Making a lane one row cost the thing a row was for. A clip stopped being a row,
so there was no longer any way to open a clip and see what was inside it, and
the inside of a drawing — the most ordinary thing in the document — became
reachable only by opening it as its own tab. This is that capability back,
from the root timeline, down as far as it goes.
An expanded lane opens exactly ONE clip: the selected one. Its own keys, then
the lanes and nodes of the symbol it places, then theirs, each mapped into this
ruler by the recursive walk that was already there. Twelve clips in a lane
still cost one row, and inspection costs one branch rather than twelve.
Two things that only showed up once it ran. The portal is chosen by the whole
LINEAGE of the selection and not by the selected id: selecting a shape inside
the clip — or the end of its span — is still working inside that clip, and
matching the id alone shut the portal the instant anything under it was
touched. And selecting now waits for the pointer to come UP, because selecting
on the way down re-drew the timeline before the gesture had said anything: it
shut the portal holding the lane being dragged INTO, out from under the
pointer.
A HELD clip opens too, which the old row walk never did either. `source-time`
is nil for a hold, so the walk stopped there and the contents of every drawing
were invisible from here. Its rows are shown across the hold — which is when
the node is on screen — and marked `:unmapped?`: no keys, and no draggable
edges, because a frozen clock gives no frame inside it a place on this ruler.
Refusing to place the keys is the honest half; refusing to show the rows was
not.
Double-clicking a clip opens the symbol it places as a tab, as double-clicking
the same symbol in the pool does. That was already written and had never once
run: the track captures the pointer for a slide, so the click and double-click
that follow are delivered to the track and never to the block. The track now
resolves them itself. Fixing the delivery exposed two more: `symbol/lineage`
reported a `parent cycle` for any id in a symbol with NO nodes, because a
one-element chain is longer than zero nodes — and opening a symbol left the
selection pointing into the symbol being left, which the breadcrumb and the
inspector then tried to resolve. The editor unmounted. Both are fixed where
they were wrong, and the browser test asserts the editor is still standing
afterwards.
Audio is a clip in a lane like everything else. A dropped sound lands in one
and is trimmed and moved by the same commands; a lane holds picture or sound
and not both, which is the explicit capability the model asked for rather than
a guess per frame. The refusal lives in the commands and not only in
validation, because placement claims time: `blank` would have deleted the
sound to make room for the picture and left a perfectly valid document behind.
What is in a lane of the open symbol is drawn as a lane; what is nested inside
a placed symbol is still flattened by `audio-tracks`, so no sound is on two
rows.
Everything that enters the timeline now enters a lane: a converted take, a
symbol brought in from another project, a sound. One rule answers where —
`lane-destination` — and every symbol is born with a lane for it to answer
with. An unaimed drop fills an EMPTY lane rather than taking an occupied one
nobody pointed at, because the alternative is trimming away what was there to
make room for what was dropped.
Shift during a clip-body drag means the other intention: put this node INSIDE
the symbol the clip under the pointer places, through `nest/move-node`, which
is what keeps the world transform and the root timing. Overlap cannot say
which of the two is meant — dropping on occupied time already means claiming
it — so the person says, and a label by the pointer says it back. The label
asks `nest/move-refusal`, the same check the command makes, so it cannot
promise what the drop would refuse. Today it refuses more than it allows:
both clips have to be on screen at one frame, which two clips in one lane
never are, and a held destination has no clock to move through at all.
`docs/lane-nesting-notes.md` argues that the second refusal is stronger than
the facts require and says what would settle it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A lane was a drawing lane: the only thing that could go in one was a one-frame
held cel, and every other symbol instance stayed a permanent root row of its
own. Those are not two kinds of timing, they are one kind with two creation
policies. `lane/place-symbol` drops any library symbol in as a clip that plays
naturally at speed one, `lane/adopt` moves an instance that is already in the
document into a lane keeping its source, span, playback and corrections, and
`append-drawing`/`overwrite-drawing` keep being the policy that makes a new
empty symbol a one-frame hold. The child shape they produce is the same.
Both new commands claim their interval through `blank` before they write, so
the partition rule is unchanged and unduplicated: placing into occupied lane
time trims, removes or splits the incumbents, and a lane still never stores an
overlap. Real compositing overlap is another lane, where the order is explicit.
Creating a symbol with nothing aimed now makes a lane and a clip in it instead
of a loose root instance, and a pool drop prefers an explicitly targeted lane,
then the selected one, and makes a lane only when there is neither. That is
what stops the row-per-symbol growth coming back in through the drop path, and
it is why `add-lane` now takes a z in front of the existing root nodes and
calls what it makes a "lane" rather than "drawings".
The timeline learned the two gestures that a generic lane needs. A clip body
dragged over another lane's track previews there as a dashed block and lands
through `::adopt-in-lane`; the track is found with `elementsFromPoint` and its
selection read back off the element, because a pointer capture does not
retarget. A pool drop over an existing lane previews as a dashed clip inside
that lane instead of a temporary new row that appears and then vanishes --
which also needed the drag-leave check to be geometric, since inserting the
preview changes the element under the pointer and Chromium then reports a leave
with no related target. Lanes are renameable from their label, by double-click,
F2, or the pencil, through `::rename-node`.
`symbol/lane-cels` is `symbol/lane-clips`, and the vocabulary table in the
handoff now separates the two words it had merged: a clip is an instance in a
lane, and a cel is specifically the one-frame held source that drawing creation
makes. Keeping `cel` for the policy is what lets the lane stop being about
drawings at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Constant, ramp, and return offsets now append ordinary channel layers to a lane or cel in explicit owner frames. The inspector exposes the commands as one undoable transaction, shows conflicts, and offers removal or retry while preserving generated bases through regeneration.
Ordered-stack compatibility is shared by validation, conflict reporting, and regeneration, including adjacent replacement coverage. Cel-sheet gaps and headers select their lane, so commands cannot fall through to another column's stale selection.
437 tests, 5,804 assertions; both browser flows; 56 Django tests; optimized frontend build.
The cel sheet is a second projection of the same lane rows: frames run down, lanes run across, and each occupied cell carries the timeline cel's exact selection address. The shared action strip proves the point in the browser test by selecting a cell and issuing the existing hold command.
Before exposing that second entrance, fix the boundary mistakes it revealed. Nested commands now convert the open playhead through their enclosing instance path. Overwrite composes blanking with non-rippling placement as one transaction. Picture-rate and pose sampling select only the generated base frame while hand corrections retain the node's authored frame. Stack validation follows covering replacement layers so a document accepted by the validator cannot throw solely because a later offset sees a different shape.
429 tests, 5,767 assertions; both browser flows; 56 Django tests; optimized frontend build.
Four words had accumulated for a node that puts a symbol inside another symbol.
`instance` was the document's, from the model. `placement` was the stage and
export work's. `occurrence` came in with the lane model. `exposure` came in with
me, because it is what an animator would say. Three bodies of work each brought
a word and none of them retired anybody else's, which is how you get a codebase
that reads like three people describing the same object over each other.
It is a CEL. One drawing, held for some duration. `cel` was already the view's
word — `.tl-cel`, the cel strip — so choosing it was also the smallest change,
and the app already says "drawing" for the content, which is what frees the word
up: historically a cel IS the celluloid with the drawing on it, and that sense
has somewhere else to live here.
instance the `:kind`. The general thing, anywhere in a document.
cel an instance in a lane. UI labels, command names, prose.
lane the group with `:layout :sequence`.
drawing the content a cel names.
placement kept ONLY for where a node sits — `nest/placement` and the
transform that puts a face on the stage. Retired as a noun for the
node itself.
occurrence gone.
AND IT SETTLES A COLLISION I SHOULD HAVE SEEN EARLIER. `:time :expose` already
existed and means something else entirely: how many frames each step of a
subtree lasts, which is what shooting on twos is. Had the block been called an
exposure too, `node/expose`, `clock/exposed-frame` and `subs/render ::exposure`
would have been permanently confusable with it. Choosing `cel` lets the word
`exposure` keep the thing it actually names, and every remaining use of it in
`src` is now that one.
`:layout :sequence` stays as the field, and it is the one place two words are
kept deliberately: the layout names the RULE — children follow one another and
may not overlap — and a group carrying it is called a lane. `node/lane?` says so
where the two meet.
The second view is traditionally the exposure sheet. It will be the CEL SHEET,
for one vocabulary.
Renamed with a script and then read, because a blind pass does real damage: it
produced "an cel" thirty times, renamed the `::exposure` sub that is about the
`:expose` grid, and turned an "exposure grid" into a "cel grid" in two
docstrings. All three classes are fixed. `arthur.domain.sequence` is now
`arthur.domain.lane`, which is what its test file was already called.
424 tests, 5,749 assertions, and both browser flows — `test/browser/lane.mjs`,
renamed too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Trim, move and blank, and the decision they all three walked into: is the shot's
length authored, or derived from what is in it?
AUTHORED. `:frames` is the symbol's window — how long the shot IS — and the
occupied extent of its lanes is a different fact, read off the occurrences. A
command grows the window when the caller says `:grow-symbol` and NEVER shrinks
it, so blanking the end of a shot leaves a shot with empty frames at the end.
That is a true statement about what somebody authored, and the alternative is
deleting the last drawing and quietly shortening the film. `finish` had the
right behaviour by accident — `(apply max (:frames sym) ...)` — and now says
which number is which: `needed` is where the occurrences reach, `:frames` is
what was authored, and the only thing that makes the second follow the first is
a caller asking.
The three commands turned out to be one piece of geometry, which is `split`'s.
A `:span` is in the occurrence's OWN frames and `:time` says where those land in
the lane, so moving an edge of an exposure is ONE WRITE to `:span` and `:time`
and `:playback` are never touched. `local` and `edged` are the whole of it, and
split now goes through them too.
trim narrows one edge and moves nothing else. Lengthening is `extend-hold`,
which carries a ripple policy and a shot-length policy because it needs
them; letting trim grow as well would give one gesture two sets of
rules and a way to overlap its neighbour.
move one write to `:time :at`, and a destination that would overlap is
REFUSED rather than rippled. Moving a drawing and re-timing the ones
around it are different intentions, and a move that pushed the rest
would be the second wearing the first one's name. Clear the room first.
blank leaves a gap and does not close it. Wholly inside the range goes,
overlapping an end is trimmed to it, spanning the range is split — the
one case that needs an ID, and it asks for one instead of inventing it.
Because the source clock is untouched, trimming the front of a playing insert
starts it LATER INTO its animation rather than restarting it, which is the
difference between trimming and slipping and the reason they stay two commands.
The test samples the frames it kept and asserts they show what they showed.
Blanking leaves the drawings in the library. A lane does not own its content,
and a drawing whose last exposure is gone is still a drawing somebody made.
Overwrite is now `blank` then `place` and needs no policy argument of its own,
which is why it still is not one.
424 tests, 5,749 assertions. The browser flow trims an exposure at the playhead,
moves it into the gap that made, blanks it, and checks the shot is still as long
as it was authored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Everything could only be added to the end, because `append` computed its own
position — the max end of the lane — and so had no opinion to state. Insert is
not a new command; it is the argument that function was missing. `:at` takes a
lane frame or `:end`, `:end` is the position where nothing has to move, and
appending stops being a separate operation from inserting. New, reused and
duplicated drawings all take it, because there was only ever one placement rule.
Placing ripples: occurrences at or after the position move later by the new
exposure's duration, and `:keep` against `:grow-symbol` still decides what
happens at the shot's end. OVERWRITE is deliberately not a policy argument yet.
Taking frames away from the occurrence already there is TRIMMING, and an
argument whose second value is unimplemented is worse than an argument that is
not there. A position strictly inside an existing exposure refuses and names
`split`, rather than splitting on the quiet: one command performing two is how
a command stops being predictable.
Then split, which turned out to cost almost nothing, and that is the
interesting part. The two pieces keep ONE `:time` and differ only in `:span`.
The right piece's own frames therefore carry on exactly where the left's
stopped, so its source clock, its keys and its corrections go on meaning what
they meant: a held drawing holds the same frame either side of the cut, and a
playing insert plays through it without a seam. There is no arithmetic on
in-points to get wrong, and no shot-length question, since the pieces occupy
the frames the one exposure occupied. The test samples every frame before and
after and asserts the picture is identical — for a hold, for an exposure with a
correction of its own, and for a playing insert.
That is not a clever split. It is `:span` being in the node's OWN coordinates,
which was decided long before there were lanes, paying for something it was not
designed for. The same property is why extending a hold leaves lane keys alone.
Both new commands act at the playhead, which needed `lane-frame` — the symbol's
frame as a frame of the lane's own time, nil through a stepped or looping lane
where one is not the other. Nil refuses; it does not snap to a nearby frame.
Two smaller things found while doing it. `placeable` promised "a whole lane
frame" in its refusal and then accepted 2.5, so both it and `split` now require
an integer, as `extend-hold` already did for its delta. And `lane-end` is
private: `:end` is the only way to ask for it.
401 tests, 5,612 assertions. The browser flow now splits an exposure at the
playhead and puts a drawing in the gap, and checks that six exposures are still
one row.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The model's whole claim is that content and its occurrences are different
things, and until now nothing in the editor could tell them apart: you could
make a drawing and time it, but not expose one drawing twice, and so never find
out whether an edit arrives in two places. That is the first proof obligation in
the lane model and it was the one the commands could not reach.
Three commands, and the distinctions between them are the point:
reuse another occurrence of the same drawing. A decision to share,
made on purpose, because sharing discovered later — when an edit
turns up somewhere you did not expect — is the bad version.
duplicate a copy of the drawing, appended, for when what is on screen is
the starting point for the next one.
make unique this occurrence gets a private copy; the others keep sharing.
The undo of reuse, and refused when nothing else uses the
drawing: a copy nobody asked for is a second identical symbol in
the library for no reason a person could see.
Duplicate copies the CONTENT and not the exposure. Its new occurrence is a plain
one-frame hold, not a copy of the source occurrence's transform or corrections,
because those belong to that use of the drawing — carrying them over would make
duplicating a drawing quietly duplicate the treatment of one exposure of it.
A copy is SHALLOW by default and keeps its references to other symbols, so a
head built out of reusable eyes still uses those eyes. `:deep? true` copies
everything it places with new ids throughout. The lane model asks for both and
says why: never promise decoupling while leaving the edited object shared, and
only the deep copy can keep that promise. `bring/symbols` already did the
reachability walk and the id remapping, so the deep copy is that function
pointed at its own clip.
`node/sources` was still being read as a SET at five call sites, each with a
comment about a lane that cuts between several drawings — the keyed source that
no longer exists. An occurrence names one symbol, so they now ask `node/source`,
and `placed-frame` answers with `:symbol` rather than `:of`, which was the last
echo of the retired field name.
To let the commands use `clip/free-id` and the copy machinery, the lane's own
validation moved from `domain/sequence` to `domain/symbol`, which is where it
belonged anyway: a sequence is the one composition rule a node map carries, and
it now sits beside the parent and stencil checks rather than in the namespace
that happens to build lanes. That also breaks the cycle — sequence can require
clip and bring, and nothing below it requires sequence. Preconditions still
check only the LANE's shape: refusing an exposure edit over an unrelated defect
elsewhere in the symbol would be this command answering for a part of the
document it never touches.
The cel strip gains reuse, duplicate and make unique, the last shown only where
the selected exposure actually shares its drawing. Drawing on twos is also now
under test: exposure length is the cadence, the lane's transform has its own
clock, and it still moves on every frame — stepping it would be the cel cadence
leaking into continuous motion.
397 tests, 5,561 assertions. `test/browser/sequence.mjs` drives the three new
commands through the real editor and checks that three exposures are still one
row.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A lane's drawings were going to be one instance whose source was a KEYED
channel: frame 0 says `:drawing-a`, frame 4 says `:drawing-b`, and the cels of
a row are that channel's keys. Two things followed from it, and both were
wrong.
The first is that playback meant whichever shape the channel happened to have.
A framed source played its symbol; a keyed source froze the selected frame.
So `node/placed-at` read animation out of storage, and adding an ordinary key
to a still turned it into an animation — the last-key bug, which was not a bug
in the code so much as the rule working as written. But WHICH drawing is used
and HOW time runs inside it are independent questions, and all four combinations
are ordinary: hold one drawing, play one animation, cut between held drawings,
cut between playing ones.
So an occurrence names one symbol in `:source {:symbol ...}` and says how its
source time advances in `:playback {:in :speed :end}` — `source = in + speed *
f`, a hold being speed 0, with `:stop`, `:hold` or `:loop` at the end named
rather than guessed. `node/placed-frame` samples it forwards, which works for
holds too, and `node/source-time` is the separate, invertible edit map, nil
where inversion is meaningless. The two were one function before, and a hold
had to lie about one of them.
The second is that a keyed source only looked necessary because an occurrence
was assumed to need a ROW. It does not. A lane is a group with `:layout
:sequence`, its occurrences are ordinary instances in the same flat node map,
and `timeline/rows` draws them as cel blocks on the lane's own row: twelve
exposures, one row, each cel still separately selectable and addressable. The
vertical growth that justified the keyed source is a presentation question, and
it is answered in the view.
`arthur.domain.sequence` holds the first commands over that shape — add lane,
append drawing, extend hold — each one history step, each refusing rather than
half-applying. Extending a hold leaves the lane's keys at their authored times,
because you are adjusting drawings underneath timed motion; a correction owned
by an occurrence travels with it. Ownership does that work, so no key needs a
flag saying what it follows. Ripple past the symbol's end is refused with the
frame count it would need, and `:extent :grow-symbol` is the caller saying yes.
`clip/blank` no longer carries `:subjects {} :features {} :groups {}`. Empty
maps write no leaf, so a blank document could not survive its own round trip —
`leaf/leaves` promises exactness and was the only honest side of that.
Documents are schema 3. A version 2 document is not read; nothing here converts
one. `docs/lane-model.md` is the design, and says which of its parts are built.
392 tests, 5,525 assertions, and `test/browser/sequence.mjs` drives the editor
through create, hold, explicit overflow and undo.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A project is only ever at /p/<id>/<slug>; / is the index of the projects
you own or edit. Every project has an owner, who can name editors;
anyone with the link can view. Every edit saves itself, one request in
flight at a time, as a patch of the leaves that changed, and a websocket
(channels + daphne) carries presence and each committed write to
everyone else in the project. The first write to a leaf wins, and the
loser is told.
Undo is per person: a step undoes only if the leaves it touched still
hold what it left, so it never takes a collaborator's work with it.
Named snapshots replace saving, and restore as an ordinary write.
An empty symbol now survives the leaf round trip with `:nodes {}`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This project lists every symbol in the document and the video it uses or was
given this session, each with a frame from its proxy as a thumbnail. All
assets lists every upload on the server and every other saved project's
symbols, from a new /api/symbols that reads symbol leaf paths. Every row is a
drag source (symbol:, import:, footage:). Uploading no longer runs straight
into detection; it lands in the project's media.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Step 9. The tier split was the work; Django was the easy half.
Tier 1 — the authored scene — is the document, and it is addressed as
independently versioned leaves rather than saved whole, so one vertex drag
cannot clobber a collaborator's keying. `domain/leaf` is the document as
path -> value; `domain/wire` puts it on the wire as transit, because JSON
has neither integer map keys nor keywords and a save would quietly turn
`{0 v}` into `{"0" v}`.
Tier 2 — the dense channel blocks — is content-addressed by a hash over
every input, with the detector version inside every key through the
analysis the block descriptor names. `flow/address`'s `block-knobs` is the
invalidation table, and `address-test` does not trust it: it re-freezes the
take once per knob and asserts the biconditional, that a block's bytes
changed if and only if its key changed. That found `brow-pos` not depending
on `contour-avg` — the brow ring is smoothed, the raise is not.
Tier 3 — frames and audio — is served by the hash of its bytes out of the
same store. A manifest now names frames and carries a URL for each, so the
frame layout stopped being a shared secret between a shell script and a
ClojureScript namespace, and the `?v=` cache-buster went with it: a blob's
name is the hash of its contents, so a stale copy is not a thing that can
happen. The synthetic take's `audio.wav` moved to `static/arthur/` — an
asset the project owns, not an extraction that churns.
The server verifies rather than trusting a name it was handed: it
recomputes every key from the descriptor stored beside it, refuses an
analysis that declares no detector version, and refuses a document naming
blocks it does not hold. It hashes the descriptor TEXT, because JS prints
an integral double as `1` and Python as `1.0`, and a scheme where both ends
re-render the numbers disagrees on the first parameter that happens to be
whole.
Two loose ends from step 8 closed on the way. `pack` no longer takes a
`(track, frame)` predicate whose call sites each re-derived a feature from
an index — every track names the feature it follows, which deleted five
hand-maintained mappings. And `:dev-http` is gone: Django serves the page,
shadow-cljs only builds into the staticfiles tree.
227 CLJS tests, 31 Django tests, green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two bugs in the browser suite, both dating from step 7 adding eyes, brows and
teeth to the stage.
The shut-mouth check asked for exactly one tone on the whole canvas. That was
true when the stage held nothing but a mouth; since step 7 every frame carries
five or six tones whatever the mouth is doing, so the check failed on a correct
picture. Ask instead whether :mouth-dark is on the stage at all: nothing else
carries that tone, so it answers "is the interior drawn" without needing to know
where the mouth is. freeze_test already got this same rescoping; its browser twin
did not.
The failure went unnoticed because close() raced Chrome's own profile writes and
threw ENOTEMPTY out of main's `finally`, past the summary line and the
process.exit that reports the failure count. The suite therefore exited 2 and
printed no verdict whether it passed or failed. Teardown is now allowed to fail
out loud without taking the exit code with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01B87NVmiU36qQmN9gmFYnJ9
