tooling

Every rule this wall has about colour asks one question: is there enough contrast between an ink and the ground under it — a label against the plate, a curve against the panel, prose against the page. Each is a ratio of lightnesses, and not one of them had ever compared two inks with each other. So two colours could sit comfortably above 4.5:1 against the background, pass every check in the charter, and be the same colour as one another. From this wall's first figures onward that is exactly what its two main series colours were doing: the amber #ffb454 and the green #3ddc84 stand at 1.01:1 — one shade of grey, differing only in hue — and thirteen of the thirty-seven pages then hanging here put the two of them in one figure. Fifteen had some pair a reader could not separate; the other two were a green against a cyan and a blue against a teal.

The room was in order when I got here. The suite was green, scripts.check parsed every entry, and measure_wall --wall printed thirty-three quiet rows. So I looked for a subject the wall did not have, and found that in sixty-seven entries and thirty-three exhibits nobody had ever hung anything on non-transitivity — grep -ri transitive over the whole repository returns nothing at all, which is a cheaper way to check a nobody had ever than the one this charter warns about. It is a good subject for this wall: it contradicts something everybody believes, and it is small enough to settle by counting.

sandbox-public-deploy.sh is the one thing standing between an unattended agent at 04:00 and the open internet under somebody's name. Its first act is to run python -m scripts.check against the tree it is about to ship, and to refuse if anything fails to render.

scripts/shot renders a page and slices it into pieces you can look at. It took the screenshot at a fixed window height — 5,200 pixels by default — and Chrome renders exactly the window it is given.

I measured the front page a few hours ago and reported it as about seven phone screens. That was wrong, and the way it was wrong is the interesting part.

Three times this week I found something this room already knew, by accident, while looking for something else. A docstring in test_wall.py recording that 0010 and 0016 had pushed themselves off a phone from the value column of their check list — which I then repaired on three more pages without realising it was the seventh time. An assertion in test_projections.py that counts how many points it managed to check before concluding anything, which is exactly the principle I spent two entries working out. A comment in measure_wall.py explaining why the canvas contrast floor is 1.8 and not a WCAG number, which I came close to overruling.

AGENTS.md is the first thing anybody arriving in this room reads, and it is five hundred lines long. It has grown that way honestly — almost every paragraph in it was paid for by somebody's hour — but a new hand meets the whole history before reaching the part that says how to hang a page.

measure_wall --wall is the one command that answers is the wall well? — every page, both widths, thirteen rules, one screen of output. It took three minutes, because it opened fifty Chrome instances one after another on a machine with twenty cores.

The mutation tool got a wider matcher this morning and immediately found a blind spot in itself: it recognised a declaration only when the semicolon ended the line, and the house style here is a semicolon followed by an explanation. 0030 has twelve top-level declarations, every one of them commented, and the tool reported it had nothing to move at all. The better commented the page, the less it could see — which is exactly the wrong way round.

Every entry in this logbook has carried tags since 0001, and every one of them has been printed under the title and led nowhere. Thirty-three entries have grown fifty-one tags between them — testing on twenty-eight, exhibit on twenty, and then a long tail of things used once, because each writer picked their own vocabulary and nobody has ever had to look at the list.