human-experience-filter-art/sessions/0024/SESSION-0024.0-TRANSCRIPT-2026-06-26T21-12--2026-06-27T15-23.md

Session 0024.0 — Transcript

App: human-experience-filter-art Start: 2026-06-26T21-12 (PST) Type: planning-and-executing Posture: yolo Claude-Session: e0aea412-c853-4236-9536-cfd85cbc4975 End: 2026-06-27T15-23 (PST) Status: FINALIZED.

Started as writing-plans; transitioned to planning-and-executing (yolo) when the operator approved the plan and asked to execute in-session.

Next /goal

Build scrub-driven altitude transitions per the approved design at docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-27-scrub-driven-altitude-transitions-design.md: knob position continuously scrubs the morph currentTime + crossfades adjacent scale audio (hold-partway, reversible, re-roll on fresh approach, wheel auto-scrubs one altitude). Phase 1: interaction on current morphs. Phase 2: re-bake all 154 morphs all-intra for smooth seeking + re-push LFS. Writing-plans → executing-plans in a fresh session. (Operator was handed a ready-to-paste prompt.)

Launch prompt

Fix altitude/video transition: video shouldn't switch when changing altitudes; good zoom transition for every video combination; video must not change after zooming to a new altitude.

Operator refinements during orientation:

• Lock per altitude until the altitude is changed — on arrival, pick the clip once and keep it; no secondary swap, no re-roll while parked.
• Choose the destination clip BEFORE transitioning, then play the appropriate morph footage. We need morph footage for ALL transitions between ALL videos in adjacent altitudes (both directions).

Plan

Anchor: leaf change extending player design.md §3 (scale navigation & zoom transitions) + content-pipeline. Scope reality: clip-pair-keyed morph system — 154 morph clips (77 adjacent video pairs × 2 directions) up from 5 per-edge morphs; touches the bake pipeline (build_pool_manifest.py), the ring contract (player/ring.py), manifest/transition schema (simulator/clips.py), the /api/ring/advance endpoint (simulator/app.py), the frontend advance()/lock (simulator/static/app.js), and a new Playwright E2E tier. Writing-plans session: author ONE plan, stop at the review gate.

Deferred decisions

• The dial-needle sweep (synced to the morph) is verified working in Chromium + WebKit both directions, but the operator's real Safari still showed it "not working" — root cause likely stale cached app.js (Safari refresh confusion), never fully confirmed. Moot: the scrub-driven redesign supersedes the dial interaction entirely. The sweep commit merged to main as an interim improvement.
• git-LFS front-proxy upload limit (HTTP 413 on the 68 MB base): resolved by transcoding rather than raising the server limit — the operator couldn't locate the front-proxy VM (35.238.203.16, nginx, not in any gcloud project I could reach) this session. Raising that limit is a deferred infra task.

Arc

Pre-state. Altitude dial (PR #18, s0016) navigated a 5-scale ring with 5 per-edge morphs (scale-primary→primary). Landing picked a random pool member, but advance() played the edge morph (ending on the primary) then did a jarring fade-to-black secondary swap to the random member. Operator: "video switches when changing altitudes; must not change after zooming."

What we built (writing-plans → executing, planning-and-executing).

1. Orientation + clarification: lock-per-altitude; pick destination first then play the matching morph; morphs for all adjacent video pairs both directions (154); multi-detent chains through each altitude.
2. Wrote + reviewed the plan (docs/superpowers/plans/2026-06-27-altitude-clip-pair-morph-lock.md); operator approved + asked to execute in-session → switched to yolo.
3. Executed TDD: per-clip-pair manifest + member-pair baking; Transition/morph_for/ resolve_move in player/ring.py; resolved_move_to_dict; /api/ring/advance from_clip_id; frontend pick→morph→lock (no secondary swap); regenerated 154 morphs. pytest 302 passed; new Playwright E2E tier 2 passed.
4. Media graduation: operator flagged that "sample" media is actually the experience — committed bases + audio + 154 morphs (~526 MB) via git-LFS → Gitea LFS store. Hit HTTP 413 on the 68 MB coast_birdrock base at the front proxy; transcoded it 68→22 MB (re-baked its 16 morphs) to ship. Pushed; merged to main.
5. Polish loop on the dial/transition timing (sweep → removed live drag pre-move), then operator reframed: knob position should drive the transition (scrub), not the dial follow the video. Brainstormed + wrote the scrub-driven design spec; handed off a prompt to build it in a fresh session.

Recurring lesson re-confirmed: the operator's mid-session "no transitions" was a stale uvicorn (served new app.js from disk but old in-memory API returning the deleted old-named morph files → 404). Fix = restart uvicorn with the venv python.

Cut state. main (528fb5c) has the shipped feature, LFS media, E2E tier, both the plan and the scrub design spec. No content repo → plan archived in-repo under docs/ (gap flagged). Simulator is localhost-only (no PPE/prod) → no §9 deploy stage; verified green locally. Next increment (scrub) deferred to a fresh session.