-1.0 (see CLAUDE.md); stop once real user databases exist.

The original decision this replaces, kept for why the old chain died:

applySchema created the whole schema from sql/schemas/*.sql on every open; all DDL was IF NOT EXISTS. A database written by an older build was not supported and there was no upgrade path, by design.

Two things that removal fixed, worth not reintroducing:

• The 48-step chain was ~3,700 of database.go's 4,061 lines, plus helpers that existed only to serve it (backupDatabase, readLibraryDirFromTOML, isDuplicateColumnErr, …).

• sql/schemas/ had drifted badly from the real schema — it still described a genre_recordings table that migrations had renamed, and omitted explore_index, http_cache, artist_images, similar_artist_map, release_to_rg, lyrics_index and artist_metadata entirely. sqlc reads that directory, so it had been generating against a stale schema and silently missed columns such as audio_files.modified_at.

  The new design's answer to this specific risk: sql/schemas/ is never edited to describe something migrations already did elsewhere — it's edited to directly declare the target shape, and migrations exist only to carry an old on-disk database to that same shape. There is exactly one hand-maintained description of "what does the schema look like", same as before; migrations don't add a second one.

When regenerating schema files from a live database, remember the seed rows. file_types (the four supported extensions), player_state and queue each carry INSERT OR IGNORE rows that sqlite_master does not contain. Dropping them breaks every audio-file foreign key.

ANALYZE runs after the catalog merge, not at schema creation

The old migration 45 ran ANALYZE once. With the migration chain gone there is no equivalent moment — an empty database has nothing to measure — so it runs at the end of the artifact import instead (SearchIndex.analyzeIndex). Without current statistics the planner mis-estimates the partial expression indexes on explore_index (idx_explore_title_lower, idx_explore_artist_lower) and scans a million rows for queries that should seek.

If another path ever populates the catalog, it needs the same call.

Writers, not readers, are responsible for name quality

resolveArtistName falls back to returning the artist MBID when it cannot find a name. That is fine for a one-off render but must never be persisted — an MBID stored as a title is unsearchable and shows as a UUID in the UI.

This used to be defended at every read (title != mbid predicates) and in the upsert's conflict rules. Those defenses are gone; AddFromCache now refuses to write a name equal to the MBID and lets the upsert's "non-empty wins" rule fill it in when a real name arrives. TestAddFromCacheNeverStoresMBIDAsName guards this.

Attached databases are invisible to the read pool

database.DB holds two handles: a single-writer connection and a separate query-only pool. ATTACH binds to one connection, so anything touching an attached database must use ExecContext/QueryRowWriter (the writer) — QueryContext routes to the pool, where the attachment does not exist and the query fails with "no such table".

FTS triggers are defined in Go, not in the schema

explore_index's three FTS sync triggers live in exploreIndexFTSTriggers in database.go rather than in sql/schemas/explore_index.sql, because the bulk-load path drops and recreates them (SuspendExploreIndexFTS). Defining them in both places would be two copies free to drift.

Bulk loads must suspend them: measured on a real import, assembly runs at ~31 rows/s with the triggers attached and ~4,700 rows/s without.

They are now dropped and recreated on every open rather than created with "already exists" tolerated, because a trigger is a definition: an existing install would otherwise keep the first one it ever got, and these definitions are where this table's write cost is decided. explore_index_au is scoped to UPDATE OF title, artist_name, aliases with a WHEN guard on them having changed, so the common write — an upsert whose merge rules keep every existing value — re-indexes nothing.

The writer stall that broke playback is only half explained (2026-08-14)

The user's report — play an album, the track changes, the transport stays paused, nothing appears in the queue, the play button does nothing — was diagnosed on the running app: 91% of its CPU was BackfillLibraryDiscographies → upsertBatch, with four of its six workers parked in sql.(*DB).conn waiting for the single write connection, while the play path did its writes inline under q.mu and p.mu. The locking half is fixed and tested (see CLAUDE.md, "Playing a track does not wait for the database to hear about it").

What is not explained is why those upserts were so expensive.

Recovered note, 2026-08-14. The rest of this section was lost to a mishandled git stash --keep-index before it was ever committed; what survives above is verbatim, and the two arguments that followed "Two things argue against the obvious answer" are gone. Re-derive them from a profile before acting on this — do not treat the question as answered.

Explore "library only" toggle was removed (2026-08-06)

The Explore UI used to have a "library only" mode toggle (frontend/src/store/explore-settings.ts, explore:libraryOnly in localStorage) that filtered the Explore UI to owned content only. It was removed outright — the app now always shows full (network-enriched) Explore data. If offline/library-only mode is wanted again, it should be built from scratch rather than restored; the old implementation gated several component code paths in ad hoc ways. A separate deep_catalog_enabled backend flag briefly existed for the same idea and was removed earlier, when the dump importer left the app binary.

The dev server is a real, drivable app (verified 2026-08-10)

wails dev binds an HTTP + WebSocket server on localhost:34115 (internal/frontend/devserver/devserver.go) that serves the frontend with the generated bindings on window.go and bridges every call and every runtime.EventsEmit to the same Go backend the desktop window uses. A browser pointed at it is not a mock — measured: queue.Queue.GetState() returned real JSON, SetVolume(42) produced a real VolumeChanged. Multiple clients are supported by design (notifyExcludingSender fans events to the other web clients and the desktop frontend). See plan 005.

Four facts that cost time to find:

• The GTK window cannot be suppressed. devserver.Run ends in d.Frontend.Run(ctx) with no flag to skip it, so headless needs Xvfb. Nobody upstream has a way around this.
• Build the dev binary directly. app_dev.go parses -devserver, -assetdir, -loglevel from os.Args, so go build -tags "dev webkit2_41" plus those flags gives the same server with no watcher, no reload broadcast and one PID.
• A binding call with wrong argument types hangs forever. The backend logs error parsing arguments and never fires the callback, so the caller's promise never settles. Always use a timeout; the app log is the only place the reason shows up.
• dbus-run-session does not break audio, and fixes MPRIS. It replaces the bus, not /run/user/1000, so PulseAudio still works and org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.yellowjacket registers on the private bus.

Playwright's WebKit does not run on Arch (measured 2026-08-10)

playwright-cli install-browser webkit downloads fine and then fails to link: its Linux build wants Ubuntu 24.04 libraries (libicu74, libWPEWebKit-2.0.so.1, libflite) that Arch does not provide, and the dependency check emits apt-get advice. So --browser=webkit — the cheap way to approximate the WebKit2GTK renderer we actually ship — is a CI-only capability. Local browser work is Chromium, which is unaffected.

The fixture library is generated, and generated by our own writers

test_data/music_library_test/ is produced by cmd/gentestdata (make testdata), not committed — 31 tracks across MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and WAV, ~700 KB, ~1 s to build. Two rules keep it honest:

• Tags are written by backend/tagwriter, not by ffmpeg. ffmpeg only encodes (with -map_metadata -1); every tag comes from the same writers the app uses, so a fixture and the reader under test cannot drift into agreeing with each other and disagreeing with reality. tagwriter.WriteFileTags exists for this — it is the format switch WriteUntrackedFileTags already had, lifted out so tooling with no app to construct can call it.
• The manifest hash covers the spec, not the bytes. ffmpeg stamps encoder version strings, so identical specs produce different bytes on different ffmpeg builds. test_data/music_library_test.manifest.json hashes paths, formats, durations, tags and cover identity instead, and lives outside the library root so the scanner never sees it.

Fixtures are selected in tests by case (testfixtures.CaseCoverDedup, CaseUnicode, CaseDuplicates, …) rather than by path. Deliberately malformed files live in a sibling root, test_data/music_library_broken/ — the clean library's track count has to stay at exactly 31 for seeds to be verifiable, and a zero-byte .flac in the scanned tree used to get swept into testFlacFiles and fail the duration parser.

WAV tags are write-only (found 2026-08-10)

backend/tagwriter writes WAV tags into a RIFF id3 chunk, and backend/metadata reads through dhowden/tag, which recognises MP3, FLAC, OGG, MP4 and DSF and has no RIFF parser at all. So every tag the app writes to a WAV is invisible to the app that wrote it, and WAV tracks always scan in untitled — visible in the Artists view, where the fixture library's WAV tracks produce no "Field Recordings" artist.

The fix is small (unwrap the id3 chunk and hand the payload to tag.ReadFrom) but was out of scope for plan 005. TestWAVTagsAreNotReadableYet asserts the gap so that fixing the reader turns into a failing test rather than nothing at all.

The headless harness: how to run this app without a window

make dev-headless [SEED=<name>] starts the app in the background and returns; make dev-stop, make dev-logs. It runs the dev binary (go build -tags "dev webkit2_41"), not wails dev, under dbus-run-session -- xvfb-run. See plan 005 and scripts/dev-headless.sh for why each of those three is load-bearing.

Seeds are built by running the app. The first-run wizard's dismissal condition is not a config file — it is GetAllLibrariesWithTrackCounts() returning something — so make sandbox-seed NAME=<n> boots a fresh YJ_HOME, calls the real AddLibrary binding through playwright-cli, waits for the real scan to reach the manifest's track count, stops the app with SIGTERM so the shutdown hooks persist state, and tars the result. Never hand-write a config.toml and DB rows: that is a second description of a valid YJ_HOME, free to drift, exactly like the migration chain was.

Seeding points YJ_CORE_INDEX_URL at a dead address on purpose, so no seed depends on what the explore artifact server was serving that day.

Two parsing traps, both already paid for:

• playwright-cli echoes the evaluated source back after the result, so scraping its output for bare digits picks up numbers from your own JavaScript. Return a tagged sentinel ('YJTRACKS' + '=' + n) and grep for that.
• Waiting on a fixed sleep or on a scan event is worse than waiting on the observable outcome. Polling the track count the app itself reports also validates the fixture manifest against the real scanner.

Restoring a database needs foreign keys off, not deferred

/__test/db/restore (backend/testctl) copies every ordinary table out of an ATTACHed snapshot. The obvious implementation — one transaction with PRAGMA defer_foreign_keys = ON — fails at COMMIT with a bare FOREIGN KEY constraint failed (787) that names nothing.

Deferring postpones the check; it does not stop ON DELETE CASCADE from firing. Tables are copied in name order, which is not dependency order, so DELETE FROM libraries cascades away rows of a child table that was already restored earlier in the loop, and the final state is genuinely inconsistent.

PRAGMA foreign_keys is a no-op inside a transaction, so it has to be set on the connection around it. That is safe only because the writer is a single connection (SetMaxOpenConns(1)); the restore re-enables enforcement afterwards and runs PRAGMA foreign_key_check, so a bad restore is reported instead of left in place. TestRestoreRoundTrip pins it.

Two related traps in the same path: FTS5 virtual tables cannot be written with SELECT * and their shadow tables (_data, _idx, _docsize, _config) must be rebuilt rather than copied — but the prefix test that excludes them must not swallow explore_index, an ordinary table whose name is a prefix of two virtual ones.

The event bridge hooks EventsNotify, not EventsOn

.playwright/init-events.js records backend events by wrapping window.wails.EventsNotify. That is the single choke point: wails' ipc_websocket.js does case "n": window.wails.EventsNotify(msg) and fans out to listeners from there, so one wrap captures all 46 events whether or not the app subscribes to them. Wrapping EventsOn would have needed 46 registrations and would have missed anything the app does not listen for.

window.wails does not exist when an initScript runs, so the script installs an accessor on window and wraps at assignment time (wails' main.js does a plain window.wails = {...}), then redefines the property as a plain value so nothing downstream can tell.

The buffer lives on window.__yjEvents with wait(), reset(), names(), a ready() that resolves only when a binding actually round-trips, and a call() that times out — a binding invoked with wrong argument types never fires its callback, and a 2s rejection naming .dev/app.log is worth more than an infinite hang.

Small harness traps, each of which cost a cycle

• Paths in .playwright/cli.config.json resolve against the config file's directory, not the repo root. ".playwright/init-events.js" becomes .playwright/.playwright/init-events.js.
• playwright-cli and @playwright/test have separate browser caches. The CLI working is no guarantee npx playwright test can launch; it needs its own npx playwright install chromium (the runner wants chrome-headless-shell, which the CLI never fetched).
• getByRole('button', { name: 'Play' }) also matches "Add queue to playlist". Accessible-name matching is substring by default; the transport controls need exact: true.
• Every fixture track except one is 2–6 seconds. A spec that plays a track and then clicks pause races the track ending and fails against a correct UI. Use the 90-second Long Player (edge-lengths), exported as LONG_TRACK from e2e/support.
• e2e/ needs "type": "module" or Playwright transpiles the specs to CJS and every import.meta in the support code throws "Cannot use 'import.meta' outside a module" — reported as "No tests found".

The component tier fakes two globals, and that is all it fakes

frontend/wailsjs/ is a pure passthrough: every generated binding is window['go'][svc][Type][Method](args) and every runtime call is window.runtime.X(...). So frontend/test/support/wails-fake.ts replaces those two globals and nothing else, and the tests then run the real generated bindings and the real store code. No module mocking, and no second description of the Wails layer to drift from the first — the same discipline sql/schemas/ and the seeds get.

The dispatcher mirrors wails' own internal/frontend/runtime/desktop/ events.js, which matters in two places: listeners registered with maxCallbacks expire and are removed mid-iteration, and EventsEmit from the frontend notifies local JS listeners before it notifies Go (so a frontend emit is observable in-page).

Four things that cost time:

• Store singletons are constructed at module import, so the fake must be installed from setupFiles, and any store that reads config in its constructor loads before a test can stub it. test/setup.ts carries import-time defaults for exactly those. Without them a store caches undefined where Go would have sent [], and four components then crash on .length — which reads as a component bug and is not one.
• vitest.config.mts, not .ts. The repo's vite config is vite.config.mts; a .ts sibling cannot import it, and mergeConfig is how the @go/@store/@components aliases get reused rather than restated.
• Vitest 4 takes a provider factory, not a string. provider: playwright() from @vitest/browser-playwright, which is a third package beyond vitest and @vitest/browser, and needs its own npx playwright install chromium — a third browser cache after playwright-cli's and @playwright/test's.
• Pre-bundle Web Awesome or Vite reloads mid-test. Its components are one deep import per element; discovering them lazily makes Vite re-optimise and reload the page underneath a running test. The glob @awesome.me/webawesome/dist/components/*/*.js in optimizeDeps. include settles it.

Screenshots need the app's surface, not the default white page: the setup file imports @store/theme-store for its side effect (it applies the --yj-* ramp to :root) and sets the two index.css declarations that matter, or a component renders white-on-white and the baseline is blank. And a @lit-labs/virtualizer list never produces two identical frames, so toMatchScreenshot on <queue-panel> fails with "could not capture a stable screenshot" rather than a diff — assert its rows instead.

Binding drift is now checked, and it is fast

frontend/wailsjs/ is generated by wails, not by go generate, so the pre-commit codegen check never covered it: a renamed Go bound method or struct field first showed up at runtime, in a window, as a call that never settles. wails generate module (v2.10.2) rebuilds it in ~1.5 s, which is cheap enough to gate a commit on — scripts/bindings-check.sh, make bindings-check, and a lefthook pre-commit entry. Verified by renaming queue.GetState and watching it fail.

One quirk: the generator rewrites the three wailsjs/runtime/ files as mode 755 every run. That is not drift, so the check compares with git -c core.fileMode=false and restores the modes afterwards.

Emitting an event is now one call, and it cannot kill the process

events.Emit(ctx, name, data...) (backend/events/emit.go) is the only supported way to push a Wails event; TestNoDirectRuntimeEmits fails the build on any other runtime.EventsEmit in the tree.

The reason is that runtime.getEvents (wails runtime.go:47) log.Fatalfs — os.Exit, unrecoverable — whenever the context lacks its internal "events" value. That is any context.Background(), so in-process service tests were impossible and background workers that outlived their context could take the app down at launch.

Four packages had independently discovered this and hand-rolled a guard (library.emit, download.emit, playlist.emitEvent, and autotagservice.emitEvent with a whole ctxReady field). Nine other sites guarded on ctx != nil, which does not help — a non-nil context without the runtime is exactly the fatal case. The wrapper replicates wails' own precondition once and drops at debug level.

Three things worth knowing:

• The test sink rides in the context, events.WithSink(ctx, rec), not in a package global. A global cannot survive t.Parallel() and would put a mutex on every production emit.
• events.Deliver is Emit that returns ErrNoRuntime, and has exactly one caller: /__test/emit in backend/testctl. That endpoint exists to impersonate a backend emit, so answering 200 for an event that reached nobody would send you debugging the frontend for a backend no-op. Ordinary emitters want Emit.
• Enforcement is a walk of the tree, not a lint rule. golangci-lint runs once per build configuration, so a stray emit in an indexbuild- or dev-tagged file is only visible to the pass that compiles it. One text walk sees all three, plus anything tagged out entirely. Two traps if you touch that test: the needle has to be built at runtime or the file matches itself, and it has to be the qualified selector (.EventsEmit() or it matches the test's own function name.

What it unblocks is a fourth test tier — services, in-process, with no app: backend/queue/emit_test.go, backend/config/emit_test.go, backend/playlist/emit_test.go assert on the payload the frontend receives, which had never been covered. Two gotchas found writing them: config.Save refuses to write a config that was never Loaded (so a test that only calls applyDefaults sees its second setter fail, not its first), and queue.SetQueue resolves anything over initialBatchSize in a background phase, so assert with rec.Wait rather than immediately after the call.

Docs are split by tense, and the split is checkable

Three places now describe this repo, and the rule for which one a new paragraph goes in is grammatical, not topical — a topical split ("architecture here, testing there") is what rots, because every new fact has two plausible homes.

• .planning/NOTES.md — past: measured, dated, append-only.
• CLAUDE.md — present: what the system is, and why.
• .pi/skills/yellowjacket-dev/ — imperative: what to run, in what order, and what it looks like when it fails.

So the skill carries the checklist for a schema change and CLAUDE.md carries the reasoning behind the two-file rule; the skill carries the headless lifecycle and CLAUDE.md carries only the invariant that seeds are produced by running the app. Phase 6 deleted about half of CLAUDE.md's harness section on those grounds.

make skill-check (scripts/skill-check.sh, pre-commit) makes it enforceable: every make <target> mentioned under .pi/**/*.md must exist. That is the actual anti-drift mechanism — the Makefile is the source of truth for how to invoke something and the skill only decides which, so a renamed target fails a commit instead of sending an agent confidently at a command that no longer exists. A skill that documents a command slightly wrong is worse than no skill.

One shell trap it cost: under set -euo pipefail, x="$(make -pqRr | awk … )" sinks the whole assignment, because make -q exits non-zero whenever a target is out of date and pipefail propagates that. Wrap it in { …; || true; }.

The skill was followed cold, and lost time in exactly one place

An agent that did not write .pi/skills/yellowjacket-dev/ brought the app up from a wiped .dev/ and no fixture library, drove a flow the skill does not describe (open the queue panel, toggle shuffle, assert on QueueModeChanged, confirm against queue.Queue.GetState) and stopped it — about a minute of wall clock, no dead ends. All four tiers then re-ran green from that cold state: 313 ui-test, 0 issues × 3 lint configurations, 3 test passes, 19/19 e2e.

The one expensive thing was a genuine config bug, not a doc error. .playwright/cli.config.json had outputDir: "../.playwright-cli", written on the belief — which references/harness.md stated as a flat rule — that every path in that file resolves against the config file's directory. Only initScript does. outputDir resolves against the shell's cwd, so every snapshot and console log was landing in /home/logan/Development/.playwright-cli, one level above the repo: outside .gitignore, outside find, and invisible to the obvious ls .playwright-cli/. That directory still held a stale snapshot from the previous session, so the obvious ls -t | head -1 returned it silently, and the transport buttons appeared to have lost their accessible names — a fabricated regression in phase 3's work that took a DOM walk to disprove. Reading a stale artifact is much worse than reading none, because it answers.

Four smaller corrections, all now in the skill:

• make sandbox-seed already depends on make testdata, so listing both made the fixture step look separately required. It also takes ~10 s with warm caches, not the ~30 s claimed.
• make ui-setup and make e2e-setup are once-per-clone prerequisites and are not dependencies of make ui-test / make e2e. The skill never mentioned them; on a fresh clone both fail with a missing-browser error that reads like a broken test. This matters for CI, which has no warm caches by definition.
• snapshot prints a path, not the tree. Not said anywhere.
• make dev-stop does not close the browser session; playwright-cli -s=yj close is a separate step.

And one place the tooling taught the opposite of the skill: scripts/dev-headless.sh's own success banner suggested eval "async () => await window.go.queue.Queue.GetState()" — a bare window.go call with no timeout, which is precisely the hang the banner's next paragraph warns about. A gotcha documented in prose and contradicted by the copy-pasteable line three inches above it will lose every time; the banner now prints the __yjEvents.call form.

An ALSA null PCM is enough for CI audio, and it clocks

Phase 7's job 2 needs playback to actually advance, because e2e/specs/playback.spec.ts asserts the elapsed clock moves — a missing audio device fails it in a way that reads like flake, since app.go joins InitSpeaker failure into startupErr and lets everything else work.

Measured locally, with PulseAudio made unreachable (XDG_RUNTIME_DIR pointed at an empty dir, PULSE_SERVER=none) and ALSA_CONFIG_PATH pointing at four lines:

</usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf>
pcm.!default { type null }
ctl.!default { type null }

InitSpeaker succeeded in 36 ms and all six playback/queue specs passed, including "the elapsed time advances". oto/v3 talks to libasound directly, and ALSA's null plugin advances its pointer on a timer rather than discarding instantly, so beep's stream is consumed at real-time rate. No PipeWire, no PulseAudio and no daemon of any kind is required in the container — one env var and a file.

Also found while setting this up: scripts/dev-headless.sh does not set YJ_CORE_INDEX_URL; only scripts/seed-sandbox.sh does. So a seeded run started by hand still reaches for the real explore artifact. Harmless locally, a network dependency and a minute of wall clock in CI — job 2 must set the dead-address override itself.

CI was prototyped in a container before it was written, and it found a real bug

Both jobs of .gitea/workflows/ci.yml were built as shell scripts and run to green in a bare ubuntu:24.04 container (docker run -v repo:/src -v cache:/cache) before a line of YAML existed, then the YAML was transcribed back out of the workflow and re-run in the same container to prove the transcription. That is worth the extra half hour on a self-hosted runner: the alternative is push-and-see, and a Gitea Actions run that never starts looks exactly like one that passed.

make lint was linting three configurations nothing builds. All three passes omitted webkit2_41, so wails resolved webkit2gtk-4.0. Arch still ships webkit2gtk-4.0.pc, so it passed locally and had done for the life of the repo; Ubuntu 24.04 dropped 4.0, and the dev pass fails there — wails' own app_dev.go is dev-tagged and drags in the 4.0 assetserver, which the other two passes never compile. The tag sets now match make test exactly (webkit2_41, webkit2_41 indexbuild, webkit2_41 dev). Still 0 issues × 3 on Arch, and now 0 × 3 on Ubuntu too. Note what this means: "lint passes" and "the thing lint compiled is the thing we ship" were different claims, and only a second distro could tell them apart.

Five smaller container facts, all now comments in the workflow:

• libasound2-dev, not just libasound2t64. oto/v3 dies at pkg-config --cflags -- alsa before a line is compiled.
• PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH unifies the location, not the revisions. @playwright/cli bundles its own playwright-core pinned to a different Chromium build than e2e/'s @playwright/test, so both must install into the shared directory. Installing one gives the other "Browser chromium is not installed; expected executable at …/chromium-1237/…". The "three separate browser caches" trap survives being pointed at one path.
• git config --global --add safe.directory or bindings-check fails on a clone the container user does not own.
• The runner already mounts and exports GOMODCACHE, GOCACHE and GOLANGCI_LINT_CACHE for every job via container.options, and valid_volumes is a glob over the cache root (/home/logan/docker/gitea/data/runner/cache/**), so new caches need no runner-side change. Only the Node-side ones had to be declared.
• The fixture hash is deterministic per ffmpeg, not across versions: 5425fbb454a2 on Arch (ffmpeg n8.1.2), 599a8dd4f152 on Ubuntu 24.04. Nothing asserts a literal hash, so this is harmless — but a test that pinned one would be portable only by accident.

Setting YJ_CORE_INDEX_URL for the app run, not just for seeding, is worth 8x on the suite. scripts/dev-headless.sh never set it — only seed-sandbox.sh did — so a seeded local run still fetches the real explore artifact, and testctl.spec.ts's restore then copies every table of a database full of catalogue: 42 s locally, versus a whole 19-spec suite in 7.3 s in CI with the artifact stubbed out.

Playwright's WebKit passes, so it gates

19/19, in the same container, ~11 s on top of Chromium's ~7 s. It had never been run anywhere before — Arch cannot start it — so the honest default would have been advisory. Running it once in a throwaway container turned a coin flip into a decision: it is a required step.

Two things make that safe rather than brave. Nothing in e2e/ compares pixels — every assertion is an event payload, a data-testid, an attribute or backend state, and the toMatchScreenshot baselines live in the Chromium-only Vitest tier — so a WebKit failure cannot be antialiasing noise; it is an engine difference in custom-element upgrade, a11y-tree shape or event ordering, which is exactly the WebKit2GTK signal we otherwise have no way to get. And it is cheap enough that the earlier plan to scope it (skip testctl.spec.ts, which tests Go and has no engine content) is not worth the complexity at 11 s.

Every Go typecheck needs a built frontend, and a shared prototype dir hid it

main.go embeds the built assets (//go:embed all:frontend/dist), so make lint, make test and make bindings-check all fail on a fresh clone with pattern all:frontend/dist: no matching files found (typecheck) until pnpm build has run once. It never bites locally because anyone who has started the app has a dist/ lying around, and it is not a Go dependency anything declares — which is why CI is the only place it shows up. Job 1 now builds the frontend before linting.

The prototype missed it for an embarrassing and reusable reason. Both job scripts were run against the same mounted directory, and job 2 runs dev-headless, which builds the frontend. So job 1 was silently consuming an artifact job 2 had produced on an earlier run, in an order CI never uses. A container proved the commands work; it did not prove the inputs were what CI would have, because the directory had accumulated state exactly the way a developer machine does.

The fix for the technique, not just the workflow: verify each job in a fresh git clone --no-hardlinks of the pushed commit (a plain git clone of a repo on the same filesystem fails with "Invalid cross-device link" into /tmp on a different device), not in an rsync of the working tree, and never two jobs in one directory. The distinction that matters is not clean-vs-dirty but whose dirt: a working-tree copy carries a developer's accumulated build output, which is the one thing CI is supposed to be checking you do not depend on.

A cached view needs a lifecycle, and so do its controllers

Plan 007 phase 1. index.ts caches primary views and hides them with a class so scrollTop survives navigation — a deliberate, good decision that nothing else was told about. disconnectedCallback therefore never fires, and every document listener, interval and subscription a view registers runs for the session. The measured cost was not a leak: pressing s on Settings skipped albums out of the Autotag queue, because autotag-view's document keydown handler was still live.

Three things that were not obvious before doing it:

• A focus-only scope rule would have been a regression. The shortcut service resolves a panel scope by walking up from the focused element, and this app is driven with the mouse: focus sits on <body> almost always. Panel bindings would only have worked after a click landed inside the panel, where the old document listener worked always. Hence the ambient scope claimed by the active view (services/shortcut-scope.ts) as a fallback after the focus walk.
• Shared reactive controllers have the same bug. ContextMenuController bound three document listeners in hostConnected, which for a cached host never un-happens. A controller cannot know whether its host is cached, so registerViewAware lets it ask, and it keeps connection-based behaviour on hosts that are not.
• Off-screen views were still rendering. Store controllers call requestUpdate() on every subscriber, so one keystroke in the search box re-rendered eleven pages, ten of them invisible. The mixin withholds the update and replays it on activation, which is why coming back to a view still shows current state.

Re-running a view's load on activation is not free and is not always right: autotag-view's startQueue() resets the selected folder and refetches candidates over the network, so it stays once-per-mount and only the local folder list refreshes on return.

A local timer is not a clock, and a fixed grid row is not a notice board

Plan 007 phase 2. Both halves of the finding were reproduced by hand first, and both reproduced exactly as measured in August: the seek bar read 00:44 against a backend at 73 after four keyboard seeks, and a queue with a moved file in the middle stopped dead at index 0 with nothing emitted and IsPlaying false.

Four things worth keeping:

• Phase 1 moved the reproduction. With a track row focused the arrows belong to the grid, so the keyboard seek does not fire from the track list at all any more — the 30 s desync only reproduces with focus off the grid. A fix verified against a stale reproduction would have "passed" without ever running the code path. Re-run the reproduction on the current build, not on the audit's description of it.
• A push of state needs an identity and a sequence. The store is a singleton and keeps the last position, so a seek bar mounting later adopts it: without trackChangeId on the payload that is a stale reading rendered as current. And without a monotonic seq, a report of the same second as the last one is indistinguishable from no report, so the interpolation it is supposed to reset keeps running. Both are cheap on the emit side and impossible to add later without touching every consumer.
• .bottom-bar is a fixed 4em grid row. An inline message laid out inside it squeezes the transport out of its own footer, which looks like a broken player rather than a message. It floats above the bar (position: absolute; bottom: calc(100% + 4px)), which is also the right answer for anything else that wants to speak from down there.
• Reporting by event beat returning an error. The plan wanted the queue bindings to return error; the failure that mattered most — auto-advance onto a bad file — has no caller to return to. An event covers both, and the stores kept a .catch() per call for the bridge-level rejections that a return value never described anyway.

A level says how loud, not where, and the bottom band is taken

Plan 007 phase 3. The audit's ~30 "the failure is invisible" findings were one problem wearing thirty hats — there was nowhere to put a message — so the surface shipped whole: four levels, one store, one presentation, and the callers routed through it in the same pass.

Five things worth keeping:

• A level is not a location. Blocking, Persistent and Transient say how loud; Inline says not global, which is not the same as saying where. An inline notification therefore carries a region (player, and whatever comes next) and the app-level host ignores it. Without that field the "one component with four presentations" would have become two components with two stores, which is the exact thing this phase existed to delete.
• The bottom of the window belongs to the player. The stack was first anchored above the player bar, beside the player's own floating notice. That looked right at 1440×900 and overlapped at 800×600, because the player's notice grows upward by however many lines its sentence needs. The stack moved under the header. Anything anchored to the bottom edge is sharing a band with something whose height is not known in advance.
• Some backend errors are already sentences. describeError maps runtime causes to copy, but the sentinels this app writes for its own conditions ("a library with that name already exists") are the most useful thing that could be shown, and mapping them to a generic line would have been a regression. explainError repeats a message with no Go/HTTP noise markers and defers to the map otherwise. The distinction is whether we wrote the string, not how long it is.
• C4 and M1 are the same bug from either end. The library store cached a stale answer because a fetch outlived the selection, and hung its waiters forever because a failed fetch never satisfied the "loaded and not loading" predicate they watched for. Both go away by holding the request itself and stamping it with a cache generation — one change, two findings, and the four hand-written waitFor* helpers deleted.
• A reproduction can fail for the wrong reason. The e2e spec for a rejected binding renamed the decoy library to its own name, which the backend accepts as a no-op: red at the right assertion, having never induced the failure it was named for. It only became a reproduction once it picked its row by the seeded library's name. A failing test is evidence of nothing until you have watched why it fails.

One operational note: make bindings-check requires a clean working tree for frontend/wailsjs/ and reports staged changes as dirty, so it cannot pass mid-phase on an uncommitted tree. Regenerating and diffing by hand (go tool wails generate module -tags webkit2_41, then git diff -- frontend/wailsjs) is the equivalent check.

Measuring is the work; the icon CDN was serving Pro

Plan 007 phase 4, items 1–2 of 8. This phase is verified by numbers rather than by assertions, which changes what "first" means: the first deliverable is not a fix, it is a 50 000-track library and a script that takes four measurements against it. Both fixes then landed with a before/after, and both had a reproduction that was watched failing.

Six things worth keeping:

• A measurement library is not a fixture library, and should share nothing but its generator. test_data/music_library_test is curated cases selected by name; .dev/music_library_bulk is a pile whose only interesting property is its size. Generating 50 000 files through ffmpeg is ~40 minutes, so the bulk one encodes six clips once and copies them — but it still tags every file through backend/tagwriter, because a library the app cannot read back measures nothing. 11 s, 466 MB, gitignored, and deliberately not a dependency of make test.
• The first cover renderer made a 2 GB library. The fixture cover's diagonal band is ~37 hard edges at 300 px, which is the worst case for a JPEG DCT: ~35 kB per album, nearly all of it artefacts around a pattern nobody looks at. A smooth gradient is ~6 kB and just as distinguishable. 466 MB instead of 2 GB.
• Instrument the bindings, not the symptoms. "Finishing a track refetches the library" became a fact rather than an inference by wrapping every method on window.go and recording call, duration and serialized size. The generated bindings look their target up at call time (window['go']['library']['Library']['GetAllTracks']()), so post-hoc wrapping catches a store that imported the wrapper long ago. Pair it with a longtask PerformanceObserver: a 25 MB JSON parse on the main thread appears there and nowhere else.
• A debounce will happily measure nothing. "Keystroke to paint" against the next frame gave 16 ms on every build, because search-bar debounces 150 ms and 16 ms is the input echoing its own character — a number that cannot move, and therefore cannot be evidence. The measurement has to wait past the debounce for the render the keystroke caused.
• The icon CDN was serving Font Awesome Pro. Every SVG fetched from the kit host carries a "Commercial License" comment, so the obvious fix — save what the app already downloads — is a licence violation. Font Awesome Free 7.3.1 (CC BY 4.0) has all 64 names the app uses, is redistributable with attribution, and moved no ui-visual baseline. Check what a CDN is actually serving before vendoring it.
• Some icon names cannot be found statically. Twenty call sites compute one from state (jobIcon(job), TONE_ICONS[tone], this.favCtrl.iconName), so the list is committed and checked at runtime: the resolver records a miss and renders a fallback, and an e2e sweep across every view asserts there are none. A missing icon used to be invisible because the CDN had everything; it now has to be findable instead.

And two findings that did not survive contact:

• perf.M1/M2 no longer reproduce. One keystroke costs 49.9 ms net of the debounce with zero long-task blocking at 50 000 tracks, not the predicted 50–100 ms across every mounted view — because Phase 1 stopped off-screen views rendering, which was M1's mechanism. An audit finding can be fixed by an unrelated phase, and re-measuring before fixing is how you find out.
• perf.M7/M8's unbounded caches did not show as heap growth across a ten-view scripted browse (37 → 38 MB post-GC). They are real by inspection, but the reproduction has to be a long Explore session, and it should exist before the LRU does.

One correction to the audit's own numbering, since two phases cite it: in perf.md the icons are M9 (the plan's Phase 4 prose calls them C1), the whole-library refetch is C1, the selection wipe is C2, and C3/C4 were already fixed in Phase 3.

A ticker is a hidden dependency for everything that forgot to speak

Plan 007 phase 4, items 3–5 (C5, M6/H-14, M10). Three fixes, three new measurements, and one bug shipped-and-caught inside the same session — the useful part of which is how it was caught.

Five things worth keeping:

• Deleting a polling loop is never only a deletion. The explore index emitted its status every 3 s forever, with an identical payload once ready, which re-rendered the whole settings page for the life of the session. Every path that mutates the status already emitted, so the ticker looked purely redundant. It was not: si.ready = true and si.cancel = nil both change what emitStatus derives and neither announced itself, so the ticker was carrying two transitions within three seconds of their happening. Removing it left the header badge reading "Building search index" over an index the settings page called ready. Before removing a poll, enumerate the writes to everything it reports — rg 'si\.ready = |\.cancel = ' was the whole audit, and it should have come first rather than second.
• The screenshot found it; no test did. The Go tests passed, the 436 component tests passed, all 36 e2e specs passed, and the numbers were exactly the improvement predicted. The contradiction was two labels 700 px apart in a PNG. "Read the PNG" earns its place in the gate on cases like this — the app was self-inconsistent, which no assertion was looking for because nobody had thought to.
• A "0 ms" measurement is usually a broken measurement. View-open time waited for #main-content > :not(.view-hidden), which matches the view being navigated away from — it is still on screen until the incoming chunk resolves. Every view, every build, 0 ms. This is the same failure as the 150 ms debounce from the first pass, and the same tell: a number that cannot move is not evidence. Both times the fix was to wait for the specific thing, not for a generic selector.
• A before/after must differ in exactly one thing, and git stash is not a way to arrange that on a tree carrying four uncommitted phases. Stashing frontend/index.ts to measure the pre-split bundle also reverted the bundled-icon registration living in the same file: 22 cross-origin requests, and a baseline for a build that has never existed. The honest baseline was made by adding the static imports back to the current file — a change that undoes the one thing being measured and nothing else.
• The cheapest half of a fix is often the one the audit did not name. perf.C5 is written as an event handler that over-fetches, and it is. But playlistStore is a singleton constructed at import time and eagerly warmed itself as well, so every launch paid the same 2.6 MB whether or not Playlists was ever opened — the event costs that on a user action, the constructor costs it on every start. "Only when there is a subscriber" turned out to be a two-line change that beat the patching logic it was written to support.

And one thing about splitting a bundle: report the trade, not the win. Route splitting moved 666 kB out of the pre-paint path (1 480 → 814 kB) and cost up to 6 ms on the first open of a view, once per session, hidden further by warming the chunks on idle. But first contentful paint did not move at all, because at localhost speeds over a warm cache 666 kB of JS is not what the paint was waiting for. The number that improved is real and is the one that costs on a cold start and under WebKit2GTK; the number a user watches did not change. Saying both is the difference between a measurement and an advertisement.

"We looked and saw nothing" is only evidence if the thing that fills it ran

Plan 007 phase 4, items 6 and 7 (M7/M8, M3/M4). Two fixes, two new measurements, and one finding that two previous sessions had come within a sentence of deleting as unreproducible.

perf.M7 says the Explore art caches are never evicted. Two sessions measured a ten-view scripted browse, saw the heap go 37 → 38 MB post-GC, and recorded the finding as "real by inspection but it does not show up". Both were right about the number and wrong about what it meant: the browse script navigates to Explore and never types in it, and both caches are filled only by a search. It was measuring a view with two empty maps. A session of twenty-four searches grows the heap 20.58 MB and is still accelerating at the end.

Six things worth keeping:

• A negative result inherits the coverage of the thing that produced it. "We browsed ten views and the heap was flat" sounds like evidence about caches; it is evidence about ten navigations. Before believing a finding did not reproduce, check that the code path it names actually executed — here, one console.log of thumbnailCache.size would have ended the question two sessions earlier. Phase 4 has now had three findings evaporate on contact (M1, M2, and half of M8) which makes the fourth look like the same thing, and that prior is exactly what made it cheap to accept.
• A bound cannot be verified by a run that never reaches it. The first bounded build measured identical to the unbounded one: twelve searches cached 180 thumbnails against a cap of 192, so nothing was ever evicted. This is the same trap as the 150 ms debounce and the :not(.view-hidden) selector, in its third costume — a number that cannot move is not evidence — and the tell is the same one every time: before and after are suspiciously equal.
• Two caches holding the same string means bounding one frees nothing. explore-view's artistImageCache and exploreCache.artists both hold the artist photo's base64 data URL, ~128 kB each, measured at 2.30 M chars in both maps. Capping either alone leaves every string pinned by the other, and the measurement would have read as a fix that did not work. The cap is a shared exported constant now. Before bounding a cache, find every reference to what it holds.
• The audit named the wrong two maps. M8 calls out artistAlbums and artistTopTracks as holding discographies and top-track lists. Nothing in the app has ever written to either — their only callers were a component test. Deleted rather than bounded. The map that actually retains is one the audit does not mention.
• A measurement library optimised for size can remove the property a finding is about. M3 is "the Art column renders a 1500×1500 original into a 24 px box". The bulk library's covers are 300×300 and 3.7 kB, because generating 50 000 realistic covers made a 2 GB library and a smooth gradient made a 466 MB one. So the bytes saved here are 3.7 kB → 1.1 kB and prove nothing. The number that is not hostage to the fixture is which tier was requested — 26 of 26 originals before, 0 after, true on any library. When the rig cannot show the magnitude, measure the mechanism.
• An audit's arithmetic is a hypothesis too. M4 predicts 250 000 comparisons per scroll frame from 5 000 albums × ~50 visible cards. Measured: 24 visible cards, and the scan breaks on its first match, so it costs 1.46 ms per frame — real, 146× improvable, and far below the long-task threshold, so it moves no user-visible number today. Worth fixing because it stops scaling with the library, not because anything was stuttering. Say which of those two it is.

One operational trap that cost a cycle and is now in the skill: make e2e needs SEED=default. Run against the bulk seed left over from a measurement session, 13 of 36 specs fail on fixture content — unicode tracks, fixture artists, the seeded playback file — and the failure list reads exactly like a regression in the change you are holding.

A virtualizer repaints on its own properties, and the sloppy thing doing that may be load-bearing

Plan 007 phase 4, item 8 (M5) and part of the tail (p3, m1, m7, p4). One large fix, three tail items settled, one audit recommendation rejected as a bug, and a broken feature that no audit had noticed.

The mechanism under most of it is one sentence: <lit-virtualizer>'s rows are rendered by the virtualize directive, and that directive runs when one of the virtualizer's own properties changes — not when its parent re-renders. Everything below follows from that.

Seven things worth keeping:

• Memoising items and hoisting renderItem together is how you build a list that never repaints. Virtualizing the playlist views needed both (that is the point), and selection went silently dead: the controller held exactly the right keys and no row ever showed one. Nothing failed — 447 component tests, 36 e2e specs and every Go test stayed green. A click in the real app found it in ten seconds. The fix is what track-list has always done and nobody had written down: push virtualizer.requestUpdate() on a selection change and on a playing-track change.
• The same fact makes perf.m1 a regression. It asks for artists-view and genres-view to hoist their per-render arrow functions to stable fields "as cover-grid already does". That fresh closure is the only thing changing a virtualizer property on a host update, i.e. the only thing repainting the cards. Measured in the running app: 1 highlighted card before the change, 0 after, both views. There is no compensating win — the host mostly re-renders because card state changed — so the closures stay, and card-grid-repaint.test.ts fails on the change and exists for no other reason. An audit's suggested fix is a hypothesis too, and this is the first one in this phase that was actively harmful rather than merely wrong about magnitude.
• Two of M5's four stated mechanisms did not survive measurement. "lit removes and re-adds 10 000 listeners per pass" is false on any build: instrumenting EventTarget.prototype recorded zero add/remove calls per pass, because lit-html's EventPart is itself the listener (handleEvent) and a changed listener value updates a field rather than the DOM. And one update pass cost 5.3 ms, not a stall. What was real, and worse than predicted, was elements retained: 22 090 for a 2 000-track playlist against the audit's 16 000, and 2 000 eager cover requests. Fixing the two real halves gives 487 elements and 0.
• The suggested fix would have cost two features. "Render these through <track-list> the way genre-details does" holds for genre-details because a genre list is just tracks. Both playlist views render phantom rows for missing files, and playlist-details is a drag source and a drop target; track-list has never had either. Virtualizing in place got the same 45× on elements with none of the risk, and left track-list alone for its four other callers. Check what the reference implementation does not do before adopting it.
• A row inside a virtualizer needs width: 100%. The virtualizer positions children absolutely, so a grid row shrinks to fit its content: the columns silently stopped lining up with the header above them. Caught by reading the screenshot, not by any assertion — the second time in this phase that a PNG found what the suite could not.
• A write with a RETURNING clause is still a write. CreateSmartPlaylist issued its INSERT ... RETURNING through DB.QueryContext, which routes to the query-only read pool, and failed with "attempt to write a readonly database (8)" — so no smart playlist could be created at all, in any real build. It was invisible because NewTestDB shares one in-memory connection and leaves readDB nil, so reader() hands back the writer under test: every unit test of that path exercised a handle production does not have. TestNoWritesOnTheReadPool now walks the tree for the class, watched failing on the bug first. A test double that collapses two handles into one cannot see a bug about which handle you used.
• p3 is right about one store and wrong about the other. Coalescing search-store's notify to a microtask makes a subscriber that unsubscribes synchronously after a setTerm miss the notification entirely — a semantic change, and one an existing test had already pinned deliberately. playlist-store took the fix; the keystroke store did not. "Make these five consistent" is a fine instinct and a bad rule when one of them is on a different path.

And two operational notes, both now in the skill:

• A frontend edit is not live until the app restarts. Vite HMR updates the module, but an already-registered custom element class cannot be re-registered, so the running page keeps the old one — the edit reads as having done nothing. Worse, a build error leaves the dev server serving the last good bundle, silently: a stray backtick inside a comment in a css tagged template literal ended the literal, esbuild failed, and the page kept rendering the previous CSS while make dev-headless printed nothing about it.
• tsc --noEmit is in CI and was not in the documented gate. The previous pass left the tree failing it, under a fully green make lint && make test && make ui-test && make e2e — none of which typechecks frontend/test/.

An audit's magnitude and its mechanism are two claims, and the fix is a third

Plan 007 phase 4, fifth pass: the track-details chunk split and m6. Two items, both landed, and the pass's one useful generalisation is that a finding is really three hypotheses — how big it is, why it is that big, and what to do about it — which can be independently right and wrong.

perf.m6 got the first right, the second wrong, and the third half wrong:

• Right about size. "Select all → Edit tags at 50 000 tracks will hang the renderer." Measured through the real opener: 3.0–6.3 s of blocked main thread, varying that much run to run on one build. It is the largest single stall this phase has found, and it was in the minor tier of the audit.
• Wrong about why. The audit calls it O(selection × total) — 2.5 × 10⁹ comparisons. It is not: select-all hands the opener its keys in list order, so each find matches at index i and the real cost is N²/2, quadratic in the selection. That matters for what it predicts about everything else: the audit's formula says a ten-track selection costs 500 000 comparisons (it costs about 50), and says nothing about the genuine worst case, which is a selection built from the bottom of the list.
• Half wrong about the fix. "Keep an index-ordered selection, and build a Map<FilePath, Track> for the batch lookup." The map is the entire 50× (3 051–6 298 ms → 68 ms), and it is now utils/track-index.ts, a WeakMap keyed on the array's identity — the invalidation signal this app already relies on everywhere else. The index-ordered selection is the unsafe half: an index goes stale on any re-sort, re-filter or refetch while a file path survives all three, which is exactly why retain() drops lastSelectedIndex and keeps the keys. The helper it would have replaced measures 3 ms. Three milliseconds does not buy a silently mis-ordered queue insert.

That is the second audit recommendation in two passes that would have shipped a bug, after m1. Both times the reason was the same: the audit reasoned from the shape of the code and not from what the rest of the file already knew about it.

Five more things worth keeping:

• A longtask entry arrives after the task that produced it. The new measurement's first run reported blocking: 0 ms next to a six-second wall time, because it read the buffer synchronously after the await. Sixth variant of this phase's most-repeated trap, and the first one caught by another number in the same row contradicting it rather than by suspicion. Two numbers that must agree are worth more than one number you have to be sceptical about.
• The first load after a rebuild is not a measurement of first load. FCP read 96–112 ms on every run taken immediately after make dev-headless, and 28–32 ms on the very next run of the same build. A cold Vite module graph, not variance. The plan had been describing this as "±100 ms run to run" for three passes without naming it.
• Measurement labels are a flat namespace; audit IDs are case sensitive. before-m6/after-m6 already existed — the second pass's capital M6, an unrelated finding about a 3 s ticker. Naming a baseline after a finding would have overwritten two of them.
• An unreachable code path still costs bundle size, and “dead code” can mean “missing feature”. cover-grid is one of the five components that opened track-details, and it cannot: its album dropdown is rendered by renderSplitGrid, which connectedCallback references only to satisfy noUnusedLocals and which is, by its own comment, never invoked. Expanding an album fetches its ten tracks and draws nothing. The audit files this as perf.p2, "an unreferenced renderSplitGrid", under housekeeping. It is a whole interaction that does not exist, and it was only visible from trying to use it.
• What keeps a chunk out of a bundle is the absence of an import, which nothing notices. Five static imports were what put track-details's 42 kB before first paint; adding one back costs nothing anybody would see, because the chunk is also warmed on idle and the dialog carries on working. lazy-track-details.test.ts reads the five sources and fails on a returning import — the same shape as TestNoDirectRuntimeEmits, and for the same reason: the invariant is about what the code does not say.

A finding's magnitude is measured where the work runs, not where it is written

Plan 007 phase 4, sixth pass: m5, m4, m2 — the end of the tail, and the phase. Three items, one of which was measured and then dropped, which is the outcome the discipline exists to allow.

The generalisation the pass added to the previous one's "an audit's magnitude and its mechanism are two claims": a mechanism can be exactly as described and still cost nothing, because the cost depends on state the reading cannot see. perf.m5 is right that now-playing.updated() interleaves layout reads with style writes on every pass, and right that the component updates while playing. It is wrong by two orders of magnitude, because a 1 Hz position report changes nothing that component renders — so the layout is clean when the reads happen and they cost 3 µs. The interleave only flushes when the DOM actually changed, measured at 0.103 ms, 34× more. The fix is still right (52 forced layouts over six seconds of playback became 2), but the number that justifies it had to be found by making the DOM dirty on purpose.

Seven things worth keeping:

• A guard is only correct if it lists everything the measurement depends on, including things a CSS rule adds. .will-scroll .scroll-content has padding-right: 2em, so applying the scroll class changes the distance the marquee has to travel: −128 px before the class, −158 px after it. The audit's "guard on the value/flag they already track" reads as "guard on the text", and a text-only guard would have left every first hover scrolling 30 px short — silently, with no test in any tier able to see it. That is the third audit recommendation in three passes that would have shipped a bug, after m1 and m6, and all three failed the same way: reasoning from the shape of a function instead of from what the rest of the file already knows about it.
• Measuring is also how you decline to fix something. The same finding names artists-view and genres-view, which do one querySelector and two style.setProperty per pass and no layout read at all — 0.0033 ms, one percent of their own update pass. They are the two files perf.m1 was rejected in, where a guard risks stopping the virtualizer seeing a changed property. Three microseconds does not buy that risk, and "measured, declined" is a better record than a silent omission.
• A finding can be half-fixed by a phase that was not about it. m4 describes two components registering document mousemove in connectedCallback "for the process lifetime". Phase 1 had already moved track-list's onto listenWhileActive, so half the finding described a build a year of work had passed. Check the line the audit cites still says what it said.
• An N+1 finding is usually also an N-bytes finding, and the audit's fix may only address the N. All three m2 sites want FilePath and ask for whole track rows to get it: five genres cost 6 MB over the IPC, which the suggested GetTracksByGenres([]string) would have preserved exactly while removing four round trips. Returning paths made it 1.29 MB. Ask what the caller does with the answer before batching the question.
• Return grouped, not flattened, when the caller owns the order. An album list is sorted by name and a genre selection by click order; a flattened result would have reordered a queue silently. The new bindings return map[int64][]string / map[string][]string, which also serves the drag cache — a fourth N+1 site the audit does not name, and the one that fires most, since it warms on every selection change rather than on a menu action.
• make generate was emitting TypeScript that does not parse. genevents prefixed only the first line of a const block's doc comment with //; Phase 4's first pass gave events.go two multi-paragraph comments; so regenerating frontend/src/events.ts wrote bare prose into an object literal. It is a pre-commit hook, so the failure was waiting for whoever next touched a .sql, a .templ or an event constant. Nothing caught it because nobody had run the generator since the comments were written. A generator is only verified by running it, and a hook that regenerates is a hook that can break a clean tree.
• The wailsjs delta is 13 lines across two files, both autotagservice/Service.*, not five as three sessions of notes have said. It is 25 across four now, the extra 12 being this pass's two library bindings.

And three on measuring, all of which produced a wrong number first:

• "First run cold, second warm" is not a rule. First contentful paint read 100 then 96 on one build this pass, and 28 then 76 on another — the second run warmer in neither. FCP varies ±50 ms here for reasons the harness does not control. The honest response is to report it as unattributable, not to take a third run until it agrees.
• A confirming run against the wrong seed looks like a result. A re-run taken straight after make e2e measured the default library, because make e2e needs SEED=default and the app was still on it: "Play 20 albums" went from a number to a dash and the artist's bytes fell 40×. Plausible in shape, meaningless. The tell was a row that stopped having a value at all.
• Selection highlighting read from an inactive view measures Phase 1, not a repaint bug. Driving artists-view after navigating with a raw navigate event showed the controller holding one selected artist and zero highlighted cards — the exact signature of the virtualizer hazard, and entirely an artifact: viewActive was false and an off-screen view does not render. Through a real sidebar click: one highlighted card, aria-selected="true" on the right one, in both card grids. Check viewActive before believing a view did not repaint.

A reproduction read too early is a fix applied to nothing

Plan 007 phase 5, first pass: the track list's arithmetic, a window minimum the layout can actually hold, and one page header for nine views. Three items, one inherited one-liner, and the pass's own contribution to this plan's longest-running theme — a number that cannot move is not evidence — which appeared twice more here, both times in a reproduction rather than in a measurement.

config-page's rename bug is real: the library name's click bubbles to the document handler that closes the rename editor, so it opens and closes it in the same click. But the probe that "reproduced" it read .edit-input synchronously after a synthetic .click(), and Lit renders on a microtask — so it reported "not editing" on the broken build and on the fixed one. The fix looked like it had done nothing, which nearly bought a second, unnecessary fix; the real check needed one await. The same shape then failed an e2e spec of mine, which captured a header count immediately after a navigation and got null, making every assertion after it vacuous.

Seven things worth keeping:

• A screenshot disagreeing with a number is the useful signal, not a puzzle to explain away. A viewport ladder reported the top bar overflowing by 0 px at every width while the PNG showed the job indicator cut off at the edge. The badge was display: none — no job was running by then — so nothing was overflowing and the "bug" was a rendering of the app working. Two numbers that must agree are worth more than one number you have to be sceptical about, and a picture counts as one of the two.
• An audit's symptom can outlive its mechanism. H-11 says the app title "wraps into the nav" below 700 px. It does — but the title block is 80 px tall inside a 64 px bar at every width, including 1440; what changes at 780 px is the subtitle taking a second line. Fixing the visible half is a breakpoint on the subtitle. The permanent 16 px was never the finding and is still there.
• Fixing the stated cause does not always remove the stated symptom. With the 40 px arithmetic fixed, Duration still reads "Durat…" at 800 px — because the column is at its 50 px floor and the label no longer fits, while the values do. Same screenshot, different mechanism. Worth writing down, or the next reader reasonably concludes the arithmetic fix did not land.
• Count the copies before calling something a duplicate pair. The audit names Albums and Tracks as the two views with a sort toolbar; playlist-view had a third copy of the same twenty lines. The fix was worth 1.5× what the finding implied.
• What a model carries decides what a control can offer. "Artists and Genres have no sort control" is one finding and two different fixes: genres have a track count to sort by, and library.Artist carries nothing countable at all. A select with one option is a control that does nothing, so that view gets a label and a direction button.
• Backend state outlives the page, and a spec that spends it fails the next run. view-lifecycle.spec.ts toggled shuffle and never toggled it back, so a second make e2e against the same app failed playback.spec's shuffle assertion — in a list that reads exactly like a regression in the change you are holding, which is what I assumed for half an hour. Stashing the phase's source changes and re-running the same specs is what proved it pre-existing; the same file also skips an autotag album per run, out of eleven, which is inherent and now in the skill. Restart the app before believing an e2e failure you did not cause.
• A header that appears with the data is the layout problem it was meant to fix. The first version of <page-header> rendered only once a view had loaded, and showed "0 playlists" while loading. Both were caught by reading a screenshot rather than by any assertion. The header now renders during load and omits the count until there is an answer — null meaning "no answer yet", which is a different thing from zero and has to be a different value.

An audit ages against the code, and the oldest claims are the least checked

Plan 007 phase 5, second pass: the five hand-rolled dialogs, the context menu's keyboard model, the ARIA tail, and landing on Home. a11y.md was the least verified material in the repo — three of its 34 findings had been touched before this pass — and treating each one as a hypothesis was worth it three times over.

The generalisation the pass adds to "an audit's magnitude and its mechanism are two claims": a finding also has a date, and the code has moved since. Three of the findings here describe a build that no longer exists, in three different ways:

• Fixed by a phase that was not about it. a11y.12 lists five silent async surfaces. The first is config-page's private toast, which Phase 3 deleted — and the surface that replaced it has had role="status" aria-live="polite" since the day it was written. Two of five bullets were already closed.
• Half-fixed, so the stated mechanism is now wrong. H-9 says the Home card's missing-art placeholder "has no background". It has one; it is --yj-bg-surface, which is almost exactly the page colour, and it holds a wa-icon — which has rendered at all only since Phase 4 bundled the icons. "Renders as nothing" was literally true offline when the audit was written and is now merely nearly true. Fixing the stated cause would have changed one line and nothing visible.
• Reproduces differently. H-9's other half says "all three shelves show the same seven albums". There are five shelves and the duplication is one adjacent pair. The fix is still right; a rule written from the sentence rather than from the page would have been aimed at three shelves that do not exist.

Seven more things worth keeping:

• The existing tests caught two bad versions of a new rule; the new test caught neither. "Suppress a shelf that repeats the one above" is one line of intent and three of policy. Version one collapsed a four-album library to a single shelf. Version two, guarded by a fixed shelf size, let an 11-album library keep three identical shelves while a 13-album one lost them. The rule that survives is "a repeat is a fault only if a different row was possible" — the shelf must not be showing the whole library — and the reason it is right is that it is about the library rather than about a constant. A test written for a change tests the change; the tests already there are what test the system.
• A default that is a behaviour has to be changed in two places, and one of them is a test suite. Landing on Home broke eleven e2e specs. Nine assumed the track list is on screen at startup. One failed because every primary view stays in the DOM and Home names the same artists, so an unscoped getByText().first() matched a card on a .view-hidden page. And one was a real bug: getByRole('button', {name: 'Shuffle'}) resolved to two elements, because Home's page-header action and the transport's shuffle mode had the same accessible name and had never been on screen together. A cached view is in the accessibility tree from the first paint, so "these two controls are on different pages" stopped being true the moment the app started on one of them.
• A component test against hand-built markup cannot see a web component's own lifecycle. Two of the three things that made the menu keyboard model work are invisible to it: wa-dropdown-item sets its role in its own first update, so a query at the host's updateComplete finds no items at all; and focus() on a wa-popup that has not positioned itself is a silent no-op. Both produce a menu that opens and refuses to take focus. Both were found by driving the real app, and the e2e spec exists because the component test passes either way.
• The rule for a live region is about ordering, not markup. Most screen readers announce a change to a region they are already watching and ignore one that appears with its content already in it — which is why catalog-scope-notice had a role="status" that announced nothing. So the regions render unconditionally and empty and only their text changes, and now-playing's is in both render branches, because the branch with no track is the one that has to be mounted before the first track arrives.
• aria-selected on role="button" is not useless, it is dropped. Four grids whose entire ctrl/shift interaction exists to produce a selection were publishing it into a void. The fix is not an attribute but a role: listbox/option.
• A backtick in a comment inside a css tagged template literal ends the literal. The skill has warned about this for two plans. I did it twice in one session — once in a component, where tsc pointed at the line, and once in tokens.css.ts, where every test file in the suite failed to import and the output reads like a broken test runner. If the whole tier dies at once, suspect the shared module.
• Migrating a dialog can delete feedback nobody listed. config-page's remove-library spinner lived in the hand-rolled overlay, so moving the confirmation to confirmAction() left a backend call of unknown length with no indication it had started. The state field it used had no reader afterwards, which is the tell: removingLibraryId now means "which row is busy" and the row says so.

And one on the harness, stated carefully because it is the kind of thing that gets over-claimed: e2e has failed in CI on every push this session, including one that changed no application code at all — 9f03b3f, a workflow file and a shell script. check passed on all of them. Together with 9e92721 (docs only, recorded last pass) that is two failures which cannot have been caused by the commit they ran on.

But it does not follow that this session's failures are the same one, and I could not check: this Gitea build does not expose the job-log endpoint, and the runner is not on this machine, so the log tail the skill describes is out of reach from here. The suite passes locally, twice consecutively, all 48 specs — on Chromium only. CI also runs WebKit, which cannot run on Arch at all, and this pass changed focus management, dialog modality and roles, which is exactly the area where the two engines differ. Treat the WebKit half as unverified rather than as the known audio-clock flake until someone reads the log.

"Out of reach" is a claim about a tool, not about the information

Plan 007 phase 5, third pass: Settings' keyboard reach, the ? overlay and the arrows, an Album column, and the CI question two sessions had recorded as unanswerable.

The generalisation the pass adds: when a tool says it cannot get something, that is a fact about the tool. gitea_ci job_logs returns a 404 on this Gitea build and says so clearly, and two sessions read that as "the log is out of reach from here" and reasoned from the commits instead. The REST API on the same server answers fine, with the token that was already in the environment:

GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/{run}/jobs   # per-step status
GET /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/jobs/{id}/logs    # the whole log

Ten minutes, after a session and a half of careful hedging about what the failure might be. The hedging was correct — it just cost more than checking would have.

What the log said, in two parts:

• The failure is the container's audio clock, on both engines. Not a regression in the dialog/focus/menu work, which was the live worry. playback.spec's elapsed time and two player-truth.spec cases: the UI interpolates while the backend position stays at zero, 17–18 s adrift. ci.yml says the ALSA null plugin advances at real time; it was measured once and no longer does.
• WebKit had never run. The step had no if:, so a chromium failure skipped it — conclusion: skipped, in the same JSON that held the answer. The previous pass's "treat the WebKit half as unverified" was more literally true than intended: the one place WebKit gets any coverage had produced no signal at all for as long as chromium had been red. With if: !cancelled() it runs, and both engines pass 48 and fail the same three.

Seven more things worth keeping:

• A reproduction of the fix can be as invalid as one of the bug. After making ←/→ reach the player again, the check measured zero Player.Seek calls — the same answer as the broken build, because nothing was playing and the dispatch records nothing with no track loaded. Seventh costume of this plan's most-repeated trap, and the first on the after side: "the fix did nothing" and "the probe cannot see anything" produce identical output.
• A shortcut a dialog swallows is a promise the shortcut layer cannot keep. The ? overlay was written as a toggle. It cannot be: focusedControlOwnsKey yields every unmodified key to anything inside an open dialog, so the second ? never reaches the service. Escape closes it, as it does every dialog here. The rule that protects focused controls is the rule that forbids the toggle, and an e2e spec is what noticed.
• Every wa-dialog in this app is an unnamed dialog. a11y.md lists them under "what is already correct" and says every one passes a label — true, and the label never reaches the accessibility tree. Web Awesome renders it into an <h2 id="title"> in the same shadow root as the <dialog> and never sets aria-labelledby. Found by writing getByRole('dialog', {name}) and getting nothing. Two more facts about locating one, both costing a spec run: the host is display: contents so it always reports hidden, and the slotted content lives in the host's shadow root, not in the dialog's subtree.
• A fix can be right while the finding's stated benefit is wrong. H-15 wants an Album column so the three Tideline / Aurora Fields / 00:06 rows can be told apart. They are duplicates of the same album, so they still read identically; what distinguishes them is the duplicate-detection feature or a path column. The column is still the right default for every other row. Visible only in a screenshot — nothing failed, and the finding's sentence would have been ticked off without looking.
• A section of controls that do nothing is worse than admitting the section does not exist. H-22 asks for a Playback/Audio section; backend/config has no output device, gapless, crossfade or replay gain to expose. Same judgement as "Artists cannot have a sort select" two passes ago, and the same tell: the audit describes the UI it wants without checking what the model carries.
• A default the seed has already persisted is not a default you can see. Changing tracklist.DefaultColumns changed nothing in the running app, because .dev/seeds/default.tar carries a config.toml from before it — while CI builds its seed by running the app and would have exercised the new one. A local run and a CI run testing different defaults is worse than either being wrong. make sandbox-seed NAME=default.
• aria-controls has to name an element that exists, which decides how a disclosure renders: config-section's body is rendered unconditionally and toggled with hidden rather than added and removed. Nothing is paid for it — the slot's light-DOM children are in the DOM either way; a conditional <slot> only stops projecting them.

A dependency with a rate has to be checked at its rate

Same pass, after the plan's three landings: the e2e job's red history turned out to be one measurement being wrong, and the fix was worth the generalisation.

ci.yml had made ALSA's null plugin the container's default device, with a comment saying it "advances its pointer on a timer, so playback is consumed at real-time rate". It does not. Measured in the CI image under Docker, through beep and oto with the same speaker.Init arguments player.InitSpeaker uses:

default device	3000 ms of audio consumed in
type null	2.96 ms
PulseAudio null sink	3762 ms

A thousand times too fast. Every track finished instantly, so the position reset to zero while the UI kept interpolating, and three specs failed on a clock that never moved — 17–19 s adrift, which reads exactly like the H-3 bug Phase 2 fixed. check and e2e are both green now, 54 specs on Chromium and 54 on WebKit.

Five things worth keeping:

• A dependency with a rate needs a check at its rate. Installing a sound device and asserting it exists is not the same as asserting it plays. The job now plays three seconds and fails if they take under two, in a step called "The sink plays at real time" — so the next regression names itself instead of surfacing three steps later as an app bug.
• A failure that succeeds quietly is the expensive kind. InitSpeaker returns nil in ~3 ms against both devices. Nothing logged, nothing errored; the only symptom was arithmetic in three specs. Two sessions read that as a flake and one as a possible WebKit regression.
• The CI container is reproducible locally, and nobody had tried. docker run --rm ubuntu:24.04 reproduced the whole thing in four minutes and let the fix be verified — including under the private session bus and Xvfb dev-headless.sh runs the app in — before it was pushed. Every previous attempt to reason about this job reasoned from the commits instead, because the log looked unreachable (which it was not either).
• Test the stack you ship, not one that resembles it. aplay showed the same 1000× gap and would have been enough to diagnose. It would not have shown that oto opens the pulse-backed device at all, which is the thing that had to be true for the fix to work; a fifteen-line Go program using the app's own speaker.Init did.
• The comment was the bug's hiding place. "Measured: InitSpeaker succeeds in ~36 ms and all six playback specs pass" was true when written and had been carried forward through every subsequent read of that file, including two this session. A measurement in a comment needs the same expiry as one in a plan.

A finding creates the conditions for the next one

Plan 007 phase 5, fourth pass: naming every wa-dialog, drawing cover-grid's album dropdown, and giving the album page a primary action.

The generalisation this pass adds: a finding is a door, and what is behind it has never been looked at. Three of the four items here had a second bug hiding behind the one the audit named, and none of them could have been found by reading — each was only reachable once the first fix made the code path run for the first time.

• perf.p2 files renderSplitGrid as "dead code carried in the bundle", housekeeping, delete it. It was a missing feature whose data path already worked, and behind it sat 1 463 lines that had never executed: scroll-manager.ts (916) and album-dropdown.ts (461). Drawing it revealed that the albums grid could not scroll at all — .grid-scroll-container is the markup artists-view uses and cover-grid had the class with no rule for it, so 186 984 px of albums sat in a 772 px box at 5 000 albums, unreachable by wheel, keyboard or scrollbar — which in turn revealed that the scroll manager had spent its whole life saving and restoring a scrollTop that was permanently 0. And that revealed the shared context menu labelled "Album actions" on a track row, which nothing could observe while the only menu that could open on a track was unreachable.
• H-13 asks for a Play button. The button needs file paths; the obvious key is MBTrack.LocalID, which is declared, is in the generated bindings, and is never written by anything in the backend. Ownership is decided by recording MBID. Keying on that produced a button that was wired, labelled correctly, clicked cleanly and queued nothing — a library-only album has no recording MBIDs, because its tracks are synthesised with mbid: RecordingMBID || ''. Every component test passed. It was caught by clicking the button in the running app and reading the queue.

Seven more things worth keeping:

• A count of call sites in an audit is a count as of its date. a11y.md lists five wa-dialogs; last pass estimated eight; there are eleven. Three of the six added since were added by this plan. The fix was written as a helper called from each host rather than a list, so the number stopped mattering — which is the right response to a number that drifts.
• Reaching into another library's shadow root is acceptable when the failure is bounded. name-dialog.ts queries Web Awesome's open shadow root, which is not API. If the structure moves, the query misses, nothing is written, and the dialog is exactly as unnamed as it was — no state to get wrong, nothing to throw. The alternative, patching WaDialog.prototype, fixes every call site for free and fails loudly and strangely instead. The bound is the argument, not the tidiness.
• aria-labelledby beats aria-label when the label can change. Three call sites compute their label at render time. An IDREF to the heading the component re-renders anyway stays correct with nothing resyncing it, so the helper can be a one-shot call.
• A web component's shadow root is populated in its own update, not its host's. Naming a wa-dialog from the host's firstUpdated finds an element with an empty shadow root and names nothing. Same lifecycle trap as wa-dropdown-item's role two passes ago, which suggests it is not a trap so much as a rule: never query inside a child custom element without awaiting its updateComplete.
• The a11y snapshot cannot see a dialog's accessible name. playwright-cli snapshot prints a bare - dialog [ref=…] whether the dialog is named by aria-labelledby, by aria-label, or not at all — checked all three ways against the running app. Twenty minutes went into "the fix did not work" before the probe was suspected. getByRole('dialog', {name}) and CDP's Accessibility.getFullAXTree both answer, and CDP additionally reports where the name came from. The e2e spec was watched failing on a probe-disabled build before it was believed, which is the only reason the twenty minutes did not become an hour.
• An assertion that cannot fail will pass a bug, and the fix is to make the probe move. "The scroll position is preserved when the dropdown opens" passed against a scrollTop of 0 both times on an eight-album fixture. Shrinking the viewport until the grid genuinely scrolled turned it red — and the red was correct: scrollToShowDropdown deliberately moves the scroll to reveal the dropdown (80 → 4, with the content taller after, so not clamping). The premise was wrong, not the app. Two lessons in one: a vacuous assertion hides a bug and a false claim, and the way to tell them apart is to make the number move before deciding what it means.
• A parameter name is not a specification. Queue.SetQueue's shuffleStart does not start a shuffle: it picks a random first track if shuffle mode is already on. A Shuffle button written from the name plays track 1 and looks broken. Reading the Go was thirty seconds.

And one on the audit's own accounting: H-13's "unexplained ✓ badges" was half-aged before it was read. The indicator has carried a title and an aria-label reading "Album “X” is in your library" all along, so a hover and a screen reader were both already answered; what was missing was a key for a sighted user scanning a column of green circles. The same element turns out to be a <button> whose click handler is a comment saying "wire this up later" and a stopPropagation — 30-odd keyboard stops per page that promise an action and perform none. Not fixed here, and recorded rather than implied.

A shelf that shares no ids can still be the shelf above it

Plan 007 phase 6: the two inherited one-liners from the fourth pass, and then the only part of this plan that adds rather than repairs — Explore's shelves.

The generalisation: a rule is written against a mechanism, and the thing it exists to prevent is not the mechanism. backend/home suppresses a shelf that repeats the one above it, by comparing album ids. Explore's first two shelves hold different entity types, so their ids are disjoint by construction and no overlap is possible — I wrote that in a comment as the reason the guard was unnecessary, and it is true, and the page repeated itself anyway. Ordered by raw ListenBrainz listen count, the catalog's top twelve albums are seven records by one act and its members, and the artists row underneath is then the same seven people. One fandom, twice, with nothing in common by the only measure the rule knew how to take.

It was found by reading the screenshot — the shelves rendered, the counts were right, four component tests and six Go tests were green, and the page was obviously wrong to anyone looking at it. The fix is one album per artist (a shelf is a selection, not a leaderboard) and skipping whoever a row above already showed. The existing Go test caught the semantic change immediately: an artist seeded as the maker of the album shelf's only album correctly stopped appearing in the artists shelf, which read as a regression and was the rule working.

Nine more things worth keeping, and the first four are all one theme — a plan's shelf list is a design; the schema is the constraint:

• Two of the four planned shelves cannot be built at all. explore_index has no genre or tag column, so "big in a genre you already have depth in" has nothing to join to — genre exists only in the library's own recording_genres. And "artists next to ones you own" needs similar_artist_map, which cmd/indexexport does not ship and which is filled lazily by network calls from artist pages: empty on a fresh install, empty offline, which is exactly when this page most needs content. Both were answerable in ten minutes by reading two schema files, before writing anything.
• The third is empty on every library the repo can look at. It reads in_library, set from MusicBrainz IDs, and the fixture library has 0 artists with an MBID — so a shelf about the user's own music is correctly absent on the seed, in CI, and on any untagged library however large. A feature you cannot see locally has to be designed so that the state you can see is a legitimate one.
• "The shipped artifact already contains the answer" is false in the place the tests run. ci.yml points YJ_CORE_INDEX_URL at a dead address, so CI's app has 0 catalog rows — as does every user's first run. A developer machine silently downloads the real 1.1 M-row artifact at launch, which is why the local page looked finished. The empty world was reproduced locally by setting the same variable, and it is now the world the e2e spec stages a catalog into.
• A spec that skips is not a spec that passes. The first version branched on the row count and skipped three of its four cases where there was no catalog — which is CI, i.e. the only place both browser engines run. Staging six rows through /__test/sql costs nothing and turns "skipped" into signal.
• …and it only works because the readiness gate is a question rather than a flag. Two cached answers were tried first and were wrong in the same way. GetIndexStatus().TotalRows is refreshed between build tiers, so on an ordinary launch it reads 0 next to a full catalog and hid every shelf. IsReady() is set once at startup by counting, so rows staged afterwards are invisible to it. Both are the shape the emitStatus note warns about — a derived value with nothing polling behind it. SELECT 1 FROM explore_index LIMIT 1 cannot be stale and costs nothing.
• A setup step whose failure is not checked is not setup. The staging fetch passed six values to seven placeholders and never read the response: every insert failed, the table stayed empty, and the helper looked exactly like a helper that had worked. Same family as every "probe that cannot move" in this plan, on the arrange side rather than the assert side.
• A reproduction of a fix at one scale is not one at another. End in a split grid worked on the eight-album fixture, because everything is rendered and the scroll is a no-op. At 5 000 albums the fix moved the index and focused nothing: the card arrives a few hundred ms after the host's updateComplete, and a ten-frame retry budget expired first. The retry is a time budget now. (And a probe that scrolled the grid to demonstrate the old behaviour left it somewhere that broke the next measurement in the same eval — measuring the before can spoil the after.)
• The audit did not contain the biggest bug this pass fixed. "Check what Home/End mean across a split grid" was a one-line hunch from the previous session. What it found is that offsetTop inside a lit-virtualizer is always 0 — the children are positioned by transform — so ArrowDown and ArrowUp have been End and Home in the albums, artists and genres grids since the roving controller was written. Reproduced at 700×700 with three real rows: ArrowDown from card 0 landed on card 7. One getBoundingClientRect fixed all three.
• A label can promise what the control cannot do. library-status-indicator was recorded last pass as a button that does nothing. Its label was also an offer — "Add artist “Eno” to library" — from an element that cannot accept it. Making it a badge meant changing the copy too, which is the part a mechanical fix would have left saying the wrong thing. Also worth knowing: a <span> does not inherit box-sizing: border-box from the UA stylesheet the way a <button> does, so swapping the tag grew the badge 36→38px. Nothing but the stored screenshot would have noticed.

The state a fix lands in is a state nobody has looked at

Plan 008 phase 1: the three a11y.md findings that lose function — a marquee that cannot be stopped, a combobox that announces nothing, and a queue whose order needs a mouse.

The generalisation, and it is the mirror of "a finding creates the conditions for the next one": that note is about the code path a fix opens. This one is about the code path a fix sends people to. A guard, a fallback, an empty state, a disabled variant — the branch a fix makes people live in has usually never been looked at by anyone, precisely because until now nobody arrived there.

The reduced-motion guard is two lines. Both bugs it exposed were in the place it sends you:

• The non-scrolling fallback hard-clipped, and always had. text-overflow: ellipsis was on the outer span while the box that overflows is the inline-block child — so it produced an ellipsis in no mode, including hover, which is the default every user has. A title read "An Exhaustively Overlong Trac|". Found by reading the screenshot of the fix, which is the fourth regression in two plans that only a PNG has caught.
• And fixing that broke overflow detection. Giving the child its own overflow: hidden stops the parent overflowing, so titleOverflows went false and nothing would have scrolled again for anybody. Caught by the new test's positive case — which existed only because a guard that suppresses everything passes the negative case for free, which is this repo's oldest rule wearing its eighth costume.

Eight more things worth keeping:

• A grep triage is a good answer to "is it still there" and no answer to "why". Checking all 34 findings against the tree took ten minutes and closed at least five the coverage map still showed open, including three (17, 19, 27) fixed by phases that were not about them. It said nothing about mechanism, and mechanism is what decided that 15's obvious CSS-only fix is wrong.
• A finding's stated scope can be half-closed by an unrelated phase. a11y.11 is "drag-and-drop has no keyboard equivalent anywhere" and its stated symptom is "there is no keyboard path to add a track to the queue or a playlist" — which Phase 5's MenuKeyboard closed. What was actually left is the queue's order, the one thing a menu cannot express. Fixing the sentence rather than the residue would have built three menu commands that already exist.
• A count in an audit is scoped by how it was taken. a11y.6 says two buttons are "the only truly unnamed controls" — and says, in the same line, that it scanned every <button>. The AX tree has two unnamed combobox roles that are native <select>s, one of them the page header's sort control on nine views. The claim was never wrong; it was answering a narrower question than it reads as.
• The probe was wrong, not the fix — twice more, both on the after side. Reading activedescendant out of getFullAXTree as relatedNodes[0].text reported (none) against a working build, because the property carries value.type: "idref". And __yjEvents.last('QueueChanged') returned a stale payload, so a reorder that had happened read as one that had not. Dump the whole property; ask GetState.
• An operation's index convention is part of its contract, and the symmetric-looking version fails silently. MoveQueueTracks takes an index into the array before the move, so up-by-one asks for i - 1 and down-by-one has to ask for i + 2 — i + 1 is where the row already is once its own removal is accounted for, and the backend's contiguous-block guard correctly returns without doing anything. The first version moved rows up and did nothing at all downward, with no error anywhere.
• A roving tab stop that only moves on arrow keys is not where the focus is. focusedIndex was never synced from a click or a Tab, so Enter played the first track in the queue from any focused row — pre-existing, invisible for as long as the keys only read state, and obvious the moment a key moved something.
• Watch the new spec fail on the old build. Done for all three landings, by neutering one line rather than by stashing (which reverts every uncommitted change in the file). Two of the three would have passed against the broken build in at least one case if the positive direction had been left out.
• CI's concurrency cancels the previous run's e2e when you push again, and cancelled sits one line from success in the run list. The first landing's e2e never ran; the signal came from the second push's run, read step by step through /api/v1/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs/{run}/jobs. Same family as the skipped WebKit step, one layer out.

And the one that is no longer worth calling a lesson: a backtick inside a comment in a css tagged template literal ends the literal. Third session running. It is written in CLAUDE.md, in the skill, and in NOTES.md, and it was read twice in the session it then cost a cycle in. Knowledge is not working here; it wants a lint rule.

A parked measurement is a finding of unknown size, and this one was nine times bigger

Plan 008 phase 2: the two items a11y.md never measured. One closed on measurement; the other turned out to be nine times the size of its own description and to contain two findings larger than itself.

The generalisation: "worth measuring before planning" is a debt with no stated size, and the estimate attached to it is not a bound. The audit said --yj-text-tertiary on --yj-bg-surface is "≈ 4.1:1, borderline", from a hand calculation over two hex values in a file that does not contain them. Every part of that sentence was approximately true and the conclusion it invited — borderline, low priority — was wrong by an order of magnitude:

	audit	measured
pairs considered	1	12 (three ramps × four surfaces)
failing	"borderline"	9 of 12
worst ratio	≈ 4.1	2.31 (dark overlay), 2.55 (light)
failing nodes on screen	—	110 across twelve views

Nine things worth keeping:

• A number quoted from the wrong file is still a number, and it travels. The audit cites the palette as tokens.css.ts. That file holds the type scale and icon sizes and no colours at all; the ramps live in theme-store, applied to :root at runtime — which also means the var(--yj-…, #fallback) at ~500 call sites is dead code, and four different fallbacks behind one name never mattered. I spent twenty minutes concluding the tokens "are never defined" before asking the running app what :root carried. Ask the app.
• Measuring one state of three answers one third of the question. The whole first sweep was the dark ramp, because that is the default. light was the worst of the three and had never been looked at by the audit or by me. A palette is data — enumerate it.
• A generated colour is a family, not a colour. The avatar background is hsl(nameToHue(name), 45%, 35%), and 35 of the 360 hues put white text below 4.5:1. The rendered sweep found two, because two artists happened to hash into the yellow-green band. Had I fixed the two, the bug would have returned with the next search. The unit of the fix is the generator; the unit of the test is all 360.
• A fix that makes the ramp pass can also destroy the ramp. Sizing tertiary to clear 4.5:1 on bgOverlay needs a grey lighter than secondary. Passing an automated check by inverting the visual hierarchy is the kind of accessibility fix that makes the product worse, so bgOverlay is documented as not a text surface and the one component using it that way now uses primary. The test encodes the exception rather than pretending it away, and a second case asserts the ramp stays ordered.
• My probe was wrong before the code was, twice, and a screenshot caught both. Source-over compositing that forces a: 1 makes two stacked rgba(255,255,255,0.05) surfaces composite to opaque white — which reported a perfectly readable button as white-on-white at 1.00:1. And later I read a screenshot taken after a sweep had left the app on a different ramp, and concluded the light theme was not applying at all. Both times the tell was the same: the picture and the number disagreed, and both times the number was mine.
• The cheapest tier is blind to a whole class of change. make ui-visual passed unchanged across a palette rewrite, because the component tier has no :root and renders the fallbacks. Six stored screenshots said nothing at all about the change they most looked like they were about.
• A finding that closes on measurement is worth the measurement. a11y.28 (mouse-only resize handles) was dropped by reading. At 800×600 the track list clips exactly one thing — the Duration header label — and zero data cells, and that sort has a keyboard-reachable dropdown anyway. Same conclusion, now with a number, and the next reader does not have to re-derive it.
• The measurement found two things larger than what it was measuring. The semantic colours are fixed across ramps, and one fixed colour cannot serve both a near-black and a near-white surface — --yj-error is 2.55:1 on dark's elevated. And with the greyscale fixed the light ramp still fails 50 nodes: an invisible warning banner, a white-on-yellow primary button, chrome that stays dark while the body goes light. Recorded, not fixed. "Does the light theme ship?" is not a question a contrast pass gets to answer on its own.
• Fixing the ubiquitous case makes the rare ones visible. With tertiary raised, the remaining dark-ramp failures were three nodes and every one was a different mechanism. A finding at 110 nodes hides them; at 3 they are individually obvious. Cheap tail, only reachable from the other side of the main fix.

A role, not a value, decides whether a colour can be fixed

Plan 008 phase 2, third landing: the two findings the contrast pass had recorded as too big to fix in it, fixed — plus the check for the trap that has now cost four sessions.

The generalisation: a token that is used for two different jobs will be wrong at one of them, and no amount of choosing a better value fixes it. --yj-error was "the colour of error", which is two questions. As the background of a danger button it wants to stay red in every theme, and it does. As the word failed on a surface it cannot be one value at all — a single colour cannot clear 4.5:1 against both a near-black and a near-white background, which is why the fixed set measured 2.31–4.28:1 on nearly every combination. Splitting the token by the question it answers made both answerable; picking better hexes never would have.

The same shape twice more in the same landing:

• A fill's foreground cannot be written down, because the accent is a colour picker. color: #000 is right for the current default yellow and wrong for a navy one. readableOn() computes it — white where white clears 4.5:1, black otherwise — which keeps a red danger button conventional (4.51:1) and flips a green one (3.45:1).
• var(--yj-bg-base) as a foreground is a token used for the wrong meaning. Two accent buttons did that. It reads as "the opposite of the accent" and it is not: it inverts with the ramp, so the light theme rendered white on yellow at 1.43:1. The bug is not the value, it is that the name did not mean what the call site needed.

Six more things worth keeping:

• The picture and the number disagreed, and the number was mine — again. I recorded "the header and player chrome stay dark while the body goes light" as a finding, in the plan and in these notes. It is false: .top-bar is #e9ecef and .sidebar #f8f9fa under the light ramp, and a re-taken screenshot agrees with the DOM. The original was captured before the theme had propagated. That is the third time in two passes a screenshot read at the wrong moment produced a confident wrong claim, after a spec reading the DOM before a fetch and a sweep that had moved the app to another ramp. A screenshot has a timestamp and a state; check both before quoting it.
• A color: regex matches border-color:. Twice in one landing — 3 borders while rewriting semantic text, then 30 more while rewriting accent text. Both caught by grepping the result, not by any test, because a border in the wrong shade fails nothing and looks fine. When a mechanical rewrite is the right tool, the review is a grep of what it did, not a run of the suite.
• A fix at the ubiquitous case makes the rare ones findable. The greyscale fix took the dark ramp to 0 and the light ramp from 50 to a list short enough to read individually — at which point every remaining item was a different mechanism, and two of them were the findings above. A queue of 110 hides its own structure.
• Knowledge that has been ignored three times is not a knowledge problem. The backtick-in-a-css-comment trap is documented in CLAUDE.md, in the skill and here; I read it twice in the session it then cost a cycle in. It is make css-check now — a pre-commit hook and a CI step. The detection is exact rather than heuristic: if a backtick in a comment closed the literal early, the text the parser took as the literal contains an unterminated /*, and nothing else produces that.
• The value of that check is the sentence, not the failure. tsc already failed on it — with Class static side 'typeof NowPlaying' incorrectly extends base class static side and Property 'scroll' does not exist on type 'CSSResult', pointing at a line of prose. The check was verified by breaking a file on purpose and reading both reports side by side, which is also the only way to know it fires.
• A change can be invisible to the tier that looks the most like it covers it. make ui-visual passed unchanged through a whole palette rewrite, twice, because the component tier has no :root and renders the fallbacks. The tier that did catch things was a unit test over the palette table and a probe against the running app.

A name lives where the role is, and neither the audit nor the sweep looks there

Plan 008 phase 3: the tail of a11y.md, which closes it — and with it all four audits from 2026-08-11.

The generalisation, and it is the whole of this pass: an accessible name is computed on the element carrying the role, and every way we have of checking one looks somewhere else. The audit read the source and credited a name that was never computed. My AX sweep read the tree and reported a weak name as no problem. A component test asserted the attribute and pinned the bug it was written to prevent. Three tiers, three different wrong answers, all about the same property.

Concretely, and each of these is a finding:

where it was written	where the role is	computed name
aria-label on <wa-slider>	a div in its shadow root, aria-labelledby="label"	""
<label> beside a <select> in config-field	the select	""
placeholder on Explore's search input	the input	the placeholder
label on <wa-progress-bar>	inner div's aria-label	correct

The first is wa-dialog's trap one component over and cost two sessions in 007. The fix is different, though, and the difference is worth keeping: wa-progress-bar's label is an aria-label and is invisible, so it is just the right API; wa-slider's label is visible, so the name comes from the library's own property and styles/wa-slider-label.css.ts hides it by part. That is preferred over name-dialog.ts's reach into the shadow root for one reason — if Web Awesome renames the part, the label becomes visible and correctly named, rather than silently nameless again. Choose the failure you would rather have.

Nine more things worth keeping:

• A sweep for empty names cannot see a weak one. A placeholder is an accname fallback, so getFullAXTree reported the whole Explore view clean — which is why a11y.26 survived four phases of people looking for exactly this class of bug. "0 unnamed" answers a narrower question than it reads as, which is the third time in this plan a count has done that.
• The count that sent Phase 1 hunting was wrong in both halves. "Two unnamed native <select>s, one of them the page header's sort control on nine views": the sort control is named Sort: by its wrapping <label> (from: relatedElement) on all nine, and the two unnamed roles were one config-field select and the seek bar. Recorded as a finding in the plan, believed for a phase, false.
• …and the thing it was pointing at was nine times bigger. With Settings' sections expanded: 24 of 93 controls unnamed, every config-field select and toggle and all eighteen column checkboxes. No finding names it, and a11y.6 is not wrong — it says in its own line that it scanned every <button>. Same shape as phase 2's contrast number.
• A fix's own test can be pinning the bug. transport.test.ts asserted aria-label on the wa-slider host under the title "carries an accessible name". It passed for six phases. Run the existing tests found it — third plan running that this is the rule that pays.
• a11y.21's mechanism does not exist, and the real one is on the other axis. "The 4em bars grow while the viewport does not and anything that no longer fits is clipped" — the middle grid row is 1fr and absorbs them exactly: at 200% text on 800×600 the bars go 64 → 128px, the panel 472 → 344px, and the footer still lands on 600. Nothing is clipped vertically. Horizontally the shell is 784px inside a 320px viewport (400% page zoom, the width 1.4.10 names) with 464px of it behind overflow: hidden. Measure the axis the finding does not mention.
• overflow: hidden still permits programmatic scrolling, so scrollLeft = 9999 returns a healthy 464 on the build that has the bug. My first spec passed against the broken build for that reason. A wheel gesture is the probe. Fifth entry in this plan's "the probe was wrong, not the code" column, and the tell was the oldest one there is: it could not fail.
• A synthetic MouseEvent does not reach a delegated handler. Three probes in a row reported a queue row as never becoming active; getByTestId('queue-row').dblclick() made it active immediately. Delegation reads things a hand-built event does not carry.
• A finding can be half-closed by a phase that was not about it, and the half that remains is smaller than the sentence. a11y.34 reads "the sort direction is a 10px glyph or nothing" — Phase 1's aria-sort closed the or nothing, leaving one declaration. Second time in this plan (a11y.11 was the first), and both times reading the sentence rather than the residue would have built something that already existed.
• The state a fix lands in, again, and it was three pixels. a11y.29 takes the subtitle's bottom margin away with the <h3>, which shortens the flex-centred title block and moves it down into the bar's clip — the hgroup had measured 67px inside a 64px bar since before any of this, and the descenders of "meant to bee." were cut. Found by reading a screenshot of the fix, which is the fifth regression in three plans that only a PNG has caught.

And one thing that went right and is worth copying: the marker for a11y.22 is a shape drawn in padding the row already had. The track list's grid columns are computed from the host width, so anything in the flow moves every cell on the playing row and nothing else. A ::before triangle in the 8px left padding costs no layout, and both tiers assert it is absent on the other rows — a marker that renders everywhere satisfies "the playing row has one" for free.

A guard is only a feature if everything that counts agrees with it

Plan 008 phase 4: "remove from library" — the row goes, the path is excluded from future scans, the file is never touched — and with it tracklist.delete, which had been advertised in Settings for six phases with nothing on the other end of it.

The generalisation: an operation that changes what counts as "in the library" has to be applied everywhere that number is computed, and the places that compute it do not look like the feature. The scan walk is the obvious one, and skipping an excluded path there is the whole feature as written in the plan. But the startup soft scan decides whether to scan at all by comparing files on disk against rows in the database, and an excluded path is on disk and deliberately not a row — so the fix as specified would have left the two counts disagreeing forever and queued a full scan of the entire library on every launch. Nothing fails, nothing renders differently, and no tier looks at it; the app is just permanently rescanning. The same shape one step over: deleting an audio_files row cascades to queue_tracks, so the queue's in-memory copy — and the playing track — goes stale unless the removal calls the reload hook RemoveLibrary has had all along.

Six more things worth keeping:

• A new table needs one schema file, and the two-file discipline is not about it. applySchema runs every file in sql/schemas/ on every open, so CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS reaches an existing install verbatim. The migration the plan asked for would have been a second description of the same table, which is precisely what tore out the old 48-step chain. Column order and "no index on a migrated column" are rules about ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN, and neither applies when nothing is being altered.
• The repo asked the question the plan did not. backend/datamap failed the build twice for the new table: once for having no entry at all, then again because an authored table that cascades needs an argued exemption rather than a default. Two gates, both right, and neither in references/schema-change.md until now. A catalogue that fails the build is worth more than a catalogue that is accurate.
• Reversibility is a claim until something implements it. The decision picked shape A over deleting the file partly because it is reversible — and nothing in the plan made it so. An exclusion with no UI to clear it is a one-way door with the file sitting on disk the whole time. A full rescan clears the table, which is the escape hatch until there is a list to manage, and it is now written down instead of assumed.
• The copy was wrong for the case it will be used in most. The confirmation's message and impact were written for a multi-select and used for both, so removing one track said "They are removed" under a singular title. Nothing failed. Read in the first screenshot of the dialog — sixth regression in four plans that only a PNG has caught, and the one where it mattered most, since the copy is the only thing standing between this feature and a user's music.
• Both halves of a guard need their own test, or one of them is decorative. The walk's exclusion and the survey's exclusion are two lines in two functions; neutering each in turn failed exactly one test. Had they shared a test, either could have rotted invisibly. Same reason the e2e case asserts a control path still returns from the same scan: a guard that excluded everything passes "the removed path did not come back" for free.
• A Playwright hook gets 30 seconds regardless of the test's timeout. A db/restore in afterAll passed in isolation and timed out in the full suite, where earlier specs have staged an explore catalog and the copy takes longer. test.setTimeout() inside the hook is what raises it — and a spec that spends the shared database has to give it back, since the 90 specs share one backend in file order.

A state nothing produces is a state nobody has checked

Plan 009 phase 1: library-status-indicator's third state, wired.

The generalisation: an enum whose last value is never constructed is not unfinished, it is wrong — because everything around it has been written, reviewed and tested against the two values that do occur, and the code reads as complete from every angle except the one that produces the third. LibraryStatus has had queued since it was written: styled amber, given an hourglass, given the sentence "… is queued for download". All eight call sites were a two-way ternary. So an album on the request list rendered a plus and announced "is not in your library" — on the same page, forty pixels from a filled button reading "Wanted".

Nothing was going to find that. make ui-test and make e2e both covered the badge; both asserted the states it produced. 007 phase 6 had rewritten this exact component, and the note it left behind ("when the download-client integration lands…") was itself the reason nobody looked: it names a future condition for work that was already possible, since backend/download was 16 541 lines and 20 bound methods on the day it was written. A written-down reason not to look ages worse than the code it is about.

Six more things worth keeping:

• The second bug was in the screenshot of the first. The "Wanted" button rendered a question mark — the missing-icon fallback — because bookmark-check is Font Awesome Pro and has never been bundled. offline-icons.spec.ts asserts __yjIconMisses is empty and passed the whole time: no spec had ever put the app in a state where an album was requested. The bundled-icon design anticipated exactly this ("twenty call sites compute their icon name from state") and the sweep still could not see it, because a sweep only sees the states it visits. Seventh regression in five plans that only a PNG has caught, and the first found in a PNG taken of a different bug.
• A property that does not change does not re-render a child. top-results-row reads the request list, and its host handing back the same results array means Lit stops at the property — the row keeps its old badges while the store holds the right answer. The virtualizer rule (requestUpdate() on host state) one level milder, and the same fix: subscribe where the state is read.
• A spec that gives state back has to be run twice to know it did. The afterAll cleanup called callBinding, which goes through window.__yjEvents — installed by the app fixture, not by a bare browser.newPage(). It threw where nothing was watching, left the request behind and failed the next run with a stale queued. One run proves the assertions; the second proves the teardown.
• A freshly launched app cannot search its own catalog for ~40 s. The core artifact merge has to land (core artifact: merge complete in .dev/app.log), and until it does Explore's search returns nothing at all — including for rows staged directly into explore_index a moment earlier, which makes it look like the staging failed. Cost a cycle here reading as a failure of the neuter the run was under. Budget 60 s, or wait for the log line.
• The neuter has to be per line, not per feature. Two fixes landed together and each got its own one-line neuter, which is what made the two failures distinguishable: one spec reported the wrong badge status, the other reported ["bookmark-check"]. Neutered together they would both have failed and either could have been decorative.
• The fix is where the rule is, and the rule was in eight places. Every one of the eight sites was individually reasonable; the third state was missing from all of them because no site owns the question. Same shape as getCoverUrl(), track-index.ts and page-header — when a rule is written per call site, the call sites do not disagree, they are all incomplete in the same way.

A decision phase earns its keep by finding it was not a decision

Plan 009 phases 2 and 3: the badge becomes a button where it can act.

The generalisation: the questions worth taking a phase over are the ones the code can answer, and you cannot tell which those are without asking them. Phase 2 was written as three judgement calls. Two turned out not to be:

• "An artist badge would commit a user to a whole discography" — describing a badge that does not exist. top-results-row renders nothing for an artist and no other site passes entity-type="artist" to the component at all. Artist subscription already had a labelled Follow button.
• "Should a track inside a requested album show something different" — evaporated. It read as noise only while a plus on a track meant nothing; once it means want just this one, the mixed row is the interface working.

The third — whether a track can be requested at all — went the other way and is the more useful lesson. EntityRecording reads like a placeholder and is load-bearing. It would have cost nothing to rule tracks out as unsupported, and Reconciler.tracklistFor has an explicit branch for them whose comment explains that a one-entry expected tracklist is what lets filename matching score a single-track download at all. A feature removed by assumption leaves no trace that it was ever there.

Five more things worth keeping:

• A test that passes on the neutered build is not a test, and the vacuous ones are the negative assertions. "Keeps its click off the card it sits on" asserted that nothing bubbled — free when there is no button, since ?.click() on null is a silent no-op. It passed on the neutered build while its seven neighbours failed. It asserts the click did the thing it was swallowed for as well now. Same family as overflow: hidden permitting programmatic scrolling, and the tell was identical: it could not fail.
• A measured coordinate is stale before it is used. The e2e gesture read a bounding box the moment the search settled; cover art is still arriving then and a card that grows moves the badge, so the click landed on the card and opened the album — reported as a failure to file a request, which is a different bug. A Playwright locator re-resolves and waits for the element to stop moving. Prefer one to mouse.click(x, y) whenever the thing being clicked is in a list that is still loading, which is most lists here.
• A fix moves its own assertions, and that is not churn. Phase 1's spec asserted the badge announced "… is queued for download". A control is named after what activating it does, so two commits later it is "Cancel the request for …". Naming a thing after its state is correct right up until it grows an action.
• An opt-in makes a redundancy visible. The badge could have known which pages have a "Want this" button; instead a call site passes request-mbid or does not, so explore-album-details's header declines in its own template. The rule is greppable and the component has no list of exceptions to go stale.
• Verify a control with the gesture, not with the event. A synthetic MouseEvent does not prove hit-testing, and a .click() on a shadow child does not prove the icon inside it is pointer-events: none. Both were checked with a real mouse (mousemove/mousedown/ mouseup) and a real Tab/Enter before either was believed.