The scheduled refresh on 24 August took the star catalogue from 68 388 rows to
447 410 and from 820 kB to 5.4 MB. No branch in the seven-PR chain had ever seen
it -- they were all cut before -- so nothing tested the combination until the
chain landed on main. Two things broke there.
The neighbour ring named Barnard's Star, and the spec clicked it by name. The
refresh is a Gaia DR3 merge that carries the same physical star twice: Proxima
Centauri at 1.296 pc and Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696 at 1.302 pc are one star,
as are Barnard's Star at 1.824 and Gaia DR3 4472832130942575872 at 1.828. The
extra row pushed Barnard's from fourth-nearest to fifth, off a ring that shows
four. The ring is doing exactly what it says; the spec was asserting the
catalogue's contents. It now reads whichever star the ring names and follows
that one, so the next refresh cannot demote it.
Four other assertions were timing out at Playwright's default five seconds --
not because anything was wrong, but because every one of these tests boots that
catalogue and the suite boots several at once on a software rasterizer. The
heavy waits already carried explicit longer timeouts; the default now matches.
Capping the worker count would have worked too, and would have cost every run
the time whether or not the machine needed it.
npm test 607/607, npx playwright test 16/16 at the default worker count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
A system view could say everything about the star it was inside and nothing
about where that star was. The four nearest catalogue stars are now named
around the edge of it, each with its distance, each a button that flies there
— so a chain of neighbours can be walked without pulling back out to the field
between hops.
These are bearings, not sky positions, and that is the one deliberate
compromise here. A true direction was tried first and does not work: at this
field of view the visible cone is about 30 degrees, so on average one
neighbour in fifteen falls inside the frame — measured, not guessed, at one
label of four in Sol and none at all after a small orbit. What survives the
ring is the half of the direction a viewer can act on, which way to turn to
face it, and the ring reads as instrument rather than as scene because it sits
at a fixed radius. Real distance was never an option: Proxima is 268 000 AU
from Sol, thirteen far planes out, so the distance goes on the type line.
Proximity is answered by a new pure module rather than by a scan. A uniform
grid over the catalogue answers both "the k nearest to this star" and "every
star within n parsecs", the second being what the jump-link graph in the next
PR is built from — one scan per node, and the quadratic would show. Its spec
pins the grid against a brute-force sweep of a pseudo-random cloud, because a
spatial index is an optimisation and never a different answer.
Where the ring meets the HUD, the HUD wins: placement is given the boxes the
readout, the strip and the object card occupy, and slides a name along the
ring until it clears them, or drops it rather than print it half hidden. That
rule is a pure function with its own spec.
Four defects found while verifying this, three of them older than it:
The dock's flex column was pointer-events-auto and as wide as its strip, so
an invisible band above the strip swallowed every click in it — including,
but not only, a neighbour's. The column is transparent now and each surface
opts back in.
The ring was sized against the frame's height alone, which on a phone held
upright put it a viewport and a half wide: no neighbour was reachable on any
portrait screen. It is sized against the shorter side.
Picking a search result reopened the readout, which on a narrow viewport is a
sheet over most of the scene — reopening it onto whatever was just flown to.
Below sm it now folds away.
A selectable label's two lines are adjacent spans, so it announced as
"Sirius2.64 pc"; it carries an explicit label saying what it does.
Verified: build clean, 558/558 unit, 7/7 end-to-end including a new spec that
flies Sol to Barnard's Star by its label, design detector clean, screenshots
at 1440x900 and 390x844 in Sol and Proxima Centauri, and the keyboard path
walked: both names are in the tab order, focusable, with the accent ring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5