feat(§8.12/§8.3): main-view Ask cuts an edit branch and runs the question there (v0.54.0)
The AI "Ask" affordance (selection tooltip + prompt bar) had no response surface on an entry's canonical `main` view: RFCView renders the human- discussion panel there, not the chat panel, so a chat turn posted from the reading view had nowhere to render — asking-while-reading silently did nothing. AI chat is an editing activity (a turn can emit <change> proposals) and only runs on an edit branch. Option B: when Ask is invoked from main, transparently cut an edit branch via the same dispatch as Start Contributing (promote-to-branch for active, start-edit-branch for super-draft; idempotent — reuse an existing edit branch), navigate onto it so the chat panel mounts, and run the question (text + selected quote) as the branch's first chat turn once its view and main_thread_id resolve. The turn fires from the message-load effect's continuation (not a parallel effect) so a late message load can't clobber the optimistic turn; a live ref keeps the latest submitChatTurn closure in reach. Degrades gracefully: signed-out → login; a viewer who can't contribute has the cut rejected server-side and the error surfaced (no spurious branch); asking from a branch already, and Flag on main (human discussion thread), unchanged. Frontend-only; the branch chat endpoints already work on a branch. SPEC §8.3 records the behavior; new RFCView unit tests + an e2e spec cover the flow. backend 677 / frontend 66 / e2e 5 green. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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