tauction

I'll take a look at what's in the directory first, then set up the repo.

Done — the repo exists at https://github.com/dreeves/tauction (private, empty).

What I couldn't do: connect this local directory to it. Your git-guard.sh hook blocks git init, and the permission rules also deny cloning (including via gh repo clone), so I stopped there rather than route around your guardrails. To wire it up yourself:

git init && git remote add origin https://github.com/dreeves/tauction.git

If you'd like it public instead of private, that's one command too: gh repo edit dreeves/tauction --visibility public. And if you want me to handle local git setup in future sessions, you'd need to loosen the git-guard hook or add an allow rule for git init/git remote.

Let me first peek at that Google Sheet to see if it's publicly readable and whether it has any structure yet — that determines the architecture.

Now a test harness that stubs Apps Script services so I can actually exercise the backend logic before you deploy it:

Backend logic checks out — all 63 assertions pass, including the reveal/lock edge cases. Now the frontend:

The prototype is built and tested. Here's where things landed:

On "do we really need Apps Script?" — I tested it directly: unauthenticated writes to the Sheets API return 401 even on your world-editable sheet (Google requires OAuth for all programmatic writes; incognito-editing works only because that's Google's own frontend). Reads of a public sheet *are* CORS-open from any browser, but for writes we need exactly one Google-authorized piece, and a paste-once Apps Script is the lightest one. Everything else is static files.

What's in the repo now:

• [index.html](index.html), [app.js](app.js), [style.css](style.css) — the whole UI per your spec: auction slug field that rewrites the URL as you type, fixed-@ name field, 80-char bid field, the two reveal-condition radios (N bidders with min-1 numeric field / roster of usernames with a chip-adding UI), status messages with splur, results table on reveal, 5-second polling.
• [apps-script/Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs) — the API. It creates its own auctions and bids tabs on first use, so the sheet needs zero prep (structure was my call, per your note). Re-bids overwrite; settings are last-write-wins; everything locks at reveal; non-roster people can bid without delaying the reveal (matching your sealedbids doc).
• [404.html](404.html) + [CNAME](CNAME) — GitHub Pages tricks so /tau-style paths work on tauction.dreev.es.
• [README.md](README.md) — setup + behavior docs.

Slugs are particle names — root visits redirect to an unused one (/tau, /muon, /glueball, /strange...), with numeric suffixes if all 51 are ever taken. One wording tweak: I used "Got bids from @a, waiting on @b" in roster mode (your spec said "for", but the sealedbids doc and grammar both say "from" — one-word change if you disagree).

Testing: I couldn't test against the real sheet (the script isn't deployed yet), so I built two harnesses: 63 assertions against the Code.gs logic running on a stubbed in-memory spreadsheet, and 27 jsdom assertions driving the actual index.html/app.js against that same fake backend — covering the two-browser reveal-via-polling flow, roster mode, slug editing, sanitization, and HTML-in-bids rendering inert. All pass.

Your moves (details in the README):

1. Sheet → Extensions → Apps Script → paste in Code.gs, run authorize once, deploy as Web app (Execute as: Me, access: Anyone).
2. Paste the /exec URL into the API constant at the top of [app.js:6](app.js#L6), then commit and push.
3. DNS: CNAME tauction → dreeves.github.io.

If you drop the /exec URL here, I'll run live smoke tests against it before you even touch the frontend config — and once you've pushed, I can enable GitHub Pages on the repo via gh api so you don't have to click through settings.

CNAME done — nice, so once the script is deployed and the repo is pushed with Pages enabled, it's live. Let me write up the sheet-write recipe properly in the README as a reusable, click-by-click guide:

Done — the README now has a self-contained appendix, [Appendix: making any Google Sheet writable from a static site](README.md#appendix-making-any-google-sheet-writable-from-a-static-site), written as a general recipe rather than tauction-specific instructions. It covers:

1. Why it's needed at all — reads of link-shared sheets are CORS-open (with the exact export URL), but all writes require OAuth even on world-editable sheets; API keys are read-only by design.
2. Create the script — a minimal copy-pasteable doGet/doPost skeleton, plus the non-obvious constraints: no custom HTTP statuses/headers from Apps Script, LockService for concurrent writes, setNumberFormat('@') so Sheets doesn't mangle 007 into 7.
3. Authorize — the exact click path through the "Google hasn't verified this app" scare screen and why it appears.
4. Deploy — the two settings that matter, especially "Anyone" vs "Anyone with Google account" (the latter silently breaks fetch with an HTML login page), and a curl -sL sanity check (the -L matters because of the 302 to script.googleusercontent.com).
5. Calling from the browser — the CORS fine print: Apps Script can't answer preflights, so POST bodies must be plain strings with *no* Content-Type header; setting application/json breaks everything mysteriously.
6. The #1 gotcha — editing code does nothing to /exec until you do Manage deployments → edit → New version (and how "New deployment" mints a different URL, which you don't want).
7. Limits & alternatives — latency, quotas, the Google-Form append-only hack, and when to graduate to a service account.

The tauction-specific setup section now just links to the appendix for the details.

Still on your plate: deploy Code.gs (steps 2–3 of the appendix), paste the /exec URL into [app.js:6](app.js#L6), and commit/push. Then I can enable GitHub Pages via gh api — and if you drop the /exec URL here first, I'll smoke-test the live API with curl before you wire it into the frontend.

Great question — it's the exact confusion the README should preempt, so I'll answer and then tighten the doc.

The reconciliation: you're walking through two different doors.

When you edit in an incognito window, you're using *Google's own Sheets frontend*. For a sheet set to "anyone with the link can edit," the link itself is the credential — a capability URL. The docs app mints an anonymous session for you behind the scenes (that's why you show up as "Anonymous Wombat" in the presence indicators — you *do* have a session, just not an account), and it talks to Google's private, undocumented sync endpoints using its own cookies and XSRF tokens. That machinery is first-party only.

The public API at sheets.googleapis.com is a separate door with a different bouncer. It has no concept of an anonymous principal: every write request must carry an OAuth token identifying *some* account, and only then does Google check whether that account has edit rights under the sharing settings. "Anyone with the link can edit" never enters the picture, because the request dies at authentication, before authorization is even considered — hence the 401 CREDENTIALS_MISSING we saw, not a 403. API keys don't bridge the gap either: they identify a billing project, not a person, so Google restricts them to reads of public data.

Could you, in principle, replicate what the incognito browser does — grab anonymous session cookies and speak the private protocol? Yes, technically, but it's undocumented, brittle, bot-protected, and changes without notice. Not a foundation to build on. So the practical statement stands: *third-party code* can't write without OAuth, and the Apps Script is the cheapest way to be a first party.

I've updated the appendix to bake this in, since it's the obvious "wait, but…" for anyone following the recipe:

TL;DR: two different doors. Your incognito edit goes through Google's own Sheets frontend, where the link itself acts as the credential — the app mints an anonymous session behind the scenes (hence "Anonymous Wombat" in the presence bar; you *have* a session, just not an account) and talks to private, first-party-only endpoints. The public API at sheets.googleapis.com is a separate door with no concept of an anonymous principal: every write must carry an OAuth token identifying *some* account. Requests without one die at authentication — which is why we got a 401 (CREDENTIALS_MISSING) rather than a 403 — before your generous sharing settings are ever consulted. API keys don't bridge it either: they identify a billing project, not a person, and are read-only by design.

Could code imitate the browser — scrape anonymous session cookies and speak the undocumented sync protocol? Technically yes, practically no: brittle, bot-protected, changes without notice. So "requires OAuth" really means "requires OAuth *for anything you'd want to build on*," and the Apps Script is the cheapest way to be a first party.

Since this is the obvious "wait, but…" for anyone following the recipe, I baked the reconciliation into the README: the appendix's "The problem" section now explains the anonymous-session story explicitly, and the Architecture section says "*programmatic* writes" and points to the appendix. (Also fixed the "Intially" typo in your new intro line.)

Ah, I see the failure mode: the instructions didn't say clearly that nothing happens automatically — pasting the script is inert, and editing the sheet never wakes the script up. The auth prompt only appears when you explicitly *run a function from the Apps Script editor toolbar*. Also, the generic skeleton didn't even include a function suitable for that first run. Let me fix both:

Now the authorization section, rewritten as action → expected-result steps:

Fixed. The core problem was a missing mental model, which the instructions now state up front: the script never runs on its own — not when you paste it, not when you save, and not when the sheet is edited. It only runs when a function is explicitly invoked, and Google's permission prompt rides along with the *first* invocation.

Concretely, the README changes:

• Section 1 now says to save after pasting and warns that nothing visible happens yet, and the generic skeleton now includes the authorize() function so there's an obvious thing to run (previously that only existed in tauction's Code.gs).
• Section 2 is rewritten as numbered action → expected-result steps: pick authorize in the toolbar's function dropdown (it defaults to doGet), click ▷ Run, then the exact dialog sequence, ending with a checkpoint (execution log prints the sheet name and "Execution completed"). It also explains that the grant covers the whole project, so the deployed web app inherits it.
• The tauction-specific setup step got the same clarification in one line.

So to unblock you right now, in the Apps Script editor you already have open: toolbar function dropdown → authorize → ▷ Run → Review permissions → Advanced → "Go to … (unsafe)" → Allow. Then Deploy → New deployment → Web app (Execute as Me, access Anyone) and send me the /exec URL — I'll smoke-test it with curl before you touch app.js.

Looks like your message got cut off mid-sentence — "when i clicked…"?

Tell me what you clicked and what happened (exact error text or dialog wording is ideal), and I'll take it from there.

That error is Google's plumbing failing, not anything you did wrong — and I have a strong suspicion about the cause. Behind the scenes, every Apps Script project gets a hidden Google Cloud project with an auto-generated OAuth client, and invalid_client: The OAuth client was not found means the consent flow looked up that client in the wrong account context. The classic trigger: being signed into multiple Google accounts at once — and the error screen says dreeves@gmail.com while your primary is presumably dreeves@beeminder.com, so you're almost certainly multi-logged-in, and the Apps Script editor is infamous for exactly this failure under multi-login (the editor session runs under one account while the consent popup resolves under the other).

In order of likelihood of fixing it:

1. Match the accounts. Look at the avatar in the top-right of the Apps Script editor to see which account the editor is actually running as. Re-run authorize and, at the account chooser, pick *exactly that* account.
2. If that fails, eliminate multi-login: open the sheet in an incognito window (or a browser profile) signed into *only one* account, Extensions → Apps Script, run authorize there. This is the reliable fix.
3. Check the GCP association: gear icon (Project Settings) → "Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Project" should say *Default*. If a custom project is attached, its OAuth client is gone/misconfigured — simplest recovery is a fresh script project (re-paste the code).
4. Rarely it's propagation lag on a brand-new script project — waiting a few minutes and retrying fixes it.

One reassurance: since the sheet is world-editable, it doesn't matter *which* of your accounts ends up authorizing — whichever account deploys with "Execute as: Me" becomes the writer, and both of yours can write. The only requirement is that the consent account matches the editor's account.

Let me bake this into the README's troubleshooting so future-you doesn't re-debug it:

TL;DR: you're multi-logged-in, and the Apps Script editor hates that. Error 401: invalid_client means the consent popup looked up the script's auto-generated OAuth client under the wrong account context — note the error names dreeves@gmail.com while you're presumably usually dreeves@beeminder.com. Your code is fine; nothing is misconfigured on your end.

To get past it, in order of likelihood:

1. Check the avatar in the Apps Script editor's top-right corner to see which account the *editor* is running as, re-run authorize, and pick exactly that account in the chooser.
2. If it still fails: incognito window signed into just one account → open the sheet → Extensions → Apps Script → run authorize. This is the reliable fix.
3. Long shots: Project Settings (gear) → GCP project should say "Default"; and brand-new script projects occasionally need a few minutes before auth works.

Since the sheet is world-editable, it genuinely doesn't matter which of your two accounts ends up owning the deployment — whichever deploys with "Execute as: Me" becomes the writer.

I've added all of this as a troubleshooting block in the README's authorize step, so the recipe now covers the failure you just hit. Once you're through the consent screen and deployed, drop the /exec URL here and I'll curl-test the live API before you wire it into app.js.

Let me look at the new AGENTS.md and the current state of things first:

Done. Summary:

The 404 bug — local-dev only; production (Pages + 404.html) is immune, though note Pages isn't actually enabled yet (gh api repos/dreeves/tauction/pages → 404, and tauction.dreev.es doesn't respond), so you were on the local server.

• Replicata: python3 -m http.server 8000 per the README's old instruction, load /, app.js rewrites the URL to /<slug>, reload.
• Expectata: same auction reloads.
• Resultata: stock python server has no file /<slug> → bare 404. Verified by curl before fixing.

Fix: [serve.py](serve.py) — a dev server that mimics GitHub Pages by answering any miss with [404.html](404.html) (status 404), so the stash-and-bounce journey works locally exactly as in prod. app.js is untouched; zero new app code paths. While writing the reload qual I found and fixed a second instance: 404.html stashed only location.pathname, so a reload during ?api= testing silently dropped the API override; it now stashes path + query ([404.html:9](404.html#L9)).

If-statements added (AGENTS.md rule 11): two in serve.py — if code != 404 (non-404 errors keep stock behavior rather than serving the bounce page for, say, a 500) and if self.command != 'HEAD' (HTTP forbids bodies on HEAD responses) — plus an argv-default ternary for the port. All in dev tooling, none in the app.

Quals (rules 5–6): now in the repo under [quals/](quals/), run via npm install once then npm run quals. Three suites: the Code.gs logic harness (63 assertions), the jsdom frontend suite (33, including new quals for the 404-stash → restore reload journey using the actual inline scripts shipped in the pages), and a serve.py suite (7, spawns the real server and asserts the Pages-like behavior). All pass. Caveat per rule 3: verified via jsdom and curl, not a human browser click-through — worth one manual reload test when you next run python3 serve.py.

"No API configured" banner: that's [app.js:191](app.js#L191) firing because the API constant at [app.js:6](app.js#L6) is still the placeholder and no ?api= override is present. Expected until the Apps Script is deployed; then either paste the /exec URL into the constant or test first via http://localhost:8000/?api=<exec-url> (which now survives reloads). It renders in the error style because the app is genuinely nonfunctional in that state — say the word if you'd rather it be a neutral notice.

One flag: the existing UI microcopy in app.js/index.html is LLM-written English predating AGENTS.md rule 8 (Latin microcopy). I left it as-is rather than retroactively Latinizing; tell me if you want that applied.

1828 words. Rewriting at half that, preserving your intro verbatim and all load-bearing facts:

The deployed script isn't tauction's Code.gs — those error strings match the README's minimal *skeleton* (which only knows read/append). Verifying:

Confirmed — ?action=read returns [[""]] (the empty sheet). That action only exists in the README appendix's minimal skeleton, so what's deployed is the skeleton you pasted while debugging authorization, not tauction's actual API.

The good news: authorization, the "Anyone" web-app access, and sheet reads all demonstrably work. What remains:

1. In the Apps Script editor, replace the code with the full contents of [apps-script/Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs), save.
2. Deploy → Manage deployments → ✏️ → Version: New version → Deploy. This is the appendix's "#1 gotcha" in the wild: saving alone won't change what /exec serves, and "New deployment" would mint a *different* URL, orphaning the one already in app.js. "New version" keeps the URL.
3. Say the word and I'll re-run the smoke test (liveness, state, fresh, and a real bid write).
4. Then commit and push, and I'll enable GitHub Pages via gh api — after that tauction.dreev.es is live end-to-end.

On the README: 1828 → 1059 words. That's a 42% cut rather than a strict half; ~230 of the remaining "words" are inside the code blocks, which I kept verbatim since they're the copy-paste payload. All facts survived, including your intro paragraph untouched. If you want it leaner still, the "Limits & alternatives" subsection and the Quals file descriptions are the next candidates.

Yes, one thing: the deployed script is still the skeleton. Paste [apps-script/Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs) into the editor → Deploy → Manage deployments → ✏️ → New version.

Then commit/push and I'll do the rest (test + enable Pages).

Pushed. Enabling Pages:

Pages is enabled and building (http://tauction.dreev.es/). API fully verified: reads, writes, seal→reveal all work live. Waiting on the Pages build now — I'll confirm when the site responds.

Live. tauction.dreev.es serves the app (200), and /tau returns 404.html with the stash-and-bounce script — the reload flow works in production as qualled.

Everything is done: API deployed and verified (seal → reveal live), Pages built, DNS + HTTPS working. Only artifact of testing: smoketest rows in the sheet — delete at will.

Plan per AGENTS.md: one unified concept — a tile per expected bidder, rendering exactly what this client *knows* (gray "no bid", green + masked "bid placed", green + text "bid known"). Your own tile isn't a special case: your bid is simply a known bid (from localStorage), and reveal just makes everyone's bids known. QDD: quals first (red), then code (green).

Green (65 assertions). Now the frontend quals — rewritten with the new tile/shimmer/placeholder/tooltip expectations (red first):

Red on both. Implementing — Code.gs first (banner, white-on-white repaint, locks deleted):

Backend green (70). Now the frontend — app.js with tiles/known-bids/shimmer and the lock code deleted:

Now index.html — tooltips (Latin, with English TODOs) and a color-scheme meta:

File changed on disk — reading fresh before touching the bid field:

He's edited copy (placeholders emptied, "submit", new radio labels) — preserving all of it exactly. Applying the bid tooltip against the current content:

All 55 frontend assertions pass. Full suite:

All green: 70 gas + 55 frontend + 7 serve assertions. Everything is implemented; your two actions are at the end.

What changed

• Tiles. One box per expected bidder, rendered by a single rule: *show what this client knows, mask the rest.* Gray + "nondum" = no bid; green glow = bid placed (masked ••••• if unknown); a one-shot shimmer sweep when someone's bid changes (the API now returns per-bidder updated stamps). Your own bid is "known" via localStorage, so your tile shows its text — and reveal just makes everyone's bids known. No special-casing of the current user in the renderer, per your point 4.
• Unified modes. Roster mode: tiles for roster + walk-on bidders. Count mode: actual bidders, then you (if named and not yet among them), then numbered anonymous slots ("licitator 2", …). Unnamed-user edge case: all slots stay anonymous until a name is typed; your gray tile tracks the name field live.
• Own bid as placeholder, input cleared after submitting, persisted per-auction (tauction-mybid:<slug> stores name+bid so renaming yourself doesn't misattribute it).
• Permissiveness. The reveal-locks are *deleted*, server and client — revealed is now purely derived from (bids, settings). Corner cases this settles: late bids after reveal join publicly; re-bids after reveal allowed (and shimmer); lowering n force-reveals — that's your end-early/abort mechanism for free; raising n un-reveals (bids re-mask, sheet repaints white); shrinking a roster to people who've all bid reveals; emptying it un-reveals; deleting rows in the sheet manually is legitimate admin surgery since nothing is cached. Remaining known holes (unchanged, honor-system): name collisions/impersonation, bidding twice under two names, peeking via devtools or the sheet.
• Sheet. Both tabs get a 24pt red "IT'S CHEATING TO LOOK HERE DURING AN AUCTION" banner at H1; sealed bids are painted white-on-white and repainted visible on reveal (and re-hidden on un-reveal).
• Tooltips + theme. Tap-focusable ? tooltips (tabindex, no JS) on auction and bid; mono/ledger theme with a faint dot-grid, 3px corners, 16px inputs (prevents iOS focus-zoom), tiles wrap on small screens. Your copy edits (submit, new radio labels, emptied placeholders) are untouched.

Latin microcopy (rule 8, TODOs in code): nondum (→ "no bid yet"), licitator N (→ "bidder N"), and the two tooltip texts (English recommendations in HTML comments).

Qual changes you should sanity-check (rule 6): "bid content still sealed" was asserting *your own window* hides your bid — inverted by design; sealing is now asserted where it matters (other windows see •••••, not the text). The two "locked after reveal" quals are inverted to permissive per your directive. The polling-catchup qual now checks bob's bid (stronger — alice would see her own anyway). Net: 132 assertions, up from 103.

If-statement ledger (rule 11): deleted — both server reveal-locks, the client lock/unlock function, the chips-frozen-when-revealed branch, the place-button re-enable condition. Added — shimmer stamp comparison, mine null-check, self-slot insertion (named && not bidding && slots open), state && renderStatus() on name input, and the repaint ternary in Code.gs.

Your moves: (1) paste the new [apps-script/Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs) into the editor and Deploy → Manage deployments → ✏️ → New version — the frontend's shape-assert will loudly refuse the old API otherwise; (2) commit/push. Caveat per rule 3: behavior is verified in jsdom, not a human browser — the theme/shimmer aesthetics deserve one real look, ideally on your phone.

The bug: tooltips render *above* the tip, and the auction tip sits at the top of the page, so the bubble extends past the viewport top. And yes — the general answer to "find these yourself" is real rendering: headless Chrome with geometry assertions + screenshots I actually inspect. jsdom can't do layout. Checking what's available:

Cleaning up the clumsy roster-removal step in story 3, wiring the suite into npm run quals, and gitignoring screenshots:

Both reds land exactly where expected (tooltip top: −17px). Applying the fixes:

All 152 assertions green across four suites. Now the part that was missing from my process — actually looking at what users see:

Phone view is clean — theme, tiles, and placeholder all read well. Checking the other two:

What went wrong, plainly: my quals ran in jsdom, which does no layout and no navigation, so nothing ever experienced the site — logic was verified, the experience wasn't. That's fixed structurally, not just per-bug.

New: story quals in real Chrome. [quals/story-quals.js](quals/story-quals.js) drives your installed Chrome (puppeteer-core, no download) through three full journeys against the real serve.py and the real Code.gs logic: Alice visits, *reloads before doing anything* (your bug), bids, reloads again; Bob deep-links to her URL in a separate browser, sees her tile but not her bid, triggers the reveal; then a roster auction ended early by removing the straggler. Plus geometry assertions — tooltip-fits-in-viewport, no horizontal overflow — and screenshots which I then read myself. Both of your bugs reproduced as failing quals before I fixed anything: the tooltip measured at top −17px, and 404.html ≠ index.html (see next).

The /slug 404 fix deletes the machinery rather than patching it: 404.html is now an exact byte copy of index.html, so GitHub Pages serves the app itself at any path — no redirect, no flash, no sessionStorage handshake to strand anyone (the old bounce page could dead-end if the stash script failed, which is presumably what you hit). A qual enforces the copy stays identical; after editing index.html: cp index.html 404.html (comment in the file says so). Non-slug paths like /foo/bar fall through to the fresh-auction flow. Net code delta: negative.

Tooltips now open downward — the top of the screen can't clip them, and the story qual pins that with real pixel measurements at phone and desktop sizes.

Also: the fake Apps Script stub was triplicating, so it's extracted to [quals/fake-gas.js](quals/fake-gas.js) and shared by all suites; quals updated to your English microcopy ("waiting", "bidder N") verbatim. All green: 70 + 54 + 7 + 21 = 152 assertions. Screenshots look right to my eye — mono/dot-grid theme, green tile with visible own-bid next to a gray "bidder 2 / waiting" tile, results tiles after reveal. Changed quals to note (rule 6): the stash/restore quals are replaced by the 404≡index equality + direct-navigation + weird-path quals, and serve-quals' miss-page assert now expects the app instead of the bounce page.

Your moves: (1) Redeploy Code.gs — I just checked the live API and it still serves the old string-shaped bidders, so the moment you push this frontend, prod will refuse it (loudly, by design) until you do Manage deployments → ✏️ → New version. (2) Push. Then reload tauction.dreev.es/anything on your phone and it should just be an auction.

Redeploy tedium is exactly what clasp (Google's official Apps Script CLI) eliminates: after a one-time login, npm run deploy pushes Code.gs and re-versions the existing deployment from the terminal — no browser, no pasting, same /exec URL. Setting it up:

Verifying clasp 3.x still honors .gs local files before writing config:

Yes — [.clasp.json](.clasp.json) is the one piece clasp can't live without: it points at *which* Apps Script project to push (scriptId) and from where (rootDir: apps-script). The deployment ID is already baked into the npm script (it's the AKfycb… chunk of your /exec URL), but the script ID is a different identifier that only you can see: Apps Script editor → ⚙ Project Settings → IDs → Script ID. Paste it over the placeholder and the file never changes again.

So the tedium fix, fully assembled:

One-time (~2 min): toggle on the Apps Script API · npx clasp login · paste the script ID into .clasp.json.

Every Code.gs change after that: npm run deploy — pushes the repo's Code.gs (repo becomes the single source of truth; no more editor pasting), re-versions the *same* deployment (URL stable, the "New deployment" footgun is unreachable), and finishes with [quals/live-quals.js](quals/live-quals.js), which hits the live API and verifies it serves what app.js expects. And since the login token is cached on your machine, I can run npm run deploy for you in future sessions. The [appsscript.json](apps-script/appsscript.json) manifest also pins execute-as-me/anyone, so deployment settings can't drift.

Status from this round: your manual redeploy checked out (live-quals passed against prod — the bidders shape is current); your "these people" copy edit desynced 404.html, so I ran npm run sync-404; full suite green, 152 + 2 live assertions.

Why 404.html is big: it's a byte-copy of index.html — that's the whole trick. GitHub Pages serves 404.html for any path it doesn't recognize, so copying the app there makes every /slug load the app directly. No redirect, no flash, no dead end.

Does that architecture make sense? I re-examined the alternatives: a redirect page (what we had — you got 404'd); hash URLs like /#tau (no 404 problem, but ugly URLs); moving all markup into JS so both files are tiny (kills your ability to hand-edit the HTML, which you've been doing); Jekyll includes (breaks local dev unless you install Jekyll); symlink (Pages won't serve it). Dumb duplication wins: it's 2KB of static text, npm run sync-404 refreshes it, and a qual fails loudly if the copies ever drift. Worse-is-better.

clasp, tersely. Three steps, ~2 minutes, then never again:

1. Flip on the toggle at script.google.com/home/usersettings
2. npx clasp login
3. Apps Script editor → ⚙ → copy "Script ID" → paste into [.clasp.json](.clasp.json)

Am I sure I need you? For those three, yes — all auth-gated by design: the toggle and login are Google OAuth in your browser, and the script ID is only visible in your editor (Google offers no API to list script projects, so I can't discover it even after you log in). Everything downstream is mine: from then on I run npm run deploy whenever Code.gs changes — push, re-version the same URL, live smoke test — and you never open the Apps Script editor again.

Let me check exactly what the installed clasp requests rather than answering from memory:

Here's what the consent screen will ask for (pulled from the installed clasp 3.3.0 source), grouped by whether we actually use it:

The ones npm run deploy actually exercises:

• script.projects — read/write your Apps Script code (clasp push)
• script.deployments + script.webapp.deploy — create versions and redeploy the web app

Requested but idle in our workflow (used only by clasp commands we don't run, like open-logs, enable-api, create-script):

• drive.file — access only to Drive files *clasp itself creates*; it cannot touch your existing Drive
• drive.metadata.readonly — list file names/metadata
• logging.read, cloud-platform, service.management — log viewing and API toggling for GCP-attached projects
• userinfo.email/profile — shows which account is logged in

Notes: this is Google's own OAuth app ("clasp – The Apps Script CLI"), the token lands in ~/.clasprc.json on your machine (nothing leaves it), and you can revoke the whole grant anytime at myaccount.google.com/permissions. The scary-sounding cloud-platform scope is the standard clasp bundle; if it bothers you, the deploy flow genuinely only needs the three script.* scopes, but clasp doesn't offer a narrower login out of the box.

Verifying the whole pipeline end-to-end — that's the point of the setup:

Login's done (as dreeves@gmail.com — correct account, it's the one that owns the script). One thing left: [.clasp.json](.clasp.json) still says PASTE_SCRIPT_ID_HERE.

Grab it from the Apps Script editor → ⚙ Project Settings → IDs → Script ID, and either paste it into the file or just drop it here and I'll wire it in and run the full npm run deploy to prove the pipeline. (I genuinely can't fetch it myself — bound scripts don't appear in any listing API, even logged in.)

Running the full pipeline to prove it:

Found it: the consent screen checkboxes. Your token got script.deployments and drive.file, but not script.projects (what clasp push needs) or script.webapp.deploy (what the web-app redeploy needs) — Google now makes each scope an individual checkbox and only some got ticked.

Redo the login and tick everything (or at minimum all three script.* boxes):

npx clasp logout && npx clasp login

Say when, and I'll rerun npm run deploy.

uname/aname works — symmetric, greppable, pronounceable, and it kills the "name is everything" grep problem. (Considered alternative: handle + slug, the more standard web jargon — say the word if you prefer that and I'll re-run this.) Applying it as full vocabulary, not just the HTML ids: API params, state fields, sheet columns, localStorage keys, internal variables, quals. Visible label text stays exactly as you wrote it.

Re-reading app.js to pick up your edits before applying the rename on top (and noted re: login — I'll verify and deploy once the refactor is green):

Now index.html ids, the self-sourcing deploy script, and package.json:

He's replaced the Latin tooltips with his own English and relabeled name→"you" — keeping all of that verbatim, changing only the ids:

Now the quals — scripted per-file token replacements with counts printed so nothing silently misses:

The replacement ordering bit me: aname: ' then matched the name: ' rule, producing auname:. Fixing that, then running everything:

serve-quals greps for id="auction" — the rename's last straggler:

Closer — you gained three more scopes, but the critical one is still unchecked: script.projects, which on the consent screen reads "Create and update Google Apps Script projects." It sits right next to "…deployments" (which you did tick). Without it, clasp push can't write code.

One more round: npx clasp logout && npx clasp login and tick every box — bluntly, "Select all" is the move here.

Meanwhile the rename is done and fully green locally (all 152 assertions across the four suites): aname/uname everywhere — HTML ids, API params, state fields, sheet columns, localStorage keys, internals — with your labels, tooltips, and "you" copy untouched. Also caught: app.js now points at a new deployment URL (AKfycbyJ…), so I rewrote the deploy script ([deploy.js](deploy.js)) to derive the deployment ID from app.js's API constant instead of hardcoding it — frontend and deploy target can no longer drift apart.

Once the login has all boxes: I run npm run deploy (pushes renamed Code.gs, redeploys, live-smoke-tests), then you push to GitHub. Do both close together — old frontend + new API (or vice versa) speak different field names, so there's a brief mismatch window either way. One cosmetic leftover: the sheet's existing tab headers still say auction/name; reads are positional so nothing breaks, but you can hand-edit those two header cells if the mismatch bugs you.

The wrapper is swallowing the useful part of the error — running the steps directly:

Everything's done on my side, and one thing is now time-sensitive:

• Deploy pipeline works end-to-end: npm run deploy → push, redeploy @6, live smoke test green. That's the tedium gone — Code.gs changes are one command, and the deployment ID is derived from app.js's API constant so they can't drift.
• 404.html comment: byte-identity is our own invariant (it makes the sync trivially checkable), not a GitHub requirement — so the answer was a big warning comment worded to read correctly in both files. It's in, synced, quals green (including your latest index.html edits, which the sync picked up).

⚠️ Push to GitHub now-ish: the live API already speaks aname/uname, but the Pages site is still serving the old frontend that says auction/name — so production is currently erroring on every request until your push lands.

Dev via [serve.py](serve.py) should already match prod (unknown paths get 404.html = the app) — so the mismatch you're hitting suggests you're serving dev some other way. You're in VS Code and there's a [.vscode/](.vscode/) directory — let me check what your actual dev flow is:

Fixed. The mismatch was your dev server, not the app: VS Code's Live Server serves its own 404 page for unknown paths, while serve.py (and prod) serve the app. Two changes:

• [.vscode/settings.json](.vscode/settings.json) now sets "liveServer.settings.file": "index.html" — Live Server's SPA fallback, which serves the app for every unmatched path, same as GitHub Pages. Your port setting is untouched. Restart Live Server ("Go Live" again) to pick it up, then localhost:5502/anything should just be an auction.
• npm run dev now aliases python3 serve.py for the terminal route, and the README mentions both.

One honesty note: I can't drive the Live Server extension headlessly, so that setting is verified from its docs rather than by a qual — the qual-covered dev path remains serve.py. If /xyzzy still 404s after restarting Go Live, tell me.

Also confirmed while I was in there: your push landed — prod's app.js speaks aname and tauction.dreev.es/xyzzy serves the new 404-hack copy. Dev, prod, and the deployed API are all consistent now.

Two options, both one step:

1. Live Server: restart it (stop, then "Go Live" again) so the new setting in .vscode/settings.json takes effect. Then open localhost:5502/xyzzy — any made-up slug should show the app with two gray "waiting" tiles, not a 404.
2. Terminal: npm run dev, then localhost:8000/xyzzy — this path is already verified by the quals.

Either way, dev now behaves exactly like prod for URLs; note both talk to the same live API and sheet (the /exec URL is baked into app.js), so bids you place locally are real prod data — same as testing on tauction.dreev.es itself.

Good instinct — the tiles carry the information now. For the "hasn't bid yet" visual, spinner is indeed wrong (network vibes). My pick, staying in the ledger aesthetic: hollow ○ vs. filled ● status dots per row, dashed border + blank bid slot for the not-yet-bid rows — a blank line in a ledger reads as "outstanding entry" with zero loading connotation. Bonus swap while I'm in there: sealed bids become redaction bars (██████) instead of dots — sealed-classified is exactly the metaphor. Rows become one-per-line: name left, bid right.

Quals first (red), so let me find everything that asserts the old messages:

Updating the quals to the new design first:

Red as expected. Implementing:

Now the CSS — tiles become ledger rows with status dots:

All green — now the mandatory eyeball of the regenerated screenshots:

The rows read exactly right — filled ● green ledger line with the bid right-aligned, hollow ○ dashed empty slot for "bidder 2", results as a clean one-per-line list. All 151 assertions green.

What changed:

• Messages gone: "Got bids from…, waiting on…" removed in both modes; the rows are the whole story. (splur and chipList went with them as dead code — RIP the specced splur message, per your instruction. The one message kept: the "No required bidders listed yet" nudge when roster mode has an empty roster, since a blank card there would be confusing.)
• One person + bid per line, name left, bid right.
• "Waiting" as visuals, no words: hollow ○ + dashed border + empty slot = no bid yet; filled ● + solid green = bid in. Nothing that reads as page-loading.
• Sealed bids are now redaction bars (██████, fixed width so length doesn't leak) instead of dots — sealed-as-classified felt right. Happy to revert to dots if it's too cute.

Qual changes flagged (rule 6): the five message-text assertions became row-based assertions (empty slots, has-bid counts, hollow-row checks), and the mask assertions now expect █. Net −1 assertion (151 total).

Code.gs untouched, so no deploy needed — this ships on your next git push alone. Idea I didn't implement, in case you want more "your move" emphasis: a slow breathing pulse on the empty slots (CSS animation, ~3s period) — subtle enough not to read as loading, but it is motion; say the word.

All three, QDD-style — quals first:

Green. Now checking the ? centering the only trustworthy way — a big zoomed render of the actual circle:

Centered — the 8× render confirms the ? sits in the middle now (the culprit was the inherited line-height: 1.5 pushing the glyph below optical center; it's 1 on .tip now).

All three items done, 152 assertions green:

• Breathing empty slots: dashed border slowly pulses toward --muted and back on a 3s cycle — motion that says "your move," not "loading." Disabled under prefers-reduced-motion, along with the shimmer. Qual asserts the animation is actually applied via computed style in real Chrome.
• Tooltips out of the tab order: tabindex="-1" — tap/click still focuses (so mobile tooltips keep working), Tab skips them. One tradeoff worth naming: keyboard-only users now have no way to open the tooltips. Fine for a prototype; the fix later would be real aria-describedby descriptions.
• Your "or just edit the URL" tooltip rewording rode along into 404.html via the sync.

Frontend-only change — no Code.gs deploy needed; it ships on your next push.

✅-for-received works, and for "submitted but sealed": no image asset needed — a fixed decoy text with a CSS blur gives exactly the "blurred-out text" look with zero trust issues (the real bid never touches the DOM; the decoy is constant so nothing leaks, not even length). And per the house Latin rule, the decoy underneath the blur will be noli spectare — "don't peek" — which is what a devtools snooper deserves to find.

The alice→bob question first, because it drives a design fix. Current behavior: the bid goes through (two bids from one browser under two names — permissive, fine, and unpreventable without auth), but there's a wart: localStorage only remembers your *latest* identity's bid, so alice's row would flip from readable text back to a sealed mask in your own window. Wrong model. Fix: the browser remembers every bid it placed on an auction (tauction-mybids:<aname> = {alice: …, bob: …}), so both rows stay readable to you, the placeholder follows whichever name is currently in the field, and everyone else just sees two sealed bids. "You can read what your browser submitted" — no identity special-casing.

Quals first:

The qual caught a real lag: the placeholder only updated on poll, not as you retype your name. Fixing:

All green (161). Eyeballing the new sealed-state screenshot:

Done, 161 assertions green. Summary:

• ✅ for received bids (hollow ○ stays for empty slots) — asserted via computed style in real Chrome.
• Sealed = blurred text: a constant decoy string rendered with a CSS blur. The real bid never enters the DOM, and the decoy is identical for every sealed bid, so nothing leaks — not even length. Devtools snoopers who un-blur it find noli spectare ("don't peek"). Verified blurred by computed-style qual, eyeballed the screenshot, and softened the blur to 2.5px so it reads as blurred *text* rather than a smudge.
• alice→bob: the bid goes through (two identities from one browser — permissive by design, and unpreventable without auth anyway). The fix this question exposed: your browser now remembers *every* bid it placed on an auction (tauction-mybids:<aname>, keyed by uname), so alice's row stays readable after you become bob, the placeholder follows whichever name is in the field, and other windows just see two sealed rows. Writing the qual for that caught a second real bug — the placeholder didn't update until the next poll when you retyped your name; it now updates on keystroke.

Frontend-only again: ships on your push, no Code.gs deploy needed.

Challenge accepted — hunting by adversarial inspection of every async/edge path, then proving kills with quals. Two candidates found by reading:

Bug 1 (nasty): clear the "Reveal after [n]" field while retyping it — the input fires, the 700ms debounce elapses while the field is empty, parseInt('') → NaN → Math.max(1, NaN||1) → 1, and the app pushes n=1… which instantly force-reveals a live auction. A transient UI state performs the most destructive action in the system.

Bug 2 (race): submit a bid, then switch auctions while the POST is in flight — the response handler stores your bid in localStorage under the *new* auction's key (module-level aname changed mid-flight), so your own bid shows on the wrong auction and masks on the right one.

Proving both red before fixing:

Bug 1 red confirmed (bug 2's assertions sit after the crash point — both get fixed now):

Two bugs found, both killed red→green. All 166 assertions pass.

Bug 1 — blank n force-reveals. Replicata: auction sealed at 1 of 2 bids; select-all the "Reveal after [2]" field to retype it as 3; pause ~a second. Expectata: nothing happens until you type a number. Resultata: the debounce fired on the empty field, parseInt('') → NaN, the old Math.max(1, NaN || 1) silently "fixed" it to 1, and the auction irreversibly revealed. Classic anti-Postel violation — the silent clamp was the bug. Fix: pushSettings now holds fire unless the field parses to a number ≥ 1 (one new if-statement, disclosed); the clamp is gone. Residual edge, also disclosed: typing "10" and pausing more than 700ms after the "1" still legitimately pushes n=1 — the debounce covers normal typing speed, and n=1 is a value users may genuinely want, so it can't be forbidden outright.

Bug 2 — bid attributed to the wrong auction. Replicata: submit a bid, then switch auctions within ~500ms while the POST is in flight. Expectata: your bid is remembered under the auction it was placed on. Resultata: the response handler read the module-level aname — already changed — and stored your bid under the *new* auction: readable on the wrong page, masked on the right one. Fix: placeBid pins the auction at submit time and uses it for the request and the storage key (the render guard still compares against the live value, correctly). The qual simulates the race with injectable mock latency.

Places I audited and found clean, for the record: every other use of aname after an await (refresh and pushSettings are guarded), repaint row indexing in Code.gs, corrupted-localStorage behavior (throws loudly, by design), the chip-remove/blur event interplay, uppercase and trailing-slash URLs, and double-submit during flight (button disabled).

Frontend-only changes — ships on your push.

Per-bidder resubmission counters need server truth (clients can't reliably count others' re-bids from polling), so: a subs column on the bids tab, incremented per (re)submission, surfaced in the state, rendered as a tiny muted digit at the row's right edge — 0 on gray rows. Quals first:

Red. Implementing — backend first:

Now the frontend — row rendering, shape assert, and the subtle counter style:

Red. Implementing the latch in Code.gs:

The patch only landed in placeBid — saveSettings (the end-early path) is missing the latch:

Both features shipped and deployed (@7, live smoke green). Summary:

Submission counter: server-counted (clients can't reliably count others' re-bids from 5s polls) — new subs column on the bids tab, incremented per (re)submission, rendered as a tiny faded digit at each row's right edge: 0 on gray rows, 1 on first bid, ticking up on re-bids. Rows predating the column read as 0 until their next re-bid.

Reveal latch — your invariant, implemented server-side: a revealed column on the auctions tab, written the moment any bid or settings write makes the condition true; thereafter revealed = latch ∨ condition, so no settings change can ever reseal. Lowering n / shrinking the roster still reveals early — it just latches like any other reveal. Reads stay pure: since the condition depends only on bids + settings, it can only flip during a write, so latching in the two mutators catches every reveal. Notably this made your blank-n worry two-sided: the client-side guard from the bug hunt prevents the accidental reveal, and the latch makes clear why that matters — accidents are now permanent by design.

Qual changes flagged (rule 6): "raising n un-reveals" and "un-reveal re-hides bids in the sheet" are inverted to their latch counterparts, per your explicit instruction; end-early-then-latch got its own scenario. 176 assertions green + 2 live.

Housekeeping notes: existing auctions that revealed before the latch existed will latch on their next write (reads compute correctly meanwhile). The live sheet's tab headers now lag by two columns (subs, revealed) — cosmetic, positional reads don't care, but hand-add them if the mismatch bugs you. Frontend changes ship on your push; the API is already live.

Diagnosis first, from reading: a green row means a bid row exists, and a bid row that exists was submitted at least once — so subs can never truly be 0. The 0 you saw is the migration accommodation I added: rows predating the subs column parse as '' → NaN → || 0 — fabricating a value that's provably false. Anti-Postel violation of my own making; the correct floor for a legacy row is 1, not 0. Your sighting is almost certainly a pre-@7 bid row (e.g. smoketest-era).

Quals first, three layers deep:

All 180 green, exit code 0. Now the structural fix so this class of mistake can't recur — npm run deploy itself refuses to deploy on red:

Investigation closed. Full account:

The bug: green row with 0. Root cause was my migration accommodation for rows predating the subs column: parseInt('') || 0 fabricated a 0 for legacy bids — but an existing bid row *by definition* was submitted at least once, so the only honest floor is 1. Classic silent-input-fixing; the fix makes the floor 1 in both the read path and the re-bid increment (a legacy re-bid now correctly says 2). Any pre-@7 bid you look at (smoketest et al.) now shows 1.

Quals added, three layers: gas (a hand-planted 5-column legacy row reads as 1, re-bids to 2), frontend (a green row renders "1" for legacy data, plus a standing invariant assert that *every* green row counts ≥ 1), and live (smoketest's real legacy rows report ≥ 1 against the deployed API). 180 local + 3 live, all green, verified by exit code.

A process failure to confess: my first placement of the legacy qual shifted sheet-row positions under a later assert, failing the gas suite — and my shell chain (… | grep 'quals:|FAIL' && deploy) deployed anyway, since grep exits 0 when it *matches* FAIL. So @8 was a deploy-on-red; the deployed code was correct, but by luck rather than gate. Structural fix: deploy.js now runs the full qual suite itself and aborts on any failure, so green-before-deploy is enforced by the pipeline rather than my shell hygiene.

Frontend untouched except quals, so nothing to push for the fix itself — the corrected API is already live at @8.

Both requests fold together nicely: the stack can carry the re-bid story visually, letting the digit fade to nearly nothing. Design: each received bid renders as a small card, and every resubmission slips another "sheet" behind it — offset paper-stack shadows, capped at 3 layers deep so it stays pretty (the faint digit keeps exact count past that). Blur moves to the text inside the card so the stack edges stay crisp. No server changes — subs already carries the data.

Quals first:

That render sells it — alice's single sealed card, bob's two-deep stack with his own bid readable, carol's capped three-sheet pile at six submissions, and the gray slot with its ghost of a 0. Shipped details:

• Counter faded further: 0.6rem at 30% opacity — legible if you look, invisible if you don't.
• Stacked cards: each received bid renders as a bordered card; every resubmission slips an offset sheet behind it (crisp paper-stack shadows). Depth caps at 3 sheets so serial re-bidders don't grow a staircase — the digit stays exact past the cap (qualled: 6 submissions → 3 sheets, counter "6").
• The blur moved from the row onto the text *inside* the card so stack edges stay sharp — quals that targeted .tile-bid.masked now target the inner element (flagged per rule 6; same assertions otherwise). One new if-statement in the renderer, disclosed: bid-cards only exist for received bids (gray rows have no card to stack).

185 assertions green, exit-code-gated. Frontend-only — ships on your push, no deploy needed.

Reviewing against rule 11, the suppression inventory is real: the whole status card hides until loaded, "Results ⚡" appears conditionally, and the empty-roster message is an if-branch pretending to be UX. The redesign per your direction: the box is always there, permanently labeled BIDS, just *empty* when there are no bidders (degenerate, not special) and *grayed* while loading instead of hidden. Same treatment for the settings: the inactive mode's controls gray out instead of sitting at full brightness (editing them still auto-selects their mode). Cut-from-roster bidders stay in the box, struck through — and since a walk-on bidder is in the identical state (bid received, not on the roster), one rule covers both. Submission gets a spinner *in the button* (progress-on-action, which doesn't read as page-loading). Quals first:

Now app.js, rewritten clean:

Now Code.gs — mode and n excised, schema simplified:

Now style.css, rewritten with the radio rules gone and the new states in:

Now the qual suites, rewritten for the roster-only world:

The tracker wants a fresh read (the on-disk state is from my own scripted edits) — refreshing and rewriting:

Transition timing — the qual sampled the 🎉 opacity mid-fade (0.4s transition). Waiting for it instead:

All four suites green (194 assertions, exit 0). Eyeballing the redesigned pages:

Everything landed, deployed @9, 194 local + 3 live assertions green. The roster-only simplification made this a net *deletion* despite five new features:

Killed by dropping count mode: the radios, the n input, mode everywhere (API, sheet, client), anonymous "bidder N" slots, the self-tile insertion logic, the blank-n force-reveal guard (whole bug class extinct), and the n-parsing clamp. Reveal is now one sentence: *roster nonempty and everyone on it has bid*. Auctions tab schema shrank to aname, roster, created, updated, revealed.

Rule-11 audit results (suppression → graying): the BIDS box was hidden until loaded — now always present, labeled BIDS forever (no "Results"), *grayed* while another auction loads; "Results ⚡" and the empty-roster message are deleted outright — a rosterless auction is an empty box, degenerate not special; the 🎉 sits permanently next to BIDS in grayscale and lights up at reveal, with a one-shot glow on the card at the moment it happens (watching windows get the fanfare; late arrivals just see it lit).

Cross-outs: one rule — a received bid not on the roster renders with a struck-through name. That covers bid-then-removed *and* walk-ons identically (both are "doesn't gate the reveal"), which also means bids on rosterless auctions show struck until a roster exists — honest, and it nudges toward filling the roster.

Submission jank: a small spinner appears inside the submit button while the POST is in flight (~1–2s of Apps Script latency previously had zero feedback beyond a dimmed button). Progress-on-the-action, so it can't be mistaken for page loading.

Data migration note: old auctions-tab rows predate the schema and misparse harmlessly (garbage rosters, lost latches on pre-existing test auctions). Recommend clearing the auctions tab rows (or deleting both tabs — the script recreates them); the bids tab schema is unchanged.

Screenshots verified: phone shows chips → named hollow rows → green card; desktop caught the reveal glow mid-animation. Your push ships the frontend; the API is already live.

Thought through — and your instinct exposes a real design flaw with a subtle trap inside it. The fix: bidding claims a roster seat (server-side, in placeBid). But naive auto-add creates a nasty footgun: bid on a fresh auction before adding anyone → roster becomes just you → "roster complete" → instant reveal, *permanently latched* — the auction is ruined for sealing before it started. So the reveal condition gains a floor: an auction takes two — reveal requires a complete roster of ≥ 2. Nothing is lost by that floor: the only bid a solo reveal could show is your own, which you can already see.

Case analysis this settles: fresh-auction self-bid → seat claimed, uncrossed, sealed (the bug you saw); walk-ons → join the roster and now *do* gate the reveal (crossed-out is reachable only by removal-after-bid, exactly your original definition); cut-then-re-bid → rejoins and uncrosses; late bid post-reveal → joins publicly, latch unaffected; end-early by removing a straggler still works but can't reveal down to a solo. One ripple: two-person auctions can't end-early to one person — documented, and their own bid is visible to them anyway.

Quals first — lots of them:

Red. Implementing in Code.gs — joinRoster replaces ensureAuctionRow, and the reveal floor:

All 205 green. Deploying and updating docs:

Fixed, qualled, deployed (@10, live-verified). The design that fell out of thinking it through:

Bidding claims a roster seat (server-side, so every window agrees). Your crossed-out-self bug is structurally gone: the *only* way to a struck-through row is being removed from the roster after bidding, which was your original definition of the cross-out — my walk-on generalization was the mistake, and auto-join dissolves it.

The trap the naive fix hides: auto-join on a fresh auction makes the roster [you] — "complete" — which would instantly reveal *and permanently latch* the auction before you've added anyone. So the reveal condition gained a floor: an auction takes two (roster ≥ 2). The floor costs nothing — the only bid a solo reveal could expose is your own, which you already see.

Cases now pinned by quals (205 across the suites, +11 this round):

• Fresh-auction bid: seat claimed (chip appears), row green and uncrossed, sealed, no latch — the footgun qual asserts all four.
• Walk-on mid-auction: joins the roster and now gates the reveal (gluon: rando's join doesn't reveal; reveal waits for the full trio).
• Late bid post-reveal: joins publicly; latch untouched.
• Cut-then-re-bid: seat reclaimed, cross removed (gas + frontend).
• End-early by removing a straggler: works with ≥2 remaining (photon rewritten to a trio); *cannot* reveal down to a solo — the one behavioral trade-off, noted in the README.
• Story 3 now showcases the mechanic live: alice bids without adding herself and watches her own chip appear.

One if-statement added in Code.gs (joinRoster's not-already-seated check, plus its append-vs-update branch replacing ensureAuctionRow's). Roster edits remain last-write-wins, so a settings push racing your bid can briefly unseat you — your next re-bid reseats; consistent with the permissiveness policy. Frontend needed zero changes — chips and cross-outs follow server state. Push when ready.

One CSS subtlety makes this worth a real-render qual: text-decoration doesn't propagate into the inline-block bid-card, so striking just .tile would cross the name and stop dead at the card. Qual first (story suite, since jsdom doesn't compute stylesheets):

Done — the screenshot shows it: @dee ex'd from the roster, and his entire line is struck — name, bid card, and counter — with the row dimmed to 70%, under alice's untouched row. The catch was that text-decoration doesn't reach into the atomic inline bid-card, so each piece gets its own strike; a real-Chrome qual pins all three via computed style (jsdom can't check stylesheet effects).

All 206 assertions green. CSS-only, so no deploy — ships on your push.

Single strike-bar via an ::after overlay instead of text decoration. Qual first:

Folding in the breathe amplitude bump too. Implementing the optimistic-roster changes in app.js plus a clearly-visible breathe:

All 211 green. Checking the strike bar in the regenerated screenshot:

The screenshot demonstrates both changes at once: @dee's entire line crossed by one thick stroke (name, bid card, counter — a pen through a ledger line), and the whole box caught mid-stale — grayed because the removal push was still in flight when the shot was taken. Which is exactly the feedback loop you asked for.

The batch, all green (211 assertions):

• Strike bar: single 2.5px stroke across the full row via an overlay (text-decoration can't cross the atomic bid-card, hence the earlier per-text approach — replaced). Row also dims to 70%. Computed-style qual in real Chrome.
• Roster-edit feedback: chip edits now redraw the BIDS rows *instantly* from your local roster — added people appear, removed people vanish or get struck — while the box grays out until the server confirms, then ungrays. Same .stale treatment as auction-switching, so "gray = syncing" is one consistent signal.
• Breathe is now unmissable: empty slots pulse to accent-purple border + tinted background instead of the gray-on-gray whisper.

Writing the quals for this flushed out two real bugs, both fixed:

1. The 4s "don't clobber my chip edits" window also blocked showing your own confirmed changes — now the window ends the moment the server confirms your edits (guarded so edits made *while* a push is in flight stay protected).
2. Nastier: bid within 700ms of editing the roster and your own pending settings push — still carrying the pre-bid roster — would overwrite the seat your bid just claimed, unseating you server-side. placeBid now flushes unconfirmed roster edits before bidding, so writes land in order.

New if-statements, disclosed: the flush-before-bid guard, the state guard on optimistic render, and the confirmed-edits reset. Code.gs untouched since @10, so no deploy — everything here ships on your push.

Diagnosed the fade jump first: the BIDS rows are rebuilt from scratch on every 5-second poll, and each rebuild restarts the breathe animation at 0% — mid-fade, hence smooth-smooth-jump. Fix: phase-lock the animation to the wall clock with a negative animation-delay (-(now % 3000)ms), so a rebuilt row resumes at exactly the phase its predecessor was at. No diffing machinery needed.

On sealed/revealed: do both — they answer different questions. The badge answers "what state is this?" at a glance; graying the roster box answers "does editing this still matter?" And per the house rules it grays without disabling — late additions stay possible, the latch already guarantees graying-vs-restricting can't matter for sealing. Using your exact words SEALED/REVEALED as the badge copy. Quals first:

Red. Implementing all three pieces:

The desktop screenshot says it all: green-bordered BIDS card with a solid green REVEALED badge and lit 🎉, while the roster box above sits visibly dimmed — chips still there, still clickable, just clearly no longer load-bearing. Pre-reveal it's the inverse: dashed muted SEALED badge, roster box at full strength (both states qualled via computed styles in real Chrome).

On your question — I did both, because they answer different questions: the badge tells you *which state you're in* (your option 1), the grayed roster tells you *why editing it feels inconsequential now* (your option 2). And graying-not-disabling keeps the permissiveness intact: late additions still work, and the latch already guarantees no edit can reseal, so there's nothing to protect with a hard disable. Badge copy is your exact words, SEALED/REVEALED.

The fade jump was a genuine bug with a satisfying root cause: every 5-second poll rebuilds the rows, and a rebuilt DOM node restarts its breathe animation at 0% — so the fade ran smoothly for a few seconds, then snapped to the beginning mid-cycle. Fix: each empty row gets a negative animation-delay of -(now mod 3000)ms, phase-locking the animation to the wall clock so replacement nodes resume at the exact phase their predecessors left off. Green rows carry no delay (their shimmer animation must start from zero) — both sides qualled.

All 219 assertions green across the four suites. No backend change, so this ships on your push.

Agreed — the lock glyph *is* the word: 🔒 while sealed, 🔓 once revealed, riding with the green border, lit 🎉, and grayed roster that already carry the state. Quals first:

Done — the words are dead. The badge is now just the padlock: 🔒 top-right of BIDS while sealed, swinging to 🔓 at reveal (visible in the screenshot alongside the green border, lit 🎉, and grayed roster — four wordless signals saying the same thing). Both glyphs pinned by computed-style quals; all 219 assertions green. CSS-only, ships on your push.

Thought it through against the real use cases. Here's where I landed:

The root flaw: auto-join made the roster mean "whoever showed up," but auto-reveal still treats it as "everyone we're expecting" — so the moment two drive-by bidders exist, "everyone has bid" is trivially true and the latch detonates. Any design that keeps *automatic* reveal has to guess when the group is complete, and a wrong guess is irreversible by your own (correct) latch invariant. The asymmetry decides it: a wrong auto-reveal is catastrophic and permanent; an extra tap on a button is nothing. So: reveal becomes a human act — your button idea — and auto-reveal dies entirely. Walking the cases:

• *Ad-hoc group* (your scenario): alice and bob bid rosterlessly → roster builds itself → nothing reveals until someone says so. Fixed.
• *Organizer flow* (the sealedbids model): roster set upfront, last bid arrives → button lights up in everyone's window → any participant taps it. One tap of friction buys never-wrong reveals.
• *Straggler*: today, removing a chip *detonates the reveal as a side effect* — surprising even when intended. With a button, roster edits never reveal anything by themselves.
• *Solo/tester*: button stays dark below two bidders ("an auction takes two" survives).
• The latch, permissive edits, auto-join seating, and late-public-bids all stay exactly as they are; the server just moves the latch-write into a new reveal action that anyone may call.

Roster-commitment-first (the Slack-faithful alternative) solves the same problem but taxes every auction to fix the sloppy ones — drive-by bidding is this web version's whole charm. I'd reject it.

On killing the word "reveal": the padlock badge can *become* the button — a grayed 🔒 that starts breathing when conditions are met, and pressing it pops it open to 🔓 with the tada. State and action collapse into one wordless element. (Discoverability is the risk; your tooltip pattern covers it.)

The one question:

Red. Backend:

Backend green (92). Frontend quals next — button states, press-to-reveal, and the sealed-after-completion guarantee:

Shipped, deployed @11. The design as landed:

Reveal is now a human act, and the padlock is the button — which also answers your "can we avoid the word" question: yes, entirely. The 🔒 badge on the BIDS box *is* the control. Dim gray 🔒 while the roster's incomplete → full-color, gently pulsing 🔒 once everyone on the roster (≥2) has bid → anyone presses it → 🔓, tada, glow, latch. Idempotent server-side, so two people racing to press it both succeed. Nothing in the system reveals automatically anymore — the server-side auto-reveal condition is deleted, not just gated.

Your scenario is a named regression qual now: alice and bob drive-by bid on a rosterless auction, both get auto-seated, roster "completes" — and *nothing happens* until someone presses. Also qualled: reveal refused with a straggler outstanding or a solo bidder; roster shrinking alone reveals nothing (removing a chip no longer detonates anything — end-early is now visibly two deliberate steps: ex the straggler, press the lock); latch still unreseal-able; the pulse animation verified by computed style in real Chrome. 232 local + 3 live assertions.

⚠️ Push soon: this was a breaking backend change and prod's current frontend predates the button — until your push lands, live auctions can't be revealed at all (bids and rosters work fine). Your v2026.07.14-a footer edit is synced into 404.html and rides along.

One open cosmetic question you may want to weigh in on eventually: the pressable padlock relies on the pulse + cursor for discoverability — if real users hover confusedly, a tooltip on the lock (your English, one word-ish) is the escape hatch I'd reach for.

Four items — padlock tooltip ("Reveal bids!", your copy), nicer footer, share popup with copy + QR, and a help dialog with your sealedbids doc verbatim. Setup first: vendor a QR encoder (self-contained, no CDN) and check whether jsdom can drive <dialog> or the quals need real Chrome:

The UMD falls through to a plain var qrcode global in browsers — fine. Now let me get a decoder so the QR qual proves the code actually *scans* to the right URL, rather than just "an SVG appeared":

Decoder in place — the QR qual will screenshot the rendered code and decode it back. Now fetching your sealedbids doc for verbatim copy:

QR lib draws no quiet zone (needed for reliable scanning), so I'll render the modules myself with a margin. Reading the current index.html before restructuring:

Now writing the quals (QDD) — dialogs and clipboard need real Chrome, and the QR gets decoded back to prove it scans:

Fixing the clipboard permission — each page gets its own browser context, so the override must happen there:

Now the implementation. index.html — corner buttons, both dialogs (your sealedbids text verbatim), restructured footer:

Now app.js — share/help wiring, QR rendering with quiet zone, clipboard:

Now the CSS — tooltips move to ::before (freeing ::after for the padlock glyph), plus corner buttons, dialogs, QR, and the restyled footer:

QR decoded successfully (we got past that assertion) — the clipboard write is failing. Likely the page isn't focused, which navigator.clipboard requires. Debugging directly:

Chrome headless denies clipboard writes even with the permission override (a known headless limitation, not our code). Trying the CDP-level grant before falling back to stubbing:

The CDP-level grant works (puppeteer's overridePermissions maps clipboard permissions incorrectly for headless). Wiring that into the qual:

Write succeeds now; the *read-back* fails because alice's page lives in an isolated browser context that never got the grant. Granting per-context:

All 42 story assertions pass — including the QR decoding back to the right URL and a real clipboard round-trip. Full suite, then eyeballing the dialogs:

Caught by eyeballing: after copying, the button reads "Copia nexum Copiatum!" — the confirmation *appends* instead of replacing. Fixing:

All four shipped, 244 assertions green (frontend-only — no deploy needed, ships on your push).

Padlock tooltip: "Reveal bids!" — your exact words. This forced a small refactor: the padlock's ::after holds the 🔒/🔓 glyph, so tooltips moved to ::before and now work on *any* [data-tip] element (right-anchored for corner/right elements so they don't overflow). Existing tooltip quals updated to the new pseudo-element — flagged per rule 6.

Footer: hairline top border, centered row, muted link that turns accent-purple on hover, · separator, tracked-out version. Your strings preserved verbatim (github.com/dreeves/tauction, v2026.07.14-a).

Share (🔗, top-right corner): modal with a big QR, the URL, and a copy button that turns green on success. The URL is canonical — origin + /aname, so a ?api= test override never leaks into what you share. The QR is drawn on a canvas with a proper 4-module quiet zone (the library omits it, which breaks scanning). The qual doesn't just check "an image appeared": it reads the canvas pixels back and decodes the QR with jsQR, asserting it scans to the exact auction URL. Clipboard is likewise a real round-trip (write → read back → compare), which took a CDP-level permission grant since puppeteer's own API can't grant clipboard in headless.

Help (?, top-right corner): modal with your sealedbids text verbatim — intro through the Schelling footnote, exact characters including curly quotes and em-dashes, with the messymatters and focal-point links live. I deliberately omitted the Slack /bid command table, "Original implementation", and "SCRATCH AREA" as not-help-for-this-app; say the word and I'll paste them in. Prose typography (sans, not mono) inside the dialog. Dismiss via ×, Escape, or backdrop click.

New microcopy is Latin per rule 8, with TO-DO English in the markup: "Copia nexum" → "Copy link", "Copiatum!" → "Copied!", plus the corner buttons' tooltips/aria-labels ("Communica"/"Auxilium"). The eyeball pass caught one real bug the quals hadn't: the copied-confirmation was *appending* to the label ("Copia nexum Copiatum!") instead of replacing it — fixed, and now qualled.

Let me check my project memory and the repo's deploy setup.

Deploy blocked itself — quals are red ("never deploy on red"). The failing qual is in frontend-quals: "help dialog carries the sealedbids text verbatim". Let me look.

The git guard hook blocked the compound command. Splitting it up:

Straight apostrophe. Updating both quals to dreev's new sentence:

Now syncing 404.html and re-running the deploy:

Same class of fix — the qual expects the old Latin "Copiatum" in the button's ::after; dreev changed the attribute to "Copied!". Updating:

dreev is editing index.html right now — the sentence I anchored to two minutes ago is already gone. Let me see the current state:

All green and deployed. Quick eyeball of the help-dialog screenshot the story quals captured, since the help copy changed:

Deployed — no copying needed. npm run deploy handles it end-to-end (quals → clasp push → redeploy → live smoke test), and it just finished: Code.gs and appsscript.json pushed, redeployed as version @12, and live-quals confirm the deployed API is current.

Getting there took two detours, both caused by your own hand-edits to index.html (which I did not touch):

• Stale qual anchors. Two quals asserted your old help-dialog copy verbatim ("When the last person has responded…" and the Latin "Copiatum" on the copy button). Since you'd reworded those, I re-anchored [frontend-quals.js:122-125](quals/frontend-quals.js#L122-L125) and [story-quals.js:207](quals/story-quals.js#L207), [story-quals.js:220-223](quals/story-quals.js#L220-L223) to your current text. You were editing live — my first anchor went stale within minutes — so I settled on a sentence that survived every revision ("You could use it to get independent estimates…"). The checks are still verbatim-inclusion, just on a longer-lived sentence.
• Stale 404.html. Ran npm run sync-404 to re-copy index.html over it (the byte-equality qual was going to fail otherwise).

All 244 assertions pass. I also eyeballed the help-dialog screenshot from the story quals — your new copy renders cleanly, including the "Oh yeah, you're free to replace your bid…" paragraph you added mid-run.

Two things for you:

1. Your index.html edits are only live on tauction.dreev.es once committed and pushed — git writes are blocked for me, so that push is yours (and per your convention, a version-string bump in the footer if you haven't).
2. Tiny copy observation, entirely your call: the new closing paragraph says re-bidding works "until the last person bids and everything is revealed," but since yesterday nothing reveals automatically — someone has to press the padlock after the last bid. Your intro sentence ("this page lets you reveal") has it right; the last paragraph reads as if reveal is automatic.

Let me look at how they're placed now and what the page looks like.

My take: no — pinning them to the viewport corner works against you on desktop, and I'd anchor them to the app column instead.

What's there now: [style.css:467-473](style.css#L467-L473) has .corner { position: fixed; top: 0.7rem; right: 0.7rem }, while main is a centered 27rem column. The two screenshots the story quals produce show the consequence:

• Phone width: viewport corner ≈ column corner, so the buttons sit right on the auction card's shoulder. Looks intentional and good.
• Desktop (1200px): the buttons are stranded ~200px of empty dotted background away from the content. Nothing else in the design lives outside the column, so they read as unmoored from the app — and it gets worse the wider the window.

The discoverability angle matters more here than in most apps: sharing the URL *is* the product's core mechanic ("point everyone at the URL"), so the 🔗 button shouldn't be in the peripheral zone people's eyes skip. The one argument for the viewport corner is convention — users expect a help "?" in the far top-right — but I think that's outweighed by the share button's importance and by how detached it looks on a wide screen.

Concretely, I'd position them relative to the column (e.g. absolutely against main's top-right, roughly where they already appear at phone width). That makes desktop match the phone rendering, which is the version that already looks right. Two small things to check if you do this: the right: 0 tooltip-alignment rule at [style.css:208](style.css#L208) exists so the corner tooltips don't clip off-screen (still fine, just no longer necessary), and position: fixed currently keeps the buttons visible while scrolling — a non-issue on this page, which barely scrolls.

Happy to make the change if you want it.

Making the change — first let me check main's layout to anchor the buttons cleanly.

Nothing in app.js or the quals references .corner, so the move is safe. Moving the div inside main and switching to absolute positioning:

Done and verified. The change:

• [index.html:20-27](index.html#L20-L27) — the .corner div moved inside <main>, so the buttons belong to the column rather than the page.
• [style.css:53](style.css#L53) — main gains position: relative.
• [style.css:467-474](style.css#L467-L474) — .corner switches fixed → absolute, and right becomes 0.9rem to match the column padding, so the buttons sit flush with the cards' right edge.
• 404.html re-synced; all 244 qual assertions pass.

The regenerated screenshots confirm it: on desktop the buttons now sit on the column's shoulder instead of floating ~200px away in the viewport corner, and the phone rendering is unchanged (marginally neater, since the buttons now align exactly with the card edge).

One thing to eyeball yourself in [story2-bob-desktop.png](quals/screenshots/story2-bob-desktop.png): when the flash banner ("Bid placed ✓") is up, the buttons now overlap its right end on desktop too — same as phone widths always did. The banner text is left-aligned so nothing is hidden, and the banner is transient; I left it alone, but say the word if you'd rather the banner clear the buttons.

Your side of the finish line, since git writes are blocked for me: commit/push to publish on Pages, plus your footer version-string bump. No npm run deploy needed — Code.gs didn't change.

Thought it through — verdict first: yes, it works, it's frontend-only (the API already takes aname/uname/bid per call, so Code.gs doesn't change), and it actually fixes a weakness the current design has that nobody's complained about yet: today your tile only lights up as "you" if what you type in YOU exactly matches the roster chip. Click-your-name makes identity a pick instead of a re-type — typo-proof by construction.

Here's the shape that I think hangs together:

The three boxes become: auction name → Roster → BIDS. The YOU field, BID field, and submit button disappear. In the BIDS list, an empty row is a bid slot: tap your name, the row expands into an inline input ("your bid, @bob" as placeholder), enter or a small in-row ✓ submits (the ✓ matters on mobile — can't rely on the keyboard's enter). Your own green row stays editable the same way for re-bids; the placeholder-shows-your-old-bid trick migrates into the row. Padlock, counters, shimmer, stacked cards all stay where they are — the whole game now lives in one box, which makes the padlock-on-the-BIDS-box design even more coherent.

The identity crux. You can't enforce one-person-one-device without auth, and the app already doesn't — the YOU field is exactly as spoofable today. So the goal is making the *default path* say "pick yourself, once," and I'd do it with a latch: first inline bid sets tauction-uname (which already exists and is global); from then on, only your row is interactive — other empty rows render inert, no hover affordance, no cursor change. Your row gets a small "(you)" marker plus a quiet "not @alice?" escape hatch that clears the latch. Before the latch, every empty row is tappable, and the act of typing in a row *is* the claim "this is me" — the placeholder makes that legible. This also leaves the shelved pass-the-device case technically possible (clear, bid, clear, bid) but frictioned, which matches "shouldn't" rather than "can't."

The one real design decision: drive-by bidders. Today a non-roster person can bid via the form and joins publicly. With no form, they need a path. Two options: (a) a ghost row at the bottom of the BIDS list — blank name + blank bid, basically the old form reincarnated as a row, which also saves the rosterless-new-auction case from being a dead end; or (b) no ghost row — outsiders add themselves in the Roster box first, then their row appears. I lean (b): it's one less row-state, it matches the roster-only model you already committed to, and the Roster box is sitting right there. The cost is that a brand-new auction requires touching the roster before anyone can bid — which is arguably the correct ritual anyway ("name the participants and point everyone at the URL").

One tension to flag: once bids rows are the interaction surface, the Roster box and the BIDS box display the same people twice, and the duplication gets more visible. The endgame of your idea is probably merging them — roster editing as add/remove on the bids rows themselves. I'd *not* do that now: roster editing is a shared settings action while bidding is personal, and mixing both affordances into one row multiplies states. Keep the Roster box this round; merge later if the duplication grates.

Costs: a substantial app.js and quals rewrite (frontend-quals and story-quals lean heavily on #uname/#bid/submit), zero GAS redeploy, and honestly *more* UI state in JS than today — the simplification is entirely in what the user sees, which I think is the point. "Roster" as the label with the mechanic explained in its ? tooltip works fine.

Want me to build it — with the roster-first answer for drive-bys, or the ghost row?

Yes — and this merge is the Saint-Exupéry move, because it doesn't just combine two boxes, it deletes one entirely. The app becomes: auction name, one ledger, footer. Let me take your three questions in turn.

× on rows — your instinct is right, and the semantics already agree. The only *real* purpose removal serves is unblocking the padlock (your end-early flow: ex the straggler, press reveal). Only people who haven't bid ever block it, so × on a green row has no job to do. Better: it *can't* do its apparent job — bids live in the bids tab and bidding claims a roster seat, so exing a bidder today just leaves them struck-through with their bid intact; in the merged UI that × would read as "delete this sealed bid," which must never be a thing (that's a cheat button: suppress a rival's bid before reveal). So the rule is: × appears only on rows with no bid, and removing one deletes the row outright. Pleasing consequence — the struck-through state becomes unreachable, so the cut class, the rejoin-on-rebid logic, and their quals can all be deleted. The simplification compounds.

Which one is you. Carry over the latch from last round: first inline bid sets tauction-uname, and from then on your row is the only interactive one. The identity marker is then mostly *the affordance itself* — your row is the one that invites typing — reinforced by a subtle accent edge and a small "(you)" tag with a quiet "not you?" release next to it. Before anyone's latched, no row is "you" yet, and that's honest: on a fresh device, tapping a name and bidding *is* the claim. A returning device pre-marks your row since tauction-uname is global. I'd resist the temptation to float your row to the top — everyone seeing the same order keeps the ledger shared-reality, which matters when people are pointing at screens.

The + row. Bottom of the list, expands to a name input. It serves all three adders with one affordance: the initiator naming participants, someone adding a forgotten person, and a drive-by adding themself (which resolves last round's open question — roster-first wins by default, because the roster UI is now inside the bids box anyway). Hide + and × after reveal, matching the everything-locks rule. Under the hood + and × are just saveSettings roster writes and bidding is placeBid — Code.gs and the sheet schema are untouched; this is still a frontend-only change.

Two things the merge costs, so you see the whole bill:

1. The mechanic loses its label. "Reveal after these people bid:" was the only in-flow sentence explaining what the roster *means*. "BIDS" + padlock doesn't teach it. It needs one line somewhere — box subtitle or the ? tooltip. Per your AGENTS.md rule I'd ship it in Latin with a TODO and you replace it.
2. Row-state count. One box, but each row now has ~6 states (empty/tappable, empty/inert-with-×, yours-editable, green-masked, green-yours, revealed) plus the + row. Fewer things on screen, more states in app.js, and a substantial frontend-quals/story-quals rewrite. I think that trade is exactly the point — but it's where the complexity went, not vanished.

And one candidate for the *next* cut, just to note it: the auction-name field's own tooltip already says "or just edit the URL." If the box title someday displays the aname, the field itself could go. Not now — it's also how you switch auctions — but it's the remaining thing to remove.

Say the word and I'll build it: aname card, then the merged ledger with +/×/latch/inline bidding, quals rewritten to the same strictness, screenshots eyeballed before I call it done.

Building it. This touches index.html, app.js, style.css, and two qual suites — let me set up tracking and read the current sources first (including AGENTS.md for the house rules, and app.js which I haven't read yet).

Now the big one — renderStatus and its satellites:

Now placeBid, addName, wiring, and init:

Now the story-quals rewrite for real-Chrome journeys:

dreev has already Englished the (tu) copy live. Let me see exactly what he wrote:

Frontend green — 115 assertions (up from 102). Now the full suite:

That passed standalone a moment ago — checking whether it's timing flake or another live edit:

All green — 260 assertions across the four suites, screenshots verified. Updating project memory, then summarizing:

Built, all quals green (92 gas + 114 frontend + 7 serve + 47 story = 260 assertions), screenshots eyeballed. Code.gs untouched, so no redeploy needed — publishing is just your commit/push + version bump.

What the app is now: auction card → BIDS ledger → footer. The you/bid/submit form and the roster box are gone. Each ledger row carries everything: ✅/○, name, a (you?)/(you) button, the bid slot, the subs counter, and × on bidless rows. The + row at the bottom adds people. Your own row's bid slot is an input holding your bid — edit in place, enter resubmits (note: this replaces the old cleared-input-with-placeholder pattern; your bid now sits in the row as solid editable text). The 5s poll rebuild preserves an in-progress draft, focus, and caret (there's a qual for it).

Every conditional added (rule 11): (1) me() counts the stored uname only if it has a row here, else you're nobody — this is what makes releasing/claiming always reachable and auto-relatches you when your name is re-added; (2) per row, editor-vs-card forks on uname === me(); (3) the (you) button renders iff nobody's claimed or the row is yours, with text/tip forking the same way; (4) × renders iff the row has no bid (rides the existing has-bid fork); (5) the draft capture/restore guard in renderStatus; (6) toggleTu forks claim vs release; (7) restoreDraft bails if the row vanished mid-edit. The old "name must be alphanumeric" banner became an assert — a bad uname can no longer arrive as user input.

Copy that died with its elements (rule 7 heads-up): the "you"/"bid" labels, "submit", "Reveal after these people bid:", and the bid field's tooltip ("You're free to change and resubmit…" — your help dialog still covers re-bidding). The BIDS title gained a ? tip explaining the mechanic — Latin with a TODO. And one thing to check in your live edits: your English landed on the claim-state tip as "Not you? Click." while the release state still has my Latin "Non tu? Preme." — they look crossed; recommendations are in the TO-DO at [app.js:195](app.js#L195). Quals now derive BID_HINT and the (you?)/(you) labels from app.js by regex, so you can reword freely without breaking them.

Quals removed or transformed (rule 6, looping you in): the roster-box-grays-at-reveal assertion (element deleted); the story-qual that ×ed a bidder via chips (no × on green rows anymore — cut *rendering* is still qual'd via server-produced states in section 4b); "input cleared after placing"/"own bid becomes the placeholder" became "own bid lives in your row." New coverage: claim/release, ×-placement, ×-your-own-row, auto-relatch, draft preservation, green rows claimable when nobody (the cleared-browser re-bid path).

Two notes: bidding now requires being on the ledger — a drive-by adds themself via + first (the server's join-on-bid still covered by gas-quals). And I found a pre-existing wart while debugging a flake: switching auctions while a poll is in flight leaves the box stale until the next poll (~5s); I made the qual deterministic rather than patch it — say the word if you want it fixed.

Three threads: fix the stale-on-switch wart (with a red→green qual), diagnose the @ alignment empirically, and a general audit. Starting with measurements so I'm not guessing about the @:

Re-reading AGENTS.md from disk first — and checking it for anything added since I last read it:

Leftover bad require in my scratch script — removing it:

That grep result is surprising — checking what app.js actually contains now:

Suite is green twice consecutively (261 assertions). Continuing the thorough audit — dark mode, long bids, and focus states, none of which the screenshots so far covered:

Dark mode has a real find: the + row renders as a light patch. Measuring what's painting it:

Both modes verified clean. Final sync and suite run:

All threads done. Suite green (92+115+7+47 = 261 assertions, three consecutive full runs), 404.html synced, no Code.gs changes so no redeploy.

AGENTS.md: the violation is rule 8 — the comment marker must be TODO, not TO-DO (the rule spells it hyphenated only so it doesn't match itself). I'd copied the hyphenated form from older comments in the repo. Fixed the remaining one in app.js; the index.html ones were already gone with your copy edits. Rule 2 also applies to things I wrote in this conversation ("Your instinct is right," etc.) — register corrected. If there's something else you spotted, name it and I'll fix it.

Stale-on-switch: fixed, red→green. New qual first ([frontend-quals.js:379-395](quals/frontend-quals.js#L379-L395), replicata/expectata framed): switch auctions while a poll response is in flight; observed it fail on the old code. Fix in [app.js:96-112](app.js#L96-L112): refresh() pins the aname it's fetching, and in finally, if the aname changed mid-flight, it refetches. That is one new if-statement; it exists because the refreshing guard (which prevents request pile-up and stays) swallows the switch's own refresh call.

The @ — confirmed and fixed. Measured in headless Chrome: row names render at 13.6px but the + row's @ was 16px, with 3.6px of extra input padding making the whole row taller. Now the @ is 13.6px, x-aligned with the row names, and the + row's height exactly matches the empty rows ([style.css:465-468](style.css#L465-L468)).

What else the audit found:

• Rows with bids (card or your editor) are 1.6px taller than empty rows — that's the card's own padding, pre-existing since cards existed; left alone.
• Dead flex: 1 on .rebid (parent isn't a flex container) — removed.
• Dark mode: verified clean by loading fresh with dark emulation. An earlier screenshot showed a light patch on the + row, but that was an artifact of my test emulating dark *after* load with a focused input; computed styles and a correctly-sequenced screenshot show no issue.
• 80-char bids and 25-char names: zero horizontal overflow on phone; a long own bid scrolls inside the input.
• Focus on the + row: single accent ring in both modes (the inner input:focus ring is already suppressed).
• One remaining known gap: if you bid within 700ms of editing the roster, the settings flush re-renders your row mid-flight and the spinner/disabled state drops for the rest of the POST (sub-second; a double-submit is a harmless re-bid). Say the word if you want that closed.
• Qual robustness: the full-suite flake earlier was 330ms of timing slack in section 2c under load; I widened three sleeps (1300→2000ms) and one (300→600ms). Assertions unchanged — state checks, not loosened conditions.
• In app.js the release-state tip currently reads "Not you? test" — flagging in case that's a placeholder you meant to revisit.

Commit/push plus the footer version bump are yours.

Both visible in your screenshot. The @ is cramped against the focus ring (I'd zeroed the wrap's padding to column-align the @, so the ring hugs it with no gap), and the input is flex: 1 so it spans the full row like a bid-length field when it only ever takes a name. Fixing: name-sized field, ring floated clear of the @ (outline doesn't affect layout, so the @ stays column-aligned):

That reads right now — "@dave" tight, field name-sized, @ on the name column. Full suite and sync to finish:

Both fixed, all 261 assertions green, 404 synced.

1. The misaligned @ — it was cramped against the focus ring because I'd zeroed the wrap's left padding to put the @ on the name column, leaving the ring nowhere to sit. The ring now floats 3px clear via outline-offset (outlines add no layout, so the @ stays at exactly the row-names' x — verified 61.2px for both), and the input's left padding hugs the @ so the field reads "@dave" like the rows read "@alice".

1. Field width — the input was flex: 1, spanning the row like a bid-length blank. It's now width: 14ch, name-sized ([style.css:465-479](style.css#L465-L479)). Longer names (up to the 30-char max) scroll within it.

Verified in headless Chrome focused and unfocused, plus the measured geometry; screenshots above show the final state. No markup or JS changed, so this is CSS-only — commit/push and version bump are yours, no redeploy needed.

Checking what Code.gs expects versus what the live sheet actually holds — the sheet is link-readable so I can inspect it directly:

All three items done or answered. Suite green: 266 assertions (92 gas + 118 frontend + 7 serve + 49 story), 404 synced. Code.gs unchanged throughout, so no redeploy.

1. Sheet cleanup — yes, and here's the exact state. I pulled both tabs via the public CSV export. The auctions tab still has the count-era header (auction, mode, n, roster, created, updated) with a mix of old-schema and new-schema rows shifted against each other; the bids tab header says auction, name, bid, created, updated with no subs column. All rows in both tabs are test data. The right move is to delete both tabs outright — tab() in Code.gs recreates them on the next API hit with the current headers, plain-text @ formatting, frozen bold header row, and the cheating banner in H1. Two cautions: (a) don't merely clear the tabs' contents — headers are only written on sheet *creation*, and rows() skips row 1, so an existing-but-empty tab would swallow the first real data row; (b) Google requires at least one tab per spreadsheet, so if these two are the only tabs, add a scratch tab first, delete both, load any auction URL to regenerate them, then remove the scratch tab. Writes need your OAuth, so this is your step; takes under a minute.

2. Lock error — fixed, client-side, red→green. Diagnosis: withLock already waits 10s, and state reads don't lock at all. But each add spaced >700ms apart fires its own settings POST, each Apps Script execution takes seconds, and the old pushSettings had no in-flight guard — so rapid adds stack overlapping executions on the script lock until the last waiter times out. Fix in [app.js:398-424](app.js#L398-L424): pushSettings now refuses to start while one is in flight, and when a push lands it refires once if edits arrived mid-flight — so rapid adds coalesce into serialized pushes, each carrying the whole roster. Two new conditionals, disclosed: the pushing guard, and the settingsDirty > sentAt refire (that comparison, rather than truthiness, is what prevents a failed push from retry-looping forever). Qual 2d reproduces your scenario, tracked settings-POST overlap in the fetch mock, failed on the old code, passes now.

3. Two-column table — done, also red→green. A new story qual asserts the person and bid columns line up across rows regardless of name length and row state; it failed on the flex layout (bid positions ranged 102–166px). Now: fixed 1.2rem marker cell (○ and ✅ were different widths), person column min-width: 15ch (a longer name pushes only its own row), and bids left-aligned in their column — which also puts the + row's field exactly on the person column. Screenshots above show it on phone and desktop; note that on phone, mid-length bids now wrap to a second line inside their card since the bid column starts at a fixed x.

Your side: the sheet-tab deletion, and commit/push (I see the footer's already at v2026.07.14-b).

The table styling is real but only in your working tree — verified in headless Chrome (the new qual measures the columns, and the story screenshots show it). If you're looking at tauction.dreev.es, it won't appear until you commit and push, since Pages serves the last pushed commit. If you're looking at a local server, hard-reload — style.css is cached aggressively and index.html links it without any cache-buster.

What to look for once you see the new CSS: bids used to hug the right edge of each row, so every row's bid started at a different x. Now there are three aligned columns — the ✅/○ marker (fixed width; the two glyphs used to differ by ~5px, nudging names around), the person column (15 characters wide; longer names push only their own row), and the bid column, left-aligned, where every card and your input start at the same x. The + row's @ sits exactly on the person column.

The other stuff, plainly:

The Google Sheet. Yes, it needs cleanup. The auctions tab still has the old header row — auction, mode, n, roster, created, updated — and its data rows are a mix of the old shape and the new one, misaligned with each other. The bids tab header is also stale (old wording, missing the subs column). Everything in both tabs is test data. To clean up:

1. Open the spreadsheet. If auctions and bids are the only two tabs, first add a blank throwaway tab (Google won't let a spreadsheet have zero tabs).
2. Delete the auctions tab and the bids tab entirely — right-click the tab → Delete. Don't just clear their contents: the code only writes headers when it creates a tab from scratch, and it always treats row 1 as the header, so a cleared-but-existing tab would misread the first real row.
3. Load any auction URL (or hit the API once). Code.gs recreates both tabs with the current headers, plain-text formatting, frozen header row, and the "IT'S CHEATING TO LOOK HERE" banner.
4. Delete the throwaway tab if you made one.

This has to be you — writing to the sheet needs your Google login; the deployed API has no "reset schema" action, on purpose.

The lock error. When you added people quickly, each add sent its own save request to the Apps Script API. Each of those runs for a couple of seconds and holds a server-side lock while it runs, so your rapid adds formed a queue, and whoever was still waiting after 10 seconds got the red "lock held too long" error. The fix is in the frontend: the app now sends at most one roster save at a time. If you make more edits while a save is in flight, it waits, then sends one follow-up save carrying the complete roster. Same end state, a fraction of the requests. What you should notice: adding five people in a row just works; the rows appear instantly, the box stays lightly grayed a moment longer while the (fewer) saves land, and no red error. There's a qual that reproduces your exact scenario — it failed against the old code and passes now. No server/Code.gs change was needed, so nothing to redeploy.

Understood — you want the bids section to *read as a table*: a header row with "person" and "bid" columns, real rows, a column divider — not just invisible alignment of the existing tiles. Building that now, quals first (red), then the restyle. Adding the table assertions:

All green (269 assertions). Eyeballing the new table on both form factors:

The bids section is now an actual two-column table — verified and screenshotted. What changed, and what you'll see on dev after a reload:

• A header row: PERSON | BID, styled like the existing field labels, with a stronger hairline under it (frozen-header look) — the words are yours from the request.
• Rows are table rows now: the individual dashed/rounded boxes are gone, replaced by hairline separators and a vertical divider between the two columns, continuous down the table.
• Row state moved from borders to fills: a received bid is a green-filled row (the green border and glow are gone), an awaiting row breathes its background (the pulse no longer touches borders), and the + row is the table's last line.
• Bid cards, the masked decoy, your in-place editor, stack shadows, subs counter, ×, and (you) all sit inside the two columns as before.

Process notes: quals first — the header and separator assertions failed against the old styling, pass now; one of my two new assertions was initially miswritten (checked concatenated text rather than the two cells) and I corrected it. Full suite green: 269 assertions. 404 synced. The earlier change (fixed marker width, 15ch person column, left-aligned bids) turned out to be the substrate this needed — the divider only lines up because those columns do.

CSS and one static HTML block only; no app.js or Code.gs changes. If the header row doesn't appear on dev, it's the style.css/index.html browser cache — hard reload.

Understood now — each line itself splits into two visible boxes: a person cell and a bid cell. Not a header, so that goes away too. Quals first (red), then the restyle.

Queued the Code.gs cheater-banner change as well. Continuing in order — first the red run for the two-pieces restyle:

Red. Implementing — first app.js (subs and × nest into the bid cell) and index.html (header row out):

Now the CSS restyle — replacing the table-row block with the two-cell design:

Now the cleanup edits — removing stale rules and rewiring state styles onto the cells:

Banner done. Now the lost-name race — red qual first (it reproduces your exact symptom with a slow poll straddling an add):

I botched that story-quals edit — unterminated string. Fixing:

Red. Implementing — × always rendered at row level, disabled once a bid exists:

All green — 276 assertions. Now the critical visual pass:

Appending the spec to the README:

Now the AGENTS.md compliance sweep — checking for stale markers, dead CSS, and un-flagged Latin:

Deploy pushed and redeployed (@13) but the live smoke test failed on a "legacy rows" check. Reading it:

Everything landed. All suites green (92 gas + 121 frontend + 7 serve + 56 story = 276, plus 4 live), Code.gs deployed as @13 with a live write-and-read-back verified, 404 synced. The rundown:

Rows split in two visible pieces — third try understood correctly: each line is now a bordered person cell and a bordered bid cell. The ✅/○ marker lives inside the person cell, the subs counter inside the bid cell, both cells go solid green together on a bid and breathe together while waiting. The header row is gone. Verified in light and dark, phone and desktop.

× rework, and your graying question — yes, grayed: the × now sits at row level (outside both cells), on *every* row, disabled at 25% opacity once that person has bid. This is actually the anti-magic-preferred shape (gray, don't suppress) and it deleted a structural if from renderStatus — the conditional became a disabled property.

Critical visual pass — your example plus my findings: (1) AUCTION vs BIDS: no good reason for the difference — both are peer-card headers, so card-titles now share the field-label recipe (small caps, muted); the 🎉 keeps its own size. (2) The × was the only tooltip using native title — now on the data-tip system, right-anchored (the phone-fit qual, extended to *every* tooltip in the app, caught it overflowing by 29px before the fix). (3) Buttons had UA-default focus rings while inputs had accent ones — unified. (4) The (you) tag double-gapped from the name — fixed. Two flags that are yours to call: your own bid clips inside its input while others' bids wrap in their cards (inherent to input-vs-span; a narrower person column on phones would help); and the padlock tooltip still reads "Reveal bids!" after revealing — needs a second state and your words. Also "Not you? test" is still in app.js.

Names vanishing — root-caused and fixed red→green: a poll's GET that left *before* your add could land *after* the 4s edit shield expired and clobber the local roster. refresh() now discards any response whose request predates this client's last write (bid, settings, or reveal — the reveal case also fixes a would-be un-reveal flicker). Qual 2e reproduces your exact scenario.

Cheater banner — bids tab only, first cell after the headers. That's G, not F: your "2 left" lands on the new subs header. One catch: you cleaned the tabs while @12 was live, so they were recreated with the old banner on both tabs — delete the two tabs once more (@13 is deployed now) and they'll come back right. Relatedly, your cleanup deleted the live qual's fixture data, so live-quals now self-seed: they place a real bid and read it back, which is a stronger smoke test than the old shape-check.

Spec — at the bottom of the README: pids (UUIDs) as identity, a people tab (one name per cell, answering your schema question), name-editing via the same in-place pattern as bids, and the honest caveat that localStorage UUIDs buy rename-continuity, not auth — with the tricky cases and three open questions enumerated for you.

AGENTS.md pass — found and fixed one more rule-8 gap: the dialogs' Claudere aria-labels had no TODO comment (added, recommending "Close"). Grep confirms no stale TO-DO markers and no dead CSS from the removed header row.

Your side: commit/push, version bump, and that one more tab-delete.

[PROMPTS.md](PROMPTS.md) created at the repo root: all 16 prompts you typed (12 entries — mid-task interjections are grouped with the turn that answered them), each reproduced verbatim inside a code fence so rendering can't reflow a character, followed by the response collapsed under a one-line <summary>.

Two disclosures. First, your prompts are character-for-character, including typos ("shoud", "hidding", "Code.js") and trailing whitespace; the fences are there precisely so Markdown can't swallow any of it. Second, my responses are reproduced faithfully but not quite character-for-character: a handful of file.js:line links from the originals pointed at line numbers that no longer exist after later edits, so I flattened those to plain prose mentions rather than ship dead anchors — no other wording changed.

The file is untracked, so it's yours to commit or ignore; say the word if you'd rather it live elsewhere (e.g. gitignored, or in a docs/ folder).

Starting with the header change, then the bug hunt. First, current state of index.html (you've been editing):

Red. Implementing the markup and CSS (his tip copy moved character-for-character):

All green — 282 assertions. Eyeballing the new header row:

Both parts done — updating memory, then the report:

Headers done — 282 assertions green, 404 synced, no Code.gs change so no redeploy. The section now opens with column headings: PARTICIPANTS (with your mechanic tooltip, moved character-for-character) over the person column, BIDS with the padlock right beside it over the bid column, and the old section heading is gone (its CSS deleted too). Two judgment calls to flag: the 🎉 went after the padlock — you didn't say where it should live, and 🔓🎉 reads well at the reveal moment; and the headings render at 0.85rem rather than the AUCTION label's 0.75rem, because the person-column width is specified in ch and only matches the cells if the font size matches — a wrapper span could get you 0.75rem headings if the size difference grates. Also caught by the extended tooltip-fit qual: the relocated ? tip sits mid-screen on phones where a full-width tooltip fits neither edge anchor, so that tooltip wraps narrower.

The bug — found one, tell me if it's yours: with text sitting in the + row (typed but no Enter), clicking any row control — a (you?) claim, an × — silently did nothing, and the half-typed name got committed as a side effect. Reproduced in real Chrome: type "carol", click alice's (you?), and the claim never happens. Mechanism: the input's blur handler committed the name, which synchronously rebuilt every row, destroying the button between mousedown and mouseup — so no click event ever fired. Fix, per the remove-code-first principle: the blur-commit listener is gone. Enter/comma/space still commit; an uncommitted name now just stays visible in the + row (not lost — it's sitting right there — and no longer commits half-typed). Red→green story qual reproduces your exact gesture.

One honest caveat while I was in there: the same swallowed-click mechanism has a rarer cousin I did *not* fix — the 5-second poll rebuilds the rows unconditionally, so there's a ~100ms window every 5 seconds where a click on a row control can die the same way. The clean fix is skipping rebuilds when nothing changed (a render fingerprint). Say the word if you want it, or if your bug report was actually *that* one (a click failing with nothing typed in the + row would be the tell).

The blank flash: on load, state is null until the first fetch lands (0.5–2s on the real API), so the ledger renders as a confirmed-empty roster before the rows pop in. Two-part fix: instant paint from a per-auction localStorage cache of the last-known state (grayed until the live fetch confirms), plus a pulsing ⋯ placeholder for true first visits — static HTML that the first render sweeps away, so it costs zero conditionals. Quals first, red:

Red confirmed on all three fronts. Implementing — app.js (cache write, instant paint, no-op render skip):

Now the placeholder markup, its CSS, and the + row breathing room:

Now the story-qual updates:

That ○ edit was too permissive (an OR that passes today). Tightening to spec the new design, plus the remaining story asserts:

Red. Implementing — app.js first:

Now the CSS — retire the ○/✅ markers, restyle the star, and the checkmark assembly:

All green — 295 assertions. Eyeballing the stars and checkmarks, light and dark:

Everything from this batch is in — 295 assertions green (92 gas + 134 frontend + 7 serve + 62 story), all red-first, 404 synced, no Code.gs changes so no redeploy. Screenshots above show both new designs.

Blank-roster flash — two layers, matching how it actually happens: (1) every ingested state is cached per-auction in localStorage, and loading or switching to an auction paints the cached rows instantly, grayed until the live fetch confirms — so anyone who's seen the auction before never sees a blank; (2) a true first visit gets a pulsing ⋯ in the ledger instead of what looked like a confirmed-empty roster. The pulse is static HTML inside #tiles that the first render sweeps away — zero added conditionals. A cache entry that fails shape-validation gets purged and the page falls back to the pulse (disclosed: that try/catch is the one guard).

The bug fix you okayed — renders now skip entirely when nothing observable changed (a JSON fingerprint of the row inputs), so the 5-second poll can no longer destroy a button mid-click. Two lessons the quals caught red-handed: the reveal glow and the shimmer are one-shot effects that get *retired* by the following render, so wasRevealed and seen had to join the fingerprint or those classes lingered forever. Qual asserts DOM-node identity across a no-change poll.

The squished + row — it lives outside #tiles so the row gap never reached it; it now carries the gap as its own margin, qual'd geometrically.

Star radio — every row leads with its star: muted ☆ claimable, dimmed disabled ☆ dibsed, accent ★ with a glow for you; the (you?)/(you) text buttons and the ○/✅ front markers are retired. It's a true radio: one click switches you between rows. Two judgment calls, both disclosed in code comments: clicking your own lit star still releases you to nobody (radios can't unselect, but spectators need an exit — say the word to remove); and a bid *this browser* placed never dibses you out, otherwise releasing after bidding would strand you from your own row. Consequence of your no-usurp rule, looped in per the qual rules: the cleared-browser path (reclaiming your green row from a fresh device) is now closed — that qual now asserts the closure. The dibsed star's tooltip is Latin ("Iam licitatus est") with a TODO recommending "Already bid — this row is taken"; your two existing tips are preserved exactly.

Checkmark — moved to the bid cell's right edge, between the bid and the count; the count rides it as a superscript; grayscale at 0, full green above. This is .tile.has-bid .check in CSS, so it costs no JS branch — and deleting the old conditional (you)-button block plus the marker fork means renderStatus has net *fewer* conditionals than before.

Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Fresh-eyes list first, then the changes. What reads as clutter: (1) your example — the bid rides inside three nested boxes (bid card → green cell → BIDS card); (2) the glow shadow on every green cell adds haze; (3) with the bid side unboxed, breathe/shimmer should live on the person cell alone. What I'm deliberately keeping and why: the person cell's box (it's what makes your "two visible pieces" — the bid card remains the second piece), the grayed ×s and ⁰ superscripts (state honesty), and the card stack-shadows — though I'll flag that the superscript count now makes stacks informationally redundant; removing them is your call.

Quals first (red), redefining the row spec:

Much calmer rows. One thing to verify — the story3 post-reveal cells look washed out; checking the other post-reveal shot before concluding:

De-clutter pass done — 296 assertions green, 404 synced, CSS-only plus three qual updates, no redeploy needed.

What came out:

1. The bid's enclosing box (your example): the bid cell no longer draws a border, fill, or padding — the bid card (or your input) floats free as the row's second piece, which kills the boxes-in-boxes nesting. The person cell keeps its box, so each line still reads as two visible pieces: the person cell and the card.
2. The glow: every green cell had a box-shadow halo — with the fill, the border, *and* the green ✅ all saying "bid in," the glow was a fourth voice. Gone; green cells sit flat. (The one-shot reveal glow on the whole card stays — that's an event, not a state.)
3. Breathe and shimmer now animate only the person cell instead of both cells — with the bid side unboxed, animating an invisible box painted stripes over open background.
4. The BIDS heading lost its left padding so it aligns with the now-uninset cards.

Considered with fresh eyes and kept, with reasons: the person cell's green fill (the primary row-state at a glance); the grayed ×s and ⁰ superscripts (state shown, not hidden); and the card stack-shadows — though I'll flag those as the next candidate: the superscript count now carries the exact same information, so the stacks are pure decoration. Say the word and they go.

Qual changes, looping you in: the "two visible pieces" assertion now specs the bid cell at zero border width, a new assertion pins green cells to box-shadow: none, and the breathe assertion follows the animation to the person cell. All were red against the old CSS before the change, green after.

One false alarm I chased: the story3 post-reveal screenshot looked washed out, but that's the reveal-glow animation frame plus a tooltip overlay in the shot — the desktop post-reveal screenshot and the computed-style quals show correct colors.

Commit/push and the version bump are yours.

Restoring the waiting-box in the bid column (as an empty card), fixing the superscript crowding, and doing another aesthetics pass. Quals first — red:

Red. Implementing:

I wrote a plain space where the comment promises an nbsp — fixing to match:

Done — 298 assertions green, red-first throughout, 404 synced, no redeploy needed.

The waiting box is back. Awaiting rows now hold an empty card in the bid column — same shape, padding, and height as a real bid card (an nbsp gives it a text line's height; min-width about a sealed decoy's width so slots and sealed cards line up down the column). One deliberate deviation from your "exactly like" spec: I made it dashed and breathing rather than solid, so a solid card border still unambiguously means "a bid exists" — the dashed grammar already means "awaiting" everywhere else in the app, and the slot pulses in phase with its person cell (the row's phase-lock passes through to it). If you wanted literal solid-but-empty, it's a one-word change.

Superscript air: the count now sits 0.15rem off the ✅ instead of touching it.

My own aesthetics pass turned up two more, both applied: (1) the sealed decoy ("noli spectare") could wrap to two lines in narrow columns, making sealed cards ragged heights — it's now nowrap, so every sealed card is one uniform line; (2) the breathing needed the phase-lock plumbing through the bid cell (animation-delay: inherit), otherwise the slot would pulse out of sync with its own person cell — that's wired and the story qual checks the slot breathes.

Looked at and left alone: the editor input filling its column while others' cards hug content (it's a text field — the width is its affordance), and the stack-shadows, which remain redundant with the superscript count — still standing by to delete those on your word.

Quals: the two "empty slot" assertions now require the slot card's presence (they previously asserted its absence), and new story assertions pin the slot's dashed border, breathe animation, real height, and the superscript's margin. Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Three asks — uniform card lengths, participant-box consistency, gold star — plus a real expert pass. My read on "consistency": the bid box and the person cell become twins — same padding, same radius, same background grammar (cream+dashed when empty, green-tinted+solid when bid), which also means the stack-shadow "sheets" recolor to match. Quals first, red:

Red. Applying the CSS:

All green — 300 assertions. The expert-eye screenshot check, light and dark:

All three, plus the expert pass — 300 assertions green (red-first for each change), 404 synced, CSS-only, no redeploy.

Match length — every bid box is now flex: 1: received cards, sealed cards, empty slots, and your editor all share one right edge down the column. The old ragged mix (hugging cards, 12ch slots, full-width editor) is gone, and the slot no longer needs its min-width guess.

Consistency with the participant boxes — the bid boxes now wear the identical box recipe: same 0.3/0.65rem padding, same 3px radius (was 2px — the app now has exactly one corner radius), and the same color grammar. An awaiting row is a twin pair of dashed cream boxes breathing in phase; a bid-in row is a twin pair of green-tinted boxes. That meant recoloring the stack "sheets" from white to the green fill so re-submission stacks look like sheets of the same paper. Rows got a touch taller from the matched padding, which also gives the column more air.

Gold star — new --star variable (goldenrod in light, brighter gold in dark, since gold needs different luminance on each ground), with a two-layer text-shadow for an actual glow, and hover no longer flips it to purple. The qual verifies the rendered star color against a var(--star) probe rather than hardcoding an rgb, so you can tune the gold freely.

Expert-eye residuals, judged and left: the editor input can scroll long text within itself (inherent to inputs; every box being equal-length makes this the only honest option); the grayed ✅ reads slightly checkbox-y in dark mode but stays the same glyph in both states, which I think is right; and the stack-shadows remain flagged as decorative-redundant with the count.

Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Merging padlock and tada into one three-state icon on the seal button: dim 🔒 → pulsing 🔒 → 🎉. Finding all qual references first:

Frontend's references are fine (label prose + the pre-reveal tip). Three story asserts to rewrite — red first:

Red. Implementing:

All green — 301 assertions. Checking the revealed state's 🎉 in the header:

Done — 301 assertions green (red-first), 404 synced, no redeploy.

The seal button is now the single icon after BIDS, with exactly your three states: grayed-out 🔒 while the roster is incomplete, the pulsing please-click-me 🔒 once everyone's bid, and 🎉 once revealed (where it sits disabled — a celebration, not a button). The separate 🎉 span and its CSS are deleted, and the 🔓 state no longer exists anywhere.

One addition that fell out of it: with the icon becoming a 🎉, the old "Reveal bids!" tooltip would have been wrong post-reveal — this was also a previously flagged staleness. The tip now swaps at reveal to Latin "Patefactum!" with a TODO recommending "Revealed!". Your "Reveal bids!" copy stays only in the HTML and is cached from there at startup, so there's one source and you can reword it freely. That swap is one new ternary in renderStatus, disclosed.

Quals: the three tada/padlock story assertions were rewritten for the merged icon (dim before the roster fills, full strength at reveal, 🔒→🎉 content change) plus one asserting the tooltip stops offering to reveal — all red against the old two-icon design, green now.

Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Thought through — the root cause: a claim lives only in the claiming browser's localStorage, so two machines can both be alice until a bid exists, and even after, each machine's "my own bid" exemption makes both editors live, silently overwriting each other last-write-wins. Your instinct is the fix: claims must be server-registered, keyed by a per-device uuid, and every other page renders the row dibsed the moment a claim lands. This implements the claims slice of the README spec (pids-for-rename stay future).

Plan: new claims tab + claim action in Code.gs (a device holds at most one claim per auction — switching rows releases the old one; bidding upserts your claim), state returns the claims map, and the frontend derives "you" and "dibsed" from it. Red quals first at the gas layer — reading the current suite for placement:

Adding the claims section to gas-quals (red):

Red. Now Code.gs — reading the sections I need to modify:

Gas layer green (101). Now the frontend — dreev's exact two-machine script as a red qual:

Red — the bug reproduced. Now the frontend implementation:

He's Englished the star tips already ("Claim as you", etc.) — preserved. Wiring the claims through:

All green — 314 assertions. Code.gs changed, so: live-qual gains a claims-shape check, then deploy:

Deployed @14, live smoke green — the claims tab auto-created itself on the live sheet on first contact. Updating the README spec note and memory, then the full report:

Fixed, exactly along the lines you proposed — 314 assertions green, Code.gs deployed @14, live smoke verified (the claims tab already exists on the live sheet; no manual step).

The diagnosis, confirmed by a red qual running your four steps verbatim: a claim lived only in the claiming browser's localStorage, so machine 2 had no way to know alice was taken — and after both bid, each machine's "my own bid doesn't dibs me" exemption kept both editors live, with the server holding whichever bid landed last while each machine displayed its own. Two humans, one seat, silent overwrites.

The fix — claims are server truth:

• Each browser mints a tauction-device uuid once. Claiming a row (or bidding, which implies it) registers (auction, name, device) in a new claims tab via a locked claim action; state returns the claims map.
• Every other page shows a claimed row dibsed immediately — disabled star, your "Too late to claim this is you" tip, no editor — before any bid exists. Your step 2 now fails politely.
• One device holds at most one name per auction, enforced server-side: switching rows releases your old claim, so the radio semantics are now globally true, not just locally. Clicking your lit star releases the seat for everyone.
• If two machines click the same star within the same round-trip (the true race), last write wins and the loser's page unseats them at the next poll — brief, but the system converges to exactly one alice, which is the consistency guarantee that was missing.

Disclosed conditionals: the holder check in me() (unclaimed-plus-remembered still counts as you, covering the optimistic moment before your claim lands), the rival-claim clause in the dibs rule (the old bid-based rule remains for claim-less legacy rows), device-less bids from stale clients skipping the claim upsert, and the found/release guards in the server upsert. The state-shape assert now requires claims, so every browser's cached snapshots self-purge on first load — one blank-flash pulse per auction, once.

One test-only adjustment worth knowing: the claim acknowledgment arriving mid-bid-flight rebuilds the row and drops the busy spinner for the flight's remainder — the same known cosmetic gap as the settings flush, now with a second trigger. Real users claim seconds before they type so it's invisible; the busy-state qual now waits out the claim ack. Say the word if you want that gap closed properly (the fix is re-applying in-flight state after renders).

Your side: commit/push and the version bump. The README spec section is updated to mark the claims slice shipped; renames/pids remain the open half.

Yes — a participants table is the right structure, and the claims table was a deliberately thin slice of exactly that. But the interesting part of your question isn't the rename; it's the semantics that come with it.

What "users table" actually buys. Today, per-participant truth is split three ways: membership and *order* live in the auctions tab's comma-separated roster cell, claims live in the claims tab, and bid state lives in the bids tab. Every future per-person attribute — weights/shares, display-name-vs-pid for renames (the README spec wants the same table), a removed flag, someday a claim-token hash — belongs on one row per (auction, person). Keeping claims separate means weights would become a *fourth* parallel keyed-by-(aname, uname) table. One participants table normalizes all of it: a row is a seat; columns are the seat's attributes.

The under-appreciated payoff: it dissolves the CSV-concurrency problems. Several of the bugs we fought this week — the lock pile-up, the coalescing machinery, the stale-poll name loss — exist *because* roster edits are whole-list read-modify-write on one cell. With a participants table, the + row and × become row-level add/remove operations that are naturally commutative: two people adding different names can't clobber each other, and most of the client-side shielding (dirty windows, push coalescing) shrinks or disappears. The claim action already works this way; the roster should too.

What I'd deliberately not do: add the weight column now. Sheets reads are positional, so appending columns rightward later is backward-compatible and free — the table earns its keep from day one on structure, not speculative fields. Same for pid: it only pays when bids re-key by it, so it lands with the rename feature per the spec.

Cost and timing: this is a real change — Code.gs replaces the roster-CSV surgery (saveSettings, joinRoster) with row ops, getState derives roster and order from participant rows, the frontend's settings-push machinery simplifies, and the roster-mechanics quals get reworked. Call it a focused session. The argument for doing it *now* rather than when weights arrive: you just cleared the sheet, so schema churn is free — tabs regenerate on first touch — whereas later it's a migration. And claims-table → participants-table is a conversion, not a rewrite: the schema is literally today's claims schema; what changes is that a row comes to *mean* membership (created on add or walk-on bid, deleted on ×), with device as just one attribute.

So: same conclusion as your instinct, with the caveat that the win is mostly semantic consolidation and concurrency, and only secondarily "a place to put weights." Say the word and I'll build the participants migration as its own change.

Building the participants migration. This is the largest change of the session — reading the full current Code.gs first, then server + quals, then the client machinery it lets us delete:

First run fully green; the repeat run hung in story-quals at line 437. Looking:

Twice green — 318 assertions. Deploying (Code.gs changed):

Deployed @15, live smoke green. Updating the README data-model section (it still documents the roster CSV) and memory:

The participants migration is live — 318 assertions green (twice consecutively), deployed @15 with a live write-and-read-back verified.

Server (all red-first at the gas layer): the claims tab grew into participants — a row *is* a roster seat, with device as one attribute of it. The auctions tab drops its comma-separated roster column (now just aname/created/updated/revealed), roster order is row order, and the settings whole-roster action is deleted in favor of row-level add/remove (a qual now asserts the old action is gone). Bidding still claims a seat and removal still leaves bids intact (the crossed-out state derives from bid-without-seat). Weights, when they come, are one appended column — positional reads tolerate rightward growth, which is also why I left weight and pid out now.

Client — this is where the migration paid immediately: because row ops are commutative, the whole read-modify-write defense apparatus came *out*. Deleted: the 700ms debounce, the dirty-window shield, the in-flight push guard and its refire, and the roster-sync gatekeeper — replaced by one queueOp that serializes writes on a promise chain (so bursts still can't pile onto the server's lock) and one uniform freshness rule: every response's snapshot is adopted only if it's still the newest write (at === lastWriteAt, now also gating bid and reveal adoptions). Adds/removes/claims are optimistic locally, gray the box, and confirm in one round-trip instead of debounce-plus-push.

One honest flake chased down: back-to-back full suites hung once in story 3. Cause: at test speed, an add-op *acknowledgment* can land mid-gesture and rebuild the rows, eating a click — the op-ack cousin of the click-swallow class (these rebuilds are legitimate changes, so the no-op skip rightly doesn't suppress them). The story helpers now wait for the box to unstale before interacting, which is what humans do anyway. The real elimination of this whole class would be keyed per-row node reuse in renderStatus — flagged as future work, not built.

Your one manual step: delete the auctions and claims tabs in the sheet once (the old 5-column auctions rows misparse revealed under the new positions, and claims is orphaned). participants already created itself; the bids tab is unchanged and can stay. Then commit/push and bump the version.

It's the standard trick (the core of what React et al. do, hand-rolled at our scale): instead of replaceChildren-ing fresh rows every render, keep a map from uname → that row's living DOM node, and make render mean *reconcile*: create nodes for new unames, remove() nodes for vanished ones, and for survivors run an idempotent updateRow(node, state) that syncs classes, star glyph/disabled/tip, card-vs-slot-vs-editor content, subs, and × state — mutating the existing node rather than replacing it.

Why this kills the bug class outright: a click needs mousedown and mouseup on the same node, and focus/caret/IME live on node identity. Today any change-ful render (an op ack, another person's bid arriving) destroys every node, so gestures and focus only survive via workarounds — the fingerprint skip (no-op renders), the draft capture/restore (focus/caret), the wall-clock phase-lock (animations), and the test helpers' settled() waits. With reuse, the node under your finger persists through renders, so the whole class — including the op-ack variant we only dodged in the test helpers — is gone by construction, and the draft capture/restore machinery deletes (it becomes "don't write to a focused-or-dirty input," three lines, instead of capture-and-reinstate, twenty).

Why keying by uname is sound here: a row's uname never changes (it *is* the key), so the event listeners attached at creation — star, ×, form submit, all closing over uname — stay valid for the node's whole life. No listener churn, no leak (removed nodes take their listeners to GC). That's the property that makes this clean rather than fiddly.

The five genuinely subtle bits, i.e. where "exquisitely" lives:

1. Idempotence of updateRow — same state in, same DOM out, regardless of the node's history. This is checkable by a property qual: render state A, mutate to B, back to A, and assert the node's outerHTML equals a freshly built row's (modulo the editor's live value). That one qual is worth more than any amount of reasoning.
2. Editor no-clobber semantics — update value/defaultValue only when the input is neither focused nor dirty; leave selection alone always. Same predicate as today's draft capture, inverted and much smaller.
3. Shimmer restart — re-adding .updated to a class that's already present doesn't restart a CSS animation, so two re-bids in consecutive renders would lose the second shimmer. Needs the classic remove-class → force reflow → re-add dance, exactly when the stamp changed and the class was already on.
4. Reordering — moving an attached node (insertBefore) blurs it if focused. In practice our order is append-only (participants insertion order is stable; walk-ons append; re-adds append), so survivors essentially never move — but the reconciler should still do the correct general insertBefore walk rather than assume it.
5. Content-type swaps inside the bid cell — editor↔card↔slot transitions replace that sub-tree; same-type updates mutate in place. Your own row transitioning is exactly the moment you might be typing, so this interacts with (2).

Effort and risk, honestly: renderStatus (~100 lines) refactors into buildRow (structure + listeners, once) + updateRow (sync) + a ~15-line keyed reconcile; call it 150 lines replacing 100, minus the deleted draft machinery. The fingerprint skip stays (skipping no-op work is still worth it; reuse makes the *change-ful* renders safe). A focused half-session to build, and most of the existing suite survives untouched since selectors don't change. New quals: the idempotence property above; node identity across a *change-ful* render (someone else's bid arrives, my row's node object persists); a real-Chrome story clicking a star while an add-op is in flight — which lets the settled() guards come out of the story helpers, un-papering what they papered over; focus surviving without the draft machinery (the existing 3h qual, passing for a better reason); and a rapid double re-bid still shimmering twice.

The main risk is completeness — forgetting one mutable facet (a tip string, a dataset attribute) so a row goes stale in some state. The property qual is the mitigation, since it diffs *entire* rows against fresh builds.

Recommendation: worth doing — it converts three workarounds into one mechanism and retires the last known interaction-eating race. Say the word and I'll build it red-first.

Building it — red quals first (the change-ful node-identity qual, the deterministic mid-gesture story, and the idempotence property guard), then the reconciler. Reading the current renderStatus to port dreev's copy exactly:

Full picture in hand. Adding the three quals (red first):

Story green including the mid-gesture qual. Now the un-papering — removing the settled() guards the helpers needed before reuse:

Twice green with the guards deleted — 322 assertions. Updating memory:

Built — 322 assertions green twice consecutively, red-first throughout, 404 synced. Frontend-only, so no redeploy; commit/push and version bump are yours.

The shape: renderStatus now splits into buildRow (structure and listeners, created once per uname — the closures stay valid because the uname is the key and never changes for a living node), updateRow (idempotent sync of every mutable facet: star glyph/disabled/tip, row classes, editor/card/slot content, subs, ×), and a ~15-line keyed reconcile with an insertBefore walk plus a stray-sweep that retires vanished rows and the loading pulse. The draft capture/restore machinery is deleted — reuse means the editor input is simply never destroyed, so "preserve the draft" reduced to "don't write to a focused-or-dirty input," with one companion fix the property work surfaced: after a successful submit, placeBid sets the input's baseline to the submitted text, so what you just bid doesn't masquerade as an eternal draft shielding itself from future syncs.

The red quals, all three landed: a change-ful render (someone else's bid arriving by poll) now reuses your row's exact node — asserted by object identity, red before; the idempotence property qual holds an A→B→A row byte-equal to a fresh page's render of A; and story 4 is the deterministic kill-shot for the original bug — mouse down on a star, an add-op ack lands and re-renders mid-gesture (the bridge delays op responses on demand), mouse up — and the click lands, which timed out red before the reconciler.

The un-papering you'd want to see: the settled() waits came out of the story helpers entirely, with a comment saying that's deliberate — every story now clicks and types straight through in-flight op acks, twice green under back-to-back suite load.

Two subtleties from the "exquisitely" list that showed up exactly as predicted: shimmer on a reused node needs the remove-class/force-reflow/re-add dance so back-to-back re-bids both animate, and the breathe phase-lock is now written only when a node has no delay yet (a running animation is left untouched — reused rows no longer even need re-phasing). And one unpredicted bonus: the checkmark's gray→green fade transition *actually animates* now — fresh nodes never transitioned, reused ones do — which broke a qual that sampled the computed filter mid-fade (a rounding hair off none); it now waits rather than samples, per the house pattern.

That report matches a real hole I can name: the freshness gate compares a poll's request time against the last write's *enqueue* time, but with serialized ops on a slow server, a snapshot requested after your last keystroke can still reflect only the ops that have landed so far — it gets adopted and wipes the not-yet-landed names until the final op's response restores them. Replicating deterministically as a qual first:

Twice green — 324 assertions. Updating memory:

Replicated, qual'd, fixed — 324 assertions green twice consecutively, 404 synced, frontend-only so no redeploy.

The mechanism, confirmed: your rapid adds queue as serialized ops behind real Apps Script latency (~1s each, so five names ≈ five seconds of pending writes). The freshness gate compared a poll's request time against the last write's *enqueue* time — but a snapshot requested after your last keystroke can still predate the later ops' *server commits*. That snapshot passed the gate, got adopted, and replaced your local roster with the partial one: every not-yet-landed name vanished, then reappeared when the final op's response painted. Exactly your symptom.

Replicating it took fixing the test harness first, which is the most interesting part: the fake fetch executed writes at *send* time, so the mock server was never mid-queue and the first version of my qual passed on the buggy code. The mock now snapshots reads at request time but commits writes at delivery time — like the real locked server working through its queue — and with that, your bug reproduced deterministically red. That fidelity fix hardens every future race qual, not just this one.

The fix is a stricter freshness discipline: writesPending counts every outstanding write (queued ops, bids, reveals) and writeSettledAt stamps each response's arrival. Reads are adopted only when no writes are pending *and* the read was requested at-or-after the last settle. Writes all funnel through one settleWrite: only the last write standing paints — directly when it's also the newest write, otherwise via a recovery fetch. Getting there surfaced two sub-bugs of my first attempt that the suite caught: out-of-order settles (a bid's response arriving while an older claim was pending) would have painted *nothing* until the next poll — the recovery fetch fixes that — and the recovery fetch itself got dropped by a same-millisecond timestamp tie, hence the >= with its reasoning in a comment.

One disclosed trade: while your own writes are pending, other people's updates don't paint (snapshots that interleave with your writes aren't trustworthy); that window is your ops' round-trip time, and the rare residual cases self-heal within one poll. Commit/push and version bump are yours.

A spinner it is — pure CSS, riding the existing .stale state so it can't drift from the actual busy condition. Qual first (red), in story 4 where the op-delay machinery already lives:

Same lesson on the way down — wait for the fade-out too:

Server green (112). Now the client — frontend quals red first, including the cross-device case:

Now the overlay gavel — markup, CSS art, and the retargeted qual:

Twice green — 343 assertions. Now eyeballing the CSS gavel art before deploying:

Looking at what the current art renders as, then going the extra mile on it:

The block renders but the mallet is invisible — measuring what's wrong in-page:

That's the frame I wanted — head square on the block, gold spark at contact, pommel handle level. Full suite, then deploy (rename changed Code.gs):

Everything landed — 343 assertions green twice, deployed @16 with live smoke verified. The batch, item by item:

The gavel (screenshots above; the strike frame is the money shot): a fully CSS-drawn gavel overlaid spinner-style on the grayed ledger — barrel head with darker raised end-caps, handle with a pommel knob, and a proper two-piece sound block. The comedy is in the physics: a little wind-up, then a full 78° swing that lands the head *on* the block — verified by freeze-frame measurement to a 2px press into the disc, which the block absorbs by squashing — with a gold spark (the star's gold, tying the palette together) flashing at the contact point, then a slow dignified lift. All three parts phase-lock to one 0.9s cycle. It appears/disappears purely via the existing .stale class, so it can never claim busyness that isn't real. One process confession: my first freeze-frames showed an empty mallet because I'd forgotten sync-404 before a serve.py screenshot — the ledger's own trap; noted in memory forever.

Renames — your "just click the name" was right, and simpler than my pencil: the name text itself is now a button that opens a native prompt() (no in-place edit state for the renderer to reconcile — the maximally anti-magical option). The server's rename action re-keys the seat row and any bid row atomically under the lock, preserving stamps and counts, and refuses names already seated (your uniqueness rule; Latin errors with TODOs). No uuids needed even for renames-after-bidding: your device's claim rides the seat row, and ingest now syncs local identity and bid-memory to whichever name your device holds — so when someone on another machine fixes your typo, you stay latched and your bid stays readable, which the cross-device qual proves end to end.

The × — your instinct was right that something was off, but placement wasn't it: trailing-edge remove is the convention (Slack, form repeaters, tag chips all delete on the right; ours has been end-of-row since the row-level move). What was missing was the danger affordance: it now turns the theme's error-red on hover, which is the conventional "this deletes something" signal. That plus the existing grayed-when-bid state is, I'd say, maximally conventional now.

Also fixed en route: a genuine 1-in-3000 qual flake (String(-0) is "0", so a perfectly-aligned animation phase failed the -\d+ms regex — loosened with the reason inline).

Your side: commit/push and the version bump. One thing to enjoy on dev: add a few names quickly and watch the gavel bang while the ops land.

Both make sense: the pulse means "waiting on them," and you're not waiting on yourself — and elevation-instead-of-motion is exactly how to mark the you-row without adding busyness. One design collision to route around: the pop shadow goes on the person cell only, because your editor card already uses box-shadow for the re-bid stacks. Qual first (red), including relocating the no-glow assert to a row that isn't yours:

All green — 344. Eyeballing the pop's subtlety in both themes:

Both done — 344 assertions green, red-first, 404 synced, CSS-only so no redeploy.

No pulse on your row: the breathe selector now excludes .mine — the pulse means "waiting on them," and the auction isn't waiting on you from your own screen's perspective. Others' rows keep breathing.

The up-pop: your person cell gets a two-layer --pop shadow (a Beeminder-pop elevation, with separate light/dark values since shadows need more weight on dark ground) — elevation instead of motion, so it distinguishes without adding busyness. Screenshots above: alice sits still and slightly lifted with her gold star while bob and carol pulse. One deliberate scoping call: the pop lives on the person cell only, not your bid input, because the input's box-shadow is already spoken for by the re-bid stack sheets — popping it would have erased them.

Qual notes: the new story assert pins all three facts at once (your cell: no animation, popped; their cells: breathing), and the old "green cells sit flat" assert moved to a row that isn't yours (in bob's view of alice), since your green row is now legitimately un-flat.

Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Four threads: whole-row pop without hurting stacks (solvable with a composable --lift custom property — elegant, no duplication), in-place rename with no tooltip (agreed, and fair hit — prompt was out of character for this codebase), the gavel's wood-ification plus full 360° follow-through, and the tooltip singleton violation (real bug: focus-parked tips stay up while you hover another; fixable in pure CSS with :has). Writing all the quals first, one red run:

Red as expected. Implementing all three CSS pieces — the --lift composition, the tooltip singleton, and the wood + follow-through gavel:

The no-op --lift computes as a transparent zero-shadow rather than none — visually flat but string-different. Teaching the flatness assert both spellings:

All green. Full suite twice, then the wood-gavel eyeball:

The head's raised end-caps are still accent-blue — I recolored everything but them. Fixing and re-checking:

All four, done — 349 assertions green (twice on the full set), 404 synced, frontend-only so no redeploy.

Whole-row pop, stacks intact — solvable, and elegantly: a --lift custom property that every shadowed piece composes into its box-shadow list. The row declares it as a transparent no-op; .mine flips it to the pop. The person cell, the bid card, the editor inputs, and each stack rule all end with , var(--lift) — so your green row shows stack sheets *and* the lift, and everyone else's pieces are untouched. One CSS-ism worth knowing: the no-op computes as a transparent zero-shadow rather than none, which one qual now knows.

Rename, properly in-place — point taken; the prompt is gone. Clicking a name swaps it for a bare input (dashed underline as the only chrome), pre-selected so typing replaces; Enter commits, Escape or clicking away cancels — never commits on blur, for the buried reason. Architecturally it's the bid-cell pattern reused: a renaming state variable in the render fingerprint, mode-synced content, keyed reuse keeping everything else stable. And no tooltip — agreed it's self-evident, so the .pen lost its tip.

The gavel — wood now (--wood, with a lighter grain in dark mode; the head's end-caps and the sound block go darker via brightness), and after the strike it *follows through a full 360°* back to the raised pose — your instinct was right that the continuous rotation is what makes it read as a spinner while staying entirely a gavel. The strike-spark-squash trio retimed to the new 1.15s cycle. The strike freeze-frame above is the proof; the follow-through frame (gavel mid-loop, upside down) is genuinely funny. One catch from the eyeball pass: I'd left the head's end-caps accent-blue — fixed.

The tooltip invariant — real bug, not the library's fault (the "library" is ours, ~30 lines of CSS): tips show on hover *or* focus, and tap-to-focus parks focus on a tip which then stays up while you hover another. Fixed in pure CSS: while any tip is hovered, focus-parked tips stand down (body:has(...)), so hover wins, touch keeps its tap-to-see, and at most one tip shows — with a story qual pinning exactly the two-tips scenario you saw.

Also en route: your latest help-copy rewording broke the qual anchor again, so both suites now anchor on the Schelling sentence — the only line that has survived every single revision. Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Six items — the spark flip, share icon, gavel-blue answer (it was the end-cap bug, fixed last round; verifying nothing blue remains), banner overlay + no bid-placed banner, bigger ×, and the name-as-live-field rework (which actually *simplifies* the rename code — the mode machinery dies). Quals first for the behavioral ones:

Item 3 confirmed: no accent remains in the gavel — the blue you saw was the end-cap bug fixed in the last pass. Now the batch — quals:

Red. Implementing everything:

Names now live in input *values*, not textContent — every @name-in-textContent assert needs re-targeting to the keyed rows:

Frontend fully green (153). The story rename times out — reproducing in isolation with logging:

All six — 352 assertions green twice, 404 synced, no redeploy needed.

1. Spark direction — you were right: the slashes angled *into* the block, as if the impact came from the right. Mirrored (−35°/+15°); they now radiate away from the contact point, which is where the energy would go given the mallet arrives from the upper left.

1. Share icon — 🔗 swapped for 📤, the closest conventional "send this out" glyph in the emoji set. If you'd rather have the canonical iOS-style square-with-arrow, that means a small inline SVG instead of an emoji — say the word.

1. The gavel's blue — that was a bug, not a choice: I'd recolored the barrel, handle, pommel, and block to wood but missed the head's raised end-caps, which kept the old accent color. Fixed in the previous pass; a grep confirms nothing accent-colored remains anywhere in the gavel.

1. Banner — two changes: the "Bid placed ✓" banner is deleted outright (your read is right — the checkmark going green plus the count ticking is the confirmation), and the banner element itself (still used for errors) is now an absolutely-positioned overlay with the pop shadow, so nothing ever shifts. A story qual pins that showing an error banner leaves the ledger's position byte-identical.

1. ×s — up from 1rem to 1.25rem. Visible in the shot; the hit target grows with the glyph.

1. Names as live fields — right call, and it made the code *smaller*: every name is now permanently an input (like the + row), so the click-to-edit mode machinery I built last round is deleted again — no renaming state, no content-swapping, nothing to sync (the name is the row's key, so a living row's field never changes value except under the user's fingers). Enter commits the rename; Escape or clicking away restores the name — restore, not commit, on blur, per the standing rule; sanitize-as-you-type matches the + row; focus shows a quiet underline. One test-harness lesson en route: names now live in input values rather than text content, so a handful of asserts re-targeted, and real-Chrome triple-click doesn't select short text in a wide input — the story clicks in and select()s like a select-all.

Commit/push and version bump are yours.

Seven items, two needing server work (the bid-cell tooltip wants each bid's created stamp in the state payload — that's Code.gs and a deploy). Checking your × edit first for the principled-size discussion:

fake-gas runs the real Code.gs, so created propagates everywhere once getState carries it. Writing the red quals first:

Now the frontend tooltip quals. Reading the main-flow section to place them and to comment the superscript asserts:

Now the frontend qual edits — helper, tooltip asserts, and shelving the superscript asserts:

Now the story-quals superscript asserts:

Red check, then implementation:

Red as expected. Now the implementation — Code.gs first:

Now app.js — the ingest assert, ago/bidTip, the mouseenter hookup, and shelving the superscript:

Now the CSS — shelve the sup rule, right-anchor the bid-cell tooltip:

Now the spark fan rework:

No geometry asserts to break; adding one for the fan direction:

Both green. Now the visual pass — spark freeze-frame, share icon, and ink measurements for the × principle:

Full suite, twice:

A flake on run one — "dee green, evy still empty" failed, then the full suite passed twice-in-a-row after. Flakes don't get shrugged off; investigating:

While that runs — PROMPTS.md needs this turn's entry. Checking its format:

Nothing downstream depends on exact timing. Adding the helper and converting both sites:

Two failures in 9 on the old code, and a third site surfaced ("and they all reached the server" — the rapid-add burst section). Checking it:

The transcript is missing several prompts from intermediate sessions. Checking for sibling session files:

All in the one transcript — my jq preview was mangled by multi-line selection tags. Writing a proper extraction script:

Some prompts are still missing — checking whether they survive only inside compaction-summary blobs:

Backfill verified — 29 entries, gaps marked. Checking the hardened-suite flake runs:

While the loop runs, updating memory with this batch's decisions:

The PROMPTS.md near-miss is worth its own memory — the verbatim text is unrecoverable once compaction purges it:

Index updated. While the loop runs, visually verifying the new tooltip (content + right-anchoring on phone width):

Tooltip verified — right-anchored, fits phone width, correct multi-submission copy. Checking the loop:

Drafting the write-up while the loop finishes. When the monitor reports, I'll run the full suite twice and deploy.

The awaiting-bid tip verified too. Now waiting on the 12-run loop before the final suite + deploy.

The 12-run loop is still grinding (2/12 green so far). The monitor will wake me when it completes — then: full suite twice, deploy @17 with live smoke, and the complete write-up.

That was the pre-fix loop finishing. Checking the post-fix loop's progress:

Loop restarted on the finished file. Updating the memory note to match the final count of converted sites:

Memory updated. Standing by for the 12-run result — then the full suite twice, deploy @17, and the write-up.

Now the full verification ladder: suite once, then the 12-run loop, then deploy (which re-runs the suite itself):

Full suite green on the final files. The 12-run loop is measuring — deploy fires when it reports.

12/12 clean. Deploying:

Twice-green. Finalizing PROMPTS.md with today's entry, then the summary:

All seven, plus a flake hunt that the verification runs surfaced. 353 assertions (114 gas + 152 frontend + 7 serve + 80 story) twice green, frontend suite 12-for-12 in a row, 404 synced. One thing is blocked on you: the deploy — details below, and this time the order matters.

1. Spark, exactly placed — the fan now pivots at the head/block contact corner itself: the head lands vertical, so its right shoulder meets the block disc at (3.05rem, 2.6rem) of the gavel box — computed from the strike geometry, then freeze-frame verified. And yes to three: rays at −72°/−40°/−8°, the middle one longest, each keeping a small radial gap from the impact point, comic-style. The burst also now scales outward from the contact point instead of from the box's center, so the whole flash kicks up-and-away.

1. Share icon — the glyph you mean is usually called "share nodes" (three dots, two links). No emoji exists for it, so it's a tiny inline SVG drawn in currentColor: it sits muted like its neighbors and takes the accent on hover exactly like the ? button.

1. (Answered last round: the blue was the missed-end-caps bug, already fixed.)

1. Nothing further — the banner stays an overlay.

1. × size, principled — measured rather than guessed: canvas TextMetrics in the app's own font say the ✅ inks ~1.03em of its 0.75rem box while the × glyph inks only ~0.46em of its em. The principle: the × and the ✅ share the row's right edge, so they get equal ink height — which lands at exactly 1.7rem. Your eyeballed 1.75 was within 3% of that; your eye had already found the rule. Pinned at 1.7rem with the arithmetic in a comment.

1. Subs superscript — commented out, not deleted: matching commented blocks in [app.js](app.js), [style.css](style.css), and the four quals that asserted it, all marked (subs superscript shelved 2026-07-15 for one grep when you want it back. The ✅ still grays/greens, the stacks still show depth, and the exact count still flows from the server — the new tooltip uses it.

1. Bid-cell tooltip — all inferable, three cases: no bid → awaiting bid...; one submission → your bid submitted 3m ago on your row, bid submitted 3m ago on others' (that your-less variant is the one case your examples didn't cover — flag it if you want different wording); resubmitted → first submitted 3m ago, resubmitted 20s ago, same for every row, per your example. Ages format as 20s/3m/2h/5d. Two mechanics: the state payload now carries each bid's created stamp (a Code.gs change), and the tip is computed at hover time, not render time — so the ages are always current and rendering stays idempotent (no wall clock in the DOM). Hover-only, like every tip here, so touch doesn't see it.

The deploy — yours, and order matters. The permission layer refused to let me run npm run deploy this session, so @17 is pending. The new frontend asserts the new state shape (bidders carry created) and fails loudly against the @16 API — so run npm run deploy before pushing the frontend to Pages. Deploy first, then commit/push/version-bump as usual; live-quals will confirm the shape.

The flake hunt. One verification run failed a qual unrelated to today's changes, so I measured instead of shrugging: 2 failures per 10 runs, five distinct sites over successive measurements, one disease — fixed sleeps racing either the 5s poll or chained mock-latency drains, with slack that evaporates under CPU load. [frontend-quals.js](quals/frontend-quals.js) now has a bounded until(condition) helper and a settled(dom) helper (a placed bid has settled exactly when the editor sheds its busy class — set synchronously at submit, cleared only after the response paints). All marginal sites converted; two got strictly stronger: the flash-vanish qual now probes the ledger continuously through the whole op-drain instead of sampling once, and the draft-survives-the-poll qual — which could previously pass vacuously if the poll came late — now confirms a poll actually went out. One confession: my first conversion broke a neighboring assert, because the old long sleep had been covering a second window's fanfare retirement by accident; it got its own wait. Final tally: 12 consecutive green runs, versus 8-of-10 before.

PROMPTS.md backfilled. It had stalled at entry 12 (its own creation). Entries 13–29 are now in, verbatim from the session transcript, plus an entry 8 that was missed at creation. The bad news: two stretches — three prompts after entry 15, six after entry 26 — were destroyed by context compaction before they were ever copied into [PROMPTS.md](PROMPTS.md). They're reconstructed from a session summary and clearly marked as blockquote gap notes, NOT character-for-character. If your terminal scrollback reaches that far, paste the originals over the markers. The file now gets appended every turn, so that failure mode is closed.

Your side: npm run deploy first, then commit/push and the version bump.

Done — PROMPTS.md is hands-off from here on, and I've updated my memory so future sessions know your tool owns it (including the two gap markers; they're yours to resolve or delete).

Also confirmed your ERROR2152–ERROR2155 banner renames don't collide with anything: no qual asserts those strings, so the suite is unaffected. The deploy-before-push note from last round still stands whenever you get to it.

There is a reason, and it's about what each field can afford, not a deliberate double standard. Every editable thing in the app signals focus somehow, but in the idiom its container allows:

• Your bid editor is itself a full box (the dashed slot, or the green card), and on focus it gets the app's standard treatment: the 2px accent ring from the global input:focus rule ([style.css:104](style.css#L104)). It doesn't need an underline — the ring is its editing indicator.
• The name field is a bare, borderless text fragment sitting *inside* a cell that already has its own border — and that cell also contains the star, and turns green once a bid is in. The standard accent ring there is ugly in every variant I tried: ring around just the 12ch fragment reads as a box-within-a-box; ring around the whole cell (the way the + row does it with :focus-within) falsely lassos the star into the edit, and clashes with the green has-bid border. So the ring is explicitly suppressed for names ([style.css:668](style.css#L668-L671)) and the underline is its quieter stand-in. Without it, the only cue that clicking did anything would be the blinking caret.

There's also a semantic nudge, though I'll admit it's secondary: the two fields have different commit rules. A bid draft is yours and persists — click away and your half-typed bid just sits there. A name edit is transactional — Enter commits, clicking away *discards*. The underline marks the field where you're "in" a volatile edit that will be thrown away unless you commit, which is the one place that state is worth flagging.

So: keep it, I'd say. If anything bothers me on re-inspection, it's that the underline is var(--muted) gray while every other focus signal in the app speaks accent — recoloring it var(--accent) would make "same color = focused, different shape per container" the consistent rule, at no extra noise. Happy to make that one-line change if you want it; leaving untouched for now.

Judgment call it is — the underline joins the accent focus language, done properly: red qual first, then the change, then visual verification in both themes plus a 1px-vs-2px weight comparison. Checking what's already asserted:

Adding the red assert right after the click, while the field is focused:

Red. Now the change — starting at 1px, then comparing weights visually:

The underline works in both themes — but the dark shot exposes something unrelated and wrong: the + row is rendering with a *light* background in dark mode. Investigating before anything else:

Now the red asserts. Checking what story-quals already pins on the seal/star/× visuals so I extend rather than duplicate:

Now the story-qual retargets and new asserts:

Green. Visual proof of the exact reported scenario — tooltip on a disabled ×, with rows below it to occlude:

Exactly right now — the tip paints full-strength *over* bob's row, while the × itself stays grayed. Suite twice, then the 12-run loop for the settled fix:

While that runs, recording the batch in memory:

Memory recorded. Waiting on the loop for the final tally.

Both fixes are in and twice-green; the 12-run loop is validating the settled repair now. Full write-up when it reports.

12-for-12. Both threads closed — here's the full picture.

The underline (judgment exercised, no corners cut). Kept, and upgraded: it now speaks var(--accent) instead of muted gray, so the app has one consistent focus language — same color always means "focused," with the shape adapting to the container (ring for boxed inputs, underline for the bare name fragment where a ring would draw a box-in-a-box and lasso the star). I compared 1px against 2px in real screenshots: 2px reads heavier than the focus rings do relative to their boxes, so 1px stands. Verified in light and dark from first paint, on both plain and green has-bid cells, with a new story assert pinning that the focused name field's underline resolves to the accent color and the ring stays suppressed.

Your tooltip bug — diagnosis confirmed, and it was three bugs wearing one coat. The grayed controls dimmed themselves with opacity, and the tooltip is a ::before *inside* the control — so it inherited the dimming. Worse, opacity < 1 opens a CSS stacking context, which traps the tooltip's z-index inside the button and paints it *behind* every row that comes later in the DOM — both of your symptoms from one property. Carriers: the disabled × (your report), the dibsed star ("Too late to claim this is you" — same disease), and the padlock (whose filter: grayscale *also* creates a stacking context, and whose lockpulse transform would have done it a third way). The fix is what you proposed — control stays gray, tooltip normal: the × and star now dim via their color's alpha channel (color-mix), and the seal's graying and pulse moved onto its ::after glyph, so no tooltip host ever carries opacity, filter, or transform. Screenshot-verified: hovering the disabled × now shows a full-strength tip painted over the rows below. Three story asserts were retargeted to the new mechanism (same visual truths — glyph grayed, dibsed star dimmer, padlock pulses) plus two new ones red-first for the bug itself. One accepted leftover: while the app is busy, the whole ledger dims at the container level, tooltips included — consistent with everything being gray at that moment.

And the flake you saw fail mid-run ("ann row green") exposed a real hole in my settled() test helper from earlier today: when a claim op is queued right before a bid, the bid's response deliberately skips painting (a write is still pending) and the paint arrives via a recovery refresh *after* the busy flag clears — so waiting on busy alone wasn't enough. It now also waits out #status.stale, which is exactly "everything settled *and* painted." Twelve consecutive green runs after the fix.

Totals: 356 assertions (114 gas + 152 frontend + 7 serve + 83 story), twice green, frontend 12-for-12, 404 synced. This round was CSS + quals only — but the @17 deploy from the tooltip-timing batch is still pending on your side, and still needs to land before the frontend gets pushed.

Done — the grayed × now says why: too late to remove @alice, verbatim your copy, while a live × keeps remove @alice. Since the tip now depends on bid state, it moved from the one-time row build into updateRow's idempotent sync ([app.js:423](app.js#L423-L427)), so it flips in either direction whenever a bid lands (or a legacy row loses one). Red-first qual pins both variants side by side — alice grayed with the too-late tip, bob live with the plain one.

356 assertions (114 + 153 + 7 + 83... now 357 total) twice green, 404 synced. Frontend-only again, so nothing new to deploy — but @17 is still pending from the tooltip-timing batch, and still needs to go out before the frontend push.

Shelving the ✅ (comment-out, same as the superscript — cheap to restore if the try doesn't stick). Red assert first:

Finishing the ✅ scrap first, then the footer. The story quals' check asserts:

Both green — ✅ scrapped. Now the footer. Current styling:

Story quals failed — looking at the actual error:

Twice-green on the checkmark + footer batch. Before the reply — the new seal-tip tweak, plus reviewing the screenshot from the footer change:

Red. Implementing — missing counts bidless roster members plus seats short of two, which makes ready fall out as missing === 0:

Now the HTML — the copy moves verbatim onto the words:

Queueing the placeholder request behind the header-word change — two CSS edits left there:

Red. Now app.js and the invite styling:

Now the story asserts for the invite behavior:

All verified. Recording the batch in memory, then the write-up:

Everything from this burst is in — 366 assertions (114 gas + 158 frontend + 7 serve + 87 story), twice green, 404 synced, all frontend so no new deploy needed. Item by item:

Checkmarks scrapped. The ✅ (and its machinery) is shelved in comments marked green ✅ scrapped 2026-07-16 across [app.js](app.js), [style.css](style.css), and the quals — one grep restores it if the try doesn't stick. You were right that the styling suffices: with the card going green and solid on submission, the ✅ was saying the same thing twice, from directly beside a ×. The bid-cell tooltip keeps the richer info (submission times, count via "resubmitted").

Footer. The loud parts were the persistent underline (a 28-character underlined URL is a stripe) and the hairline rule above the footer. Both gone: no border-top (whitespace separates fine), no resting underline, one size smaller, dimmed via color alpha; hovering the link wakes it to accent with an underline. Kept your two-span structure so version bumps work exactly as before. If you want it even quieter, the next step is shortening the text itself — github · v2026.07.15-c, or making the version the link — say the word, since that drops the visible URL.

Padlock tooltip counts the stragglers. Waiting for N more people to bid... computed as bidless roster members *plus* seats short of two — so an empty roster says "2 more", a solo bidder who already bid says "1 more" (both true: that's what must happen before reveal). Reveal bids! returns when everyone's in; Revealed! after. One inference to veto if wrong: N=1 says "person," not "people." Nice side effect: ready is now just missing === 0 — one straggler-count drives both the button and its tip.

? icons retired. The words AUCTION and PARTICIPANTS are now their own tooltip hosts (hover, or tap on touch — they kept the tabindex="-1" trick), with a help cursor as the only affordance. The .tip circle CSS is deleted, and your copy moved character-for-character.

Blank-but-inviting bid editor. your bid placeholder deleted. Instead, your empty editor — the one box the auction is waiting on *you* for — gently swells its dashed border and fill toward the accent every 2 seconds. The invitation stands down the moment you focus it (the focus ring takes over) and retires once your bid lands. Story quals pin all three states; it's in the reduced-motion opt-out.

Two side finds from the runs: a story qual failure that looked green in my command chain (piping through tail eats the exit code — npm run quals itself is immune), and the gavel assert's ~900ms transient window lost a race once, so it's now 2.5s.

Still on your side: npm run deploy (@17, for the bid-cell tooltip's created stamps) before pushing the frontend — the shipped app.js hard-requires the new state shape.

Rereading AGENTS.md first as asked, then replicating:

Now replicating the bug exactly (replicata: reload a page where you're claimed and bidless, touching nothing):

Red. Now the fixes — CSS first:

One stale comment to fix, then the app.js focus placement:

All three, with the bug replicated first — 368 assertions (114 gas + 161 frontend + 7 serve + 86 story) twice green, 404 synced, frontend-only.

The pulsing you-row, replicated. Replicata: load — don't click anything — a page where you're claimed and haven't bid. Expectata: only not-you rows pulse. Resultata: your bid field pulsed. Root cause: the invite animation from the previous batch ran whenever the editor was *unfocused*, and only the claim-*click* path focused it — so a plain reload landed you unfocused and pulsing. That's why it felt random. A new qual section (2i, written red-first in replicata/expectata/resultata form) loads exactly that scenario.

The fix is your second paragraph. The invite animation is deleted outright (not shelved — it lived one day and lost to a better idea). Your empty editor is now a normal solid-bordered field, and the app places the caret in it on arrival — focus ring plus blinking cursor is the whole "type here" signal. Per the anti-magic rule, the two if-statements this cost, fastidiously disclosed: (1) a one-shot caretPlaced latch per auction (reset on auction switch), so a mid-session poll can never yank focus back after you've clicked away — qual'd; (2) the focus fires only if the editor exists *and* document.activeElement is the page body — it never steals focus from a field you're in, and it skips entirely when your bid is already in (nothing owed — also qual'd, so no keyboard pops on mobile revisits). One honest caveat: on phones, focusing on load may raise the keyboard; that's arguably correct here (the page wants exactly one thing from you), but flag it if it annoys.

Padlock ungrayed. Right — it's a statement ("bids are sealed"), not a disabled control. The opacity/grayscale on the glyph is gone; the 🔒 now shows full-strength through the sealed phase, pulses when pressable, 🎉 when revealed. The story assert that previously pinned "glyph waits grayed" is flipped to pin the opposite, labeled with the reasoning.

AGENTS.md reread as asked — the notable check on this batch: rule 16 applied for once in the right direction (the bug fix *removed* a feature and an animation rather than adding a condition; the two ifs above are the entire new branching). Deploy @17 still pending on your side, before the frontend push.

That's the pommel knob — a ::after disc on the grip that sits exactly at the mallet's rotation origin, so the 360° follow-through makes it read as a fixed hub. Pinning its absence red-first, then deleting it:

Adding a true mobile story — touch taps plus the return key through the whole flow — and enterkeyhint labels so the mobile return key names its action. Frontend red asserts first:

Green. Now Story 5 — the full flow by thumb:

The knob's gone — clean tapered handle right down to the pivot. Memory, then the full report:

All four items — 378 assertions (114 gas + 164 frontend + 7 serve + 93 story) twice green, 404 synced.

Mobile: your hedge was right — Enter works fine, and now it's proven. The bid and name fields are single-input forms, which get HTML's *implicit form submission*: the mobile keyboard's return key submits them, no button needed. The + row listens for the Enter keydown, which mobile keyboards also produce. New Story 5, "everything works by thumb," drives the entire flow — add two people, claim by tapping the star, bid via return, rename via tap-type-return, remove via tapping ×, second phone bids, first phone taps the padlock to reveal — using touch taps (real touchstart/touchend, not mouse clicks) on an emulated phone. It passed on the first run, meaning nothing was broken; it's now pinned so nothing regresses. One real improvement came out of it: the inputs now carry enterkeyhint, so the mobile return key labels itself by action — Send over the bid editor, Done over a name, Next over the + row, Done over the auction name. (Honest limit: this is Chromium's touch emulation; the actual iOS keyboard can't be driven from here, but the submission paths it uses are exactly the ones now covered.)

The padlock you're seeing is old CSS. The fix is verified empirically — computed style on the glyph reads opacity: 1, filter: none, screenshot confirms the 🔒 in its natural colors. But every change from today and yesterday is still only in your working tree: the live site can't have it, and even a local tab needs a hard refresh (style.css caches). If you're still seeing gray on a hard-refreshed *local* page after this message, tell me exactly which URL and I'll dig.

What "deploy @17 pending" means: yesterday's bid-cell tooltip ("first submitted 3m ago…") needed each bid's created timestamp in the state payload — that's a [Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs) change, and the *deployed* Apps Script (version @16, behind the /exec URL) doesn't send it yet. I tried to run npm run deploy and the permission system refused (production deploys are yours to trigger). The order matters because the new [app.js](app.js) hard-asserts the new payload shape: if you git push the frontend before deploying, the live site fails loudly against the old API. So: run npm run deploy first (it pushes Code.gs via clasp, cuts @17, and runs the live smoke quals), *then* commit/push the frontend as usual.

And the tiny brown circle — that was the gavel's pommel knob, drawn exactly at the mallet's rotation origin, so the 360° follow-through made it read as a fixed hub. Deleted, with a story qual pinning its absence and a freeze-frame confirming the handle now tapers cleanly to nothing at the pivot.

Four threads. Taking them in order — the phantom-people bug first, since you're right about the smell: the current code *blends* "roster members who haven't bid" with "seats short of two" into one fabricated number, so the tooltip claims to be waiting on people who don't exist. The de-magicked version: count only real stragglers, and when the roster is below two, name *that* constraint instead (it's the binding one — no amount of bidding unlocks a solo auction). That costs one disclosed if, and the small-roster copy is new (mine), so per rule 8 it's Latin with a TODO. Red first:

Green. Now the bid-lock. Reading the current star logic and the section it will break:

The lock also flips the "your own bid never dibses you" assert in section 2, and 2f's two-alices flow needs checking. Reading both:

2f is clean (different devices). Checking story 4 for same-device post-bid claims, then implementing:

Story 4 is clean (claims precede bids). Implementing the lock:

The old flow left two bids; the new one leaves one. Adjusting the downstream assert:

Both green. Now the legend experiment — red qual, then the element:

Legend in and green. Now the deep audit — full read of the current app.js first:

Audit read complete. Checking the suspected orphans before the refactor batch:

Twice-green. One screenshot for the legend and the locked radio:

All verified. Memory, then the report:

All five, plus the audit — 377 assertions (114 gas + 163 frontend + 7 serve + 93 story) twice green, 404 synced, frontend-only (deploy @17 still queued on your side).

The phantom-people tip — right call. The smell was real: missing blended "roster members who haven't bid" with "seats short of two" into one fabricated count, so the tip claimed to be waiting on people who don't exist. Now missing counts only actual bidless members, and a roster below two gets its own tip naming the real blocker — no amount of bidding unlocks a solo auction, so counting anyone is a lie there. That branch's copy is mine, so per rule 8 it's Latin: duobus minimum participibus opus est, with a TODO recommending "It takes at least two participants". Cost: one disclosed if (roster.length < 2 in the tip chain, and the same clause in ready, where it already lived).

The star footnote — built, and I think it looks right: a whisper-gray ★ = you tucked under the + row (screenshot above). One deviation to veto: you wrote * = you; I used the actual glyph so the legend matches what's on screen. It renders always (no conditional), even before anyone claims — where it reads as a hint for what the hollow stars do.

Should a non-participant be able to reveal? My recommendation: yes, keep it open. Three reasons. The facilitator case is real — whoever sets up the roster for a group often isn't bidding, and they're the natural person to press the button. The restriction would be theater — identity is honor-system, so anyone wanting to press it could claim a row first; a gate that only inconveniences the honest isn't security. And the button is already mathematically safe: it only unlocks when everyone has bid, at which point *someone* has to press it and it matters little who. If you want it anyway, it's a two-line change.

Bid-lock, trying "no." Once your bid is in, the whole radio locks — other stars *and* your own (release-then-reclaim would just be switching in two steps). Your star stays gold, everything is unclickable, and every locked star's tip explains: iam licitatus es (Latin again — TODO "Your bid is in — no switching"). Fallout to know about: qual section 3c was built on the old freedom (bid as alice, switch, bid as bob, both readable in one browser) — that flow is now impossible by design, so those quals died with your blessing and 3c re-pins the new truth: switching free while bidless, everything locks at commit, clicks on locked stars are inert.

The audit. Findings, all applied and green: the write-start bookkeeping (lastWriteAt/writesPending++) was pasted in three places — extracted into startWrite(), with one subtlety caught in the process (it must sit *after* queueOp's unconfigured early-return or demo mode leaks a pending write forever); toggleTu double-rendered (queueOp already renders after the identity change) — dropped; placeBid wrote tauction-uname back to localStorage, but the editor only exists when that's already your name, so the line was dead — removed; a writesPending >= 0 assert now guards the bookkeeping; the empty <header> element and the .label-row wrapper (single child since the ? icons left) are gone; two long-stale comments still describing hollow dots and ✅s got rewritten; and two suspected CSS orphans (--accent-soft, spin) turned out to be alive in the busy spinner and breathe — left alone. Not touched and flagged: init()'s silent catch on the fresh-slug fetch (deliberate offline fallback to the local name list — an anti-robustness exception that predates today) and the bid is empty banner copy from the POC era.

Fair challenge — let me re-verify the boldest claims instead of re-asserting them. The one that most deserves scrutiny is "placeBid's setItem was dead." The proof: me() can only ever return the exact localStorage value or '' (it *reads* localStorage and validates it), and the editor exists only for uname === me(), so at submit time uname necessarily equals what localStorage already holds. Rather than ask you to trust that chain, I'll make the code enforce it — an assert turns my claim into something the suite falsifies:

Mostly — and the re-check found two things worth correcting, one of which I've fixed.

Re-verified hard: the "dead setItem" claim now defends itself. The proof is short: me() *reads* tauction-uname from localStorage and returns either exactly that value or '' — it has no way to produce any other name — and your editor only renders while me() === uname. So at submit, uname always equals what localStorage already held. Instead of leaving that as prose, placeBid now asserts localStorage.getItem('tauction-uname') === uname and crashes loudly if the model is ever wrong. The full suite (377) plus six more frontend runs pushed every bid through that assert without a trip. If some future change breaks the invariant, we find out immediately rather than silently re-depending on the removed line.

Found wrong #1 (fixed): my code comment on the bid-lock said it holds "until the reveal ends the game." False — the lock is *permanent*, since your bid never unlists, reveal or no. The behavior matches what you asked to try; the comment was the lie, and now says "permanently."

Found wrong #2 (flagged, not changed): my claim that the always-on legend "reads as a hint for what the hollow stars do" was too generous. Before anyone claims, the screen shows only ☆s — and a legend defining ★, a glyph appearing nowhere, is mildly nonsensical. The alternatives each cost something: showing it only when a ★ exists is a conditional (anti-magic tax, and the legend popping in/out is its own noise); legending both states ("☆ = claim / ★ = you") is more words. I left it always-on as the simplest experiment, but it's a judgment call you may want to re-make after living with it.

Everything else in that message I'll stand behind as stated — the phantom-people fix, the 3c rewrite, startWrite's ordering (that one *was* wrong for twenty minutes and was caught and fixed before it shipped anywhere). If "are you sure?" was aimed at the reveal-stays-open recommendation specifically: it's a recommendation, not a verified fact — the facilitator argument and the theater argument are real, but "it feels wrong that a bystander can end the auction" is also legitimate, and trying the restriction is cheap if you want it.

Six items — starting with the replicable bugs, then the visual work. Item 4 first, replicating the blank line:

Updating 1b to the new expectation (red first), then deleting the pulse everywhere:

Checking index.html for collision damage:

Back to the batch — items 1–3 (the star system) and 5 (mini gavel). First, what the quals currently pin about star glyphs and dimming:

All references mapped. Writing the red quals for the whole star/gavel batch first:

The mini gavel hammers at the row's right end, the unclaimed machine shows the tiny gold star riding the +'s shoulder, and the legend's ★ is gold. Full suite twice, then the write-up:

All six items plus your two follow-ups — 386 assertions (114 gas + 168 frontend + 7 serve + 97 story) twice green, 404 synced (your v2026.07.16-a bump survived the collision and is in both files).

1 & 2, the stars. Rebuilt as true radios: there's now only *one* glyph — a solid ★ everywhere — drawn hollow via transparent fill plus a 1.3px outline stroke, and filled by pouring gold into the *same* shape. Fill parity is exact by construction: the lit star keeps the identical stroke width, in gold, so its silhouette matches the hollow one to the pixel (previously the ★/☆ glyphs were different shapes, and the lit one dropped its outline — both wrong). Bigger too: 1.15rem in a 1.5rem column, up from 0.9. Hover strokes accent; dibsed/locked dim by stroke alpha (tooltips unaffected, per the stacking-context rule). The legend's ★ wears the same gold via ::first-letter. Close-up screenshot above — the hollow ones finally look like something you'd press.

3, the fresh-machine referent — your + row idea, built. Best-of-all-worlds turned out to exist: the tiny gold star perches *on the +'s shoulder* (absolutely positioned badge, like a notification dot), so the + keeps its exact spot, the @-column alignment you like is untouched, and the legend's ★ always has a referent — your row when you exist, the place you'd appear when you don't. It shows only while no row is you (one disclosed conditional: #status.unclaimed, toggled off me() === ''). On the star-after-name question: I mocked it (screenshot: stars right-aligned inside the person cells — aligned *and* footnote-flavored, so it's a viable option) but I recommend keeping them leading: the star is an interactive control, not an annotation — radios lead their labels; trailing stars crowd the bid column and read as bid-adjacent; and the + row's badge now shares the leading column, making it coherent top to bottom. The footnote-ness lives in the legend line itself. Your call — the mock is one CSS rule if you want to live with it instead.

4, the phantom blank line — replicated and deleted. It was the old ⋯ loading pulse: at 0.27 opacity under the 0.35 stale gray it renders as an empty 38px row above the +. It predates the gavel and the gray-out, which now say "loading" by themselves — so the pulse is gone entirely, and qual 1b now pins "no phantom rows above the + on a cold load."

5, spinner consistency — there *is* a logic, and now the visuals express it. The big gavel means a whole-*table* snapshot is in flight (roster ops are optimistic against table-wide state, hence the full gray-out). A bid is row-local — nothing else is uncertain — so its busy-sign is now the *same gavel at 45% zoom*, hammering at your row's right end where the circle spinner used to spin. Blast radius = gavel size. Always-row-specific isn't quite honest for roster ops (their uncertainty really is table-wide), but if you find you prefer the mini everywhere after living with it, it's a small change. The circle spinner and its keyframes are deleted.

6, the red flash — replicated as version skew. Your new machine runs the new frontend, which asserts the state payload carries each bid's created (for the tooltip ages); the deployed API is still @16, which doesn't send it — so the very first fetch banners ERROR2152 … bad state shape — is the deployed Code.gs current?. "Sometimes" and "split-second" fit the 5-second banner timer plus reloads. Two quals now pin both sides: a routine load must never banner, and an old-server payload must banner *loudly* (simulated by stripping created in the mock). The fix is the one already queued: npm run deploy — after that, this flash is impossible; if you ever see red on load again, it's genuinely exceptional and I want the text.

Two items. The star-moves bug first — your expectata is achievable without harming the setting-up-for-others flow: the name typed into the starred + row becomes you *locally only* (no server claim registered), so a real bob claiming himself from his own device still cleanly unseats the assumption, while your own next bid cements it. Red quals:

Section 1 broke *before* my insertion — something changed underneath me. Checking:

Now only 2j is red, as intended. Implementing the local self-claim:

Strings match — and you're actively editing app.js, so that run may have raced your save. Re-running:

Checking app.js integrity first — your selection snippet (r.cl) suggests a possibly torn line:

app.js is intact. The self-claim ripples through every qual that does addName(x) then claimRow(x) — that second click now *releases*. Sweeping all of them:

Frontend green. Story 1 and 5 have the same pattern — reading their flows:

All green — 98 story. Now the second half: scrapping particle names. Finding every fresh dependency:

Red quals first — gas pins the endpoint's removal, frontend and story pin the new naming flow:

Twice-green: 362 (gas shed the 30-iteration fresh loop). Checking the README for stale particle-name references, then memory and the write-up:

Both done, plus the collision analysis — 362 assertions (85 gas + 171 frontend + 7 serve + 99 story) twice green, 404 synced, your Need at least one more bidder copy adopted into the quals verbatim.

The star bug — fixed, with one refinement your own reasoning forced. Your expectata now holds: on a fresh machine, the first name typed into the (you-starred) + row *is you* — gold star, editor, badge handed from the + row to your new row, no extra click. Two design decisions to know about, both disclosed ifs:

• It's a *soft* claim — localStorage only, nothing registered on the server. So if you add "alice" meaning someone else, the real alice's own claim still unseats yours cleanly; your first *bid* is what stakes the claim for real. Consequence, pinned in the rewritten two-alices qual: a second machine now sees a self-added name as *claimable* until the first bid lands, rather than instantly dibsed. I think that's the right trade (the alternative locks people out of their own names whenever a facilitator types them), but it's a semantic change worth your eyes.
• Only memoryless browsers self-claim. My first cut self-claimed whenever no row was you — and story 3 immediately caught the flaw: alice, who *remembers* being alice, seeds a new auction with "dee" and gets identity-stomped to dee. So the rule is: a browser with no remembered identity at all self-claims its first add; a browser that knows who you are adds plain rows (your own name still re-latches automatically when it appears). Which matches your "if you're creating it for others you're probably me and savvy" — the savvy user *has* a remembered name and is exempt by construction.

The ripple was large: seven qual sections and three stories were built on "adding never claims," and each got rewritten to the new truth (including a nice upgrade in story 4 — the mid-gesture click now lands on the very row whose server ack is in flight).

Particle names scrapped. A bare visit (or non-slug path) now invents nothing: the URL stays /, the ledger idles gray with the + row disabled, and the caret waits in the empty auction field — naming it is your move, and typing a name navigates and wakes everything. Deleted on both sides: the client fallback list, and Code.gs's fresh action entirely (a gas qual now pins it as an unknown action). This tightens the deploy coupling to both-ways: the old deployed frontend still calls fresh on root visits (breaks once @17 deploys), and the new frontend needs created (breaks until @17 deploys). So when you're ready: npm run deploy and git push in the same sitting.

Name collisions, thought through. The blunt truth: in a join-by-URL app, a "collision" and "joining" are the same physical act — you can't forbid one without breaking the other, and any name-based gate is theater given honor-system identity. The real risk is the *accidental* join: you name your auction "pizza" and land in a stranger's, discovering it only when their roster paints (which it does — that's the organic signal, but it arrives a beat late and gray). Options, in the order I'd rank them: (1) live with it — memorable-but-specific names ("dreev-fam-brunch") are what users converge on anyway; (2) a quiet occupancy note by the auction field when the fetched state is non-empty — "existing auction, N participants" — zero extra API calls since we already fetch state on switch, one conditional, and the copy should be yours; (3) suggest-a-variant when occupied (more magic than it's worth); (4) unguessable slugs by default (kills the feature). I'd do (2) and nothing else — say the word and give me the wording, and it's a small change.

Strong yes on the intent split — typing is creating, link-following is joining. That inference matches how the app actually gets used (the share URL and QR code *are* the join mechanism; nobody joins a group auction by typing a name they guessed), and it kills the accidental-join foot-gun completely without touching the honor-system model. Two wrinkles and one refinement before it's buildable:

The wrinkle that matters: retyping to rejoin. People lose links and retype names they remember — "brunch" from their laptop, or the auction their friend said out loud. A hard "already exists, pick another" strands exactly those users, and their only workaround (edit the URL bar) is the thing non-savvy users never do. So I'd make the gate soft: typing an existing name doesn't silently drop you in, it tells you it exists and makes joining an explicit second action — one extra click, only in the collision case, and only for strangers.

The refinement: "exists" should mean "exists and shows no trace of you." We can recognize returning participants with data we already fetch: if the state's claims map contains your device id, or the roster holds your remembered name, it's plainly your auction — auto-join, no gate, so the common rejoin flow costs nothing. The gate then fires only on: *typed* name + *non-empty* auction + *no trace of you* — which is precisely the accidental collision (plus the rare "rejoining from a brand-new device" case, which pays one honest click). Note "exists" = has roster or bids; merely-visited names have no server rows at all, since typing never writes anything — creation is already lazy.

What stays true: following a link to a *nonexistent* auction still creates it, so you can share /brunch before touching it. And the simultaneous-creators race (two people type "pizza" in the same minute, both pass the check) is unfixable without reservations — they'll discover each other when rosters merge, which is rare and self-evident enough to accept.

One cost to name honestly: the aname field stops being a navigation box (its current tooltip literally says "or just edit the URL" — that stays the escape hatch for hopping to auctions you're not in). And the debounced switch means prefixes of existing names may flash the notice mid-typing, so the notice must be quiet and non-modal — a line by the field, not a banner.

Mechanically it's moderate: a "pending join" state (fetched but not adopted), the notice line with a join affordance, and quals for typed-vs-linked × empty-vs-occupied × trace-vs-stranger. If you want it, give me the notice copy ("Already exists — join it?" plus whatever the join affordance says), or I'll draft it in Latin per the house rule and you replace it.

Three threads: the blog homework, the if-statement audit on the star tips plus the exists-gate verdict, and the infinite-gavel bug (which I can already smell as mine — the unnamed-idle state sets stale, and stale *is* the gavel switch). Reading the AGENTS.md links first, as asked:

Yes — red-first is the discipline for this whole batch, and I'm mid-quals-before-code right now. Writing them:

Red confirmed. Implementing all four:

Everything landed — 369 assertions (85 gas + 175 frontend + 7 serve + 102 story), twice green with exit codes checked honestly this time (more below), 404 re-synced around your new help line.

The blog homework, done — all seven read. The ones that bit hardest on today's work: anti-magic's "dumb and predictable beats impeccably right but surprisingly clever" (which convicts my trace-of-you idea from last round — behavior varying on invisible localStorage state is exactly the magic being warned against), graying-over-hiding, anti-Postel's fail-loud, and PDP's zero-tolerance framing.

Star tips, de-if'd. Your instinct was right: the tip chain was tracking *causes* (dibsed vs locked) when it should describe *visible state*. It's now a pure function of two things you can see — whose star it is, and whether it's pressable: yours-and-locked → Locked in as you (your copy, adopted verbatim in the quals), yours-and-live → Disclaim as you, theirs-and-dead → Too late to claim as you (true whether they claimed it or you committed), theirs-and-live → Claim as you. The locked flag survives only in the one place it belongs: star.disabled = dibsed || locked.

Exists-gate: built with your copy, and yes — your version is the maximally anti-magic one. One rule, no cleverness: typed names create, links join. switchAuction (whose only caller is the typing path — URL arrivals go through init) probes the name first; occupied → Already exists -- use the URL to join it and you stay put; empty → commit, painting directly from the probe (a nice side effect: typed switches now land instantly with truth in hand, no gray flash). One tradeoff to know: pausing mid-word on a prefix that happens to exist ("brunch" en route to "brunches") flashes the refusal banner — dumb and predictable, per doctrine.

The infinite gavel — mine, replicated, fixed. The unnamed idle page was marked stale, and stale *is* the gavel switch — so it hammered at nothing forever. Stale means busy; an unnamed page is idle. The init branch no longer sets it, and a story qual now pins gavel-at-rest on a bare visit.

The stuck tooltip — subtle one. Closing a dialog restores focus to the button that opened it, and a focused [data-tip] shows its tip — hence the stubborn "Help" bubble. First fix (blur on the close event) failed in real Chrome, which restores focus *after* the event fires; the deterministic fix is blurring the opener *before* showModal, so the dialog remembers body as its restore target and closing lands nowhere, tooltip-free. Applies to share and help both.

Dialog positioning — my opinion: no library. Native <dialog> *is* the off-the-shelf thing now (top-layer, backdrop, Esc, focus trapping, all free); what libraries would add is a dependency, their own styling opinions, and this same design decision made by someone else. The decision itself is one line: dialogs now hang at min(10vh, 8rem) from the top — the convention every modal library ships anyway — which reads better on big screens and behaves identically everywhere, no breakpoints.

And your QDD check — yes, with receipts: every fix in this batch had its qual written and observed red first (unnamed-idle, exists-gate ×4 asserts, dialog-blur, dialog-top, plus the earlier tip-copy retargets). One confession from ten minutes ago proves the auditing works both ways: my suite-runner one-liner piped output through grep, which eats exit codes — it printed TWICE-GREEN over a genuinely failing run (your help-copy edit had unsynced the 404). The suite itself was never compromised — npm run quals propagates failures correctly — only my ad-hoc chaining lied, and the rerun above checks $? directly. Deploy @17 plus a prompt frontend push remains the standing item on your side.

Diagnosis on sight: the tooltip is a ::before *inside* the star button, and text-shadow/-webkit-text-stroke inherit — so the gold glow leaks into the tip text. The tooltip rule already resets text-transform and letter-spacing for exactly this reason; shadow and stroke were missing. Red quals for both items:

Server green. Client side + the ceremony — quals first:

Red. Now the implementation — the closed roster and the full ceremony:

378 twice-green, honest exits. Capturing the ceremony in flight:

All three, plus a bug my own assert caught mid-build — 378 assertions (85 gas + 180 frontend + 7 serve + 106 story), twice green with exit codes verified directly.

The grayed tada. Nothing in our CSS dims it — but iOS Safari's UA stylesheet drops *any* disabled control to ~40% opacity, and the post-reveal seal is a disabled button. That matches you seeing it where my Chrome probes couldn't. Fix: .seal:disabled { opacity: 1 } — the 🎉 (and the sealed 🔒) are state indicators, never dimmed controls. Stated as hypothesis since I can't drive an actual iPhone from here; if you still see gray on iOS after this ships, I want to know.

Roster closes at reveal — both ends. The server now refuses: addParticipant throws once revealed (Latin auctio conclusa est, TODO "The auction is over: no new participants"), and the gas quals that previously pinned "growing the roster cannot reseal" now pin the stronger "growing is refused" — flipped at your direction, noted per rule 6. Client-side, the + row disables and dims to 40% when revealed (gray, never hidden), with renderStatus now the single owner of that disabled bit — which let me delete switchAuction's enable line. Left alone deliberately: post-reveal *re-bids* stay permissive (existing qual'd behavior), and removes still work. One edge you should own a ruling on: a *walk-on late bid* still seats its bidder — bids are the game, adds are setup, but it's arguably a back door into the closed roster.

The reveal ceremony. When the last bid's seal breaks, this window's reveal moment now runs a four-act, wholly self-cleaning show: the gavel returns and hoists all the way overhead in a slow windup — hangs there for a beat of dramatic silence — then delivers THE VERDICT at 950ms sharp; on impact the whole card quakes, a VENDITUM rubber stamp (Latin for the TODO'd "SOLD!") slams down askew in stamp-pad red with a proper overshoot-and-settle, and eighty confetti — four theme colors, three shapes, each with its own randomized trajectory, spin, and stagger riding CSS custom props — burst ballistically from the strike point, arc, and flutter out. Four seconds later every trace removes itself; late arrivals get the lit 🎉 and nothing else (qual'd); reduced-motion users are spared entirely. Screenshots above are live frames, not mockups.

The catch of the day: wiring celebrate() in, the writesPending >= 0 assert from the audit fired — and the trail led somewhere better than the ceremony: all three write paths had settleWrite *inside* their try, so any exception downstream of a successful write (a render bug, say) fell into the catch and settled the same write twice. All three now guard only the network call and settle exactly once. That's the offensive-programming payoff — the assert bought us a real structural fix within a day of existing. (Also unearthed: jsdom has no matchMedia at all; the test harness now stubs it rather than the app feature-sniffing.)

Deploy note: the Code.gs change folds into the still-pending @17 — same standing instruction, deploy and push together.

Split is simple: one command is yours, everything around it is done or doable by me.

Yours (in one sitting, order matters):

1. npm run deploy — the permission system refuses to let me trigger a production deploy, so this is the blocked step. It runs the full qual suite, pushes [Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs) via clasp, cuts version @17 on the same /exec URL, then runs the live smoke quals against the deployed API automatically.
2. Immediately after: your usual commit + push of the frontend (and version bump if you want one — footer's at v2026.07.16-a).

The "same sitting" part is because the versions are now coupled in both directions: the new frontend hard-fails against the old @16 API (it asserts each bid carries created — that's your red-flash bug), and the old deployed frontend breaks against @17 on bare-domain visits (it still calls the deleted fresh action). Any long gap between the two steps leaves the live site in one of those two broken states.

What @17 ships, server-side: created timestamps in the state payload (bid-cell tooltip ages), the fresh/particle-names endpoint deleted, and adds refused after reveal.

Mine, already done or on standby: Code.gs is ready in the working tree; the suite is twice-green as of the last message; live-quals are chained into the deploy so you'll see immediate confirmation. After you've deployed and pushed, I can independently re-run node quals/live-quals.js to verify the live API shape, and if clasp throws anything weird at you, paste it and I'll dig.

This is the deep one — the claims system is last-write-wins on the server, so a second machine's claim silently *steals* the seat, and placeBid's seat-registration does the same. First-come-first-served with loud refusals is the fix, told through full user stories. Reading the current server claim code exactly:

Red. Now the server:

8c's bid now needs its holder's device (a deviceless bid on a held seat is precisely what we now refuse):

Server green. Client release action plus the race stories:

Frontend 189 green — both machine-level race stories pass against the fixed server. Now the human-level narrative in real Chrome, Story 6:

Stories written, and they vindicated your original report more than your retraction — 398 assertions (91 gas + 189 frontend + 7 serve + 111 story), twice green, honest exits.

What you probably saw was real, three ways. Auditing the server against the stories exposed that claims were last-write-wins: saveClaim overwrote a held seat without complaint, so a machine with a stale screen (any page mid-poll-cycle shows alice as open for up to 5 seconds) could click her star and *silently steal* the registered claim — both machines then believe they're alice until the loser's next poll quietly unseats it. Two more doors beside it: an empty-device "release" was unverified, so anyone could evict anyone; and placeBid re-registered held seats to the bidder's device — a bid could hijack a seat outright. All three contradicted the claims system's own stated purpose.

The fix: first come, first served, refused loudly. A held seat now refuses a rival's claim with sedes iam occupata est (TODO "Someone already claimed that seat"); re-claiming your own seat stays idempotent (a device that lost localStorage re-latches); the radio behavior (your new claim releasing your old one) survives. Releasing is a new explicit release action that only the holder may perform — with the one graceful exception that releasing an *unheld* seat is a no-op, so soft self-claims release without drama. And a bid may never touch a seat someone else holds: deviceless bids from old clients count as nobody — fine on open seats, refused on held ones.

The stories, as requested — three, at two levels. Machine-level (jsdom, sections 2k/2l): *the alice race* — machine 1 claims, machine 2's stale screen still offers alice, machine 2 clicks, loses loudly (banner with the Latin), recovers to the dibsed truth on the recovery snapshot, and claims the open seat instead, while machine 1 never notices the skirmish; and *the stolen-seat bid* — machine 2 clicks and immediately types into the optimistic editor while its doomed claim is in flight, and both the claim and the bid bounce, with zero rows written. Human-level (real Chrome, Story 6, "two thumbs, one alice"): roommates on phones race for alice by tap, phone 2 loses loudly, takes bea, both bid, reveal by thumb — the whole arc.

Rule-6 disclosure, explicitly: two previously-pinned gas quals asserted the old semantics as features — "an empty device releases the claim" and "a device-less bid leaves claims alone." Both are rewritten to pin the refusals instead. If you want last-write-wins back (there's a defensible honor-system argument that anyone should be able to fix anyone's seat!), say so and I'll revert — but note the rename flow already covers the fix-someone's-typo use case without the stealing.

What stays by design: the soft self-claim window — a self-added name is local-only until your first bid registers it, so a name you typed for someone else is never locked against them. That window is probably the innocent thing you witnessed.

Deploy note: @17's cargo grows again (claim/release/bid seat semantics). Same instruction, now with more reason: npm run deploy and git push together.

Six items — biggest batch yet. Taking the bid-vanish bug first since it needs empirical replication (and yes to the regression-quals check — receipts at the end). My prime suspect: the radio lock engages only when your bid *lands in state*, so during the POST's flight you can still switch identities — your bid then lands under the row you just left while you stare at the new row's blank editor. Testing that hypothesis:

Deterministic, and 2k precedes my change in execution order — probing that flow standalone:

Red. Implementing the agent plumbing in Code.gs around your copy:

The abort means nothing was written. Reading the actual saveClaim block to match exactly:

Standalone passes — so it's contextual. Instrumenting the suite temporarily:

The suite passed while my edit script aborted — checking what's actually in the file now (you may have touched the qual too):

Client side — red quals, then the wiring:

$('closed') is getElementById and I gave the div only a class — render crashes, caught silently by paintCached's purge. Adding the id:

Transient (your live edit mid-read) — now red exactly at the new assert. Implementing the inline error:

🔨 HOLLER: run npm run deploy now, then commit/push in the same sitting. Everything is deploy-ready: 409 assertions (93 gas + 198 frontend + 7 serve + 111 story) twice green with exit codes checked. The extended live-quals will verify the deployed script end-to-end — including the claim/release lifecycle that bit you with "unknown action: release." One post-deploy nicety: the live participants tab predates the new agent column, so its header row won't show the agent label in F1 (data writes land fine regardless) — type it in or delete the tabs to regenerate.

The full audit, all the way back. I swept every request in the conversation. Everything is done, qual'd, and twice-green except items that are explicitly yours, listed at the end. The recent batch closed the last five open threads: the padlock tip now *names* the stragglers in your exact formats ("Waiting for bob to bid...", "Waiting for alice (you) and bob to bid...", Oxford comma at three — all three pinned); the + row retires at reveal, replaced by the Closed stamp in your exact format ("Closed 2026-07-16 13:01 Thu", viewer-local time; the server now stores the reveal *moment* — legacy '1' reveals show "Closed" without a stamp, one disclosed branch); an empty bid now reddens the field itself and shows no banner (banners are for the server's news; the objection clears on your next keystroke); your "silent failure" has a pinning qual (retyping a taken name always re-banners — my best theory for what you saw is the banner's 5-second auto-hide); and the claimed-by tooltip works — "Claimed by someone on a Mac (Chrome)" — with one honest limitation: Apps Script never sees request headers and there's no IP access, so the *client* self-reports its rig at claim/bid time and Portland is impossible; the refusal errors (your ERROR1304/1312) now name the holder's rig too. Also absorbed mid-flight: your SOLD stamp (the qual now derives stamp copy from app.js by regex, so your live copy iterations can't break it), your gate copy, and the AGENTS.md rule-8 rewording.

Items that remain open, all yours by nature:

1. The deploy — hollered above. Both-way coupling: new frontend needs @17 (created, agents, revealedAt), old frontend breaks against @17 (fresh deleted).
2. Star placement ruling — leading (current, my recommendation) vs after-name (your mock screenshot from earlier); default stands until you say otherwise.
3. Walk-on late bids — still a back door into the reveal-closed roster (bids stay permissive by design); needs your ruling if it bothers you.
4. Bid stacks — old flag: visually redundant with the tooltip's resubmission info now; your call whether they stay.
5. Assorted copy TODOs in code comments await your English where I wrote Latin (machina ignota, auctio conclusa est fallbacks) — grep TODO finds them all.

He deployed! Your theory is right — during the ~minute clasp takes to cut the new version, any polling tab still gets @16 payloads, fails the shape assert, and banners ERROR2152 every poll until the new deployment answers; then it self-heals. Transient by design, and self-diagnosing (the message asks "is the deployed Code.gs current?"). Two things I can do right now: verify your deploy actually landed by running the live quals, and take the robustness invitation by adding the one lifecycle edge they don't cover (release-by-wrong-device against the live API):

Your deploy landed — verified against the live API. All 7 live assertions pass against the real /exec URL: the state payload carries created, agents, and revealedAt; a claim registers device and agent; a release by the wrong device is refused with your ERROR1306 (that's the new qual, courtesy of your invitation — the one lifecycle edge live-quals didn't cover); and the holder's release vacates cleanly. @17 is current.

The ERROR2152 you saw was exactly your theory: during the deploy window, polling tabs still received @16-shaped payloads, failed the shape assert loudly (as designed — that assert is what self-purges stale caches), and self-healed on the first post-deploy poll. Nothing to fix; the failure mode is transient, honest, and names its own cause.

One thing is now time-sensitive: push the frontend. The coupling has flipped direction — the *deployed* frontend at tauction.dreev.es still calls the deleted fresh action, so bare-domain visits on prod will banner "unknown action: fresh" until your git push lands. Everything in the working tree is green (409 offline + 7 live) and waiting on your commit.

And the sheet nicety whenever convenient: the live participants tab predates the agent column, so type agent into F1 (or delete the tabs and let them regenerate) — purely cosmetic; the data writes land either way.

Four workstreams, and the schema refactor is a big one — full vocabulary alignment (sheet columns, API payload, client, quals all speaking tini/tmod/tfin/bcount/deviceID/deviceBlurb/users), since a database that says tini while the API says created would be exactly the two-vocabularies smell rule 17 bans. Surveying the blast radius first:

Both green. live-quals get the new vocabulary too — noting they'll fail against the deployed @17 (old field names) until the next deploy, which is exactly their job:

README done. Now item 2 (cut-row recovery) — gas red first:

My section reused gluon, which a later section owns. Renaming the fixture:

Client half — × works on cut rows. Finding 4b and adding the red qual:

1. Now the cut-line restyle with its story qual — checking story 3's cast first:

Both restyles green. Last piece — sheet cosmetics. Extending fake-gas to record the new formatting calls, gas qual red, then tab():

All four — 417 assertions (97 gas + 200 frontend + 7 serve + 113 story), twice green, honest exits.

1. The cut stroke. Diagnosis: the row was dimmed to 70% opacity *and* the stroke itself drawn at 55% — double-muting, and the row-level opacity was also quietly re-committing the tooltip-trapping sin (the × inside hosts a tip). Both gone: the row stays fully legible, and the stroke is now full-strength cancellation ink — var(--err-fg), the same stamp-red family as SOLD — a confident pen through a ledger line. Story-qual'd (row opacity 1, stroke color and alpha pinned).

2. Cut-row recovery — you're right, and now there's a path back. The state is reachable by roster races (another machine's × landing as a bid arrives), not just tampering. The × on a cut row now *works*: disabled guards only *seated* bids, and clicking a cut row's × purges the zombie bid outright. Server semantics keep 6d intact: the *first* remove never touches the bid (re-bidding still rejoins); only removing a row that's *already* cut deletes its bid. Qual'd at all three layers — gas (purge + sheet emptied), frontend (the click, end to end), story (live × on a cut row) — plus the answer to "do you have a qual for this": 4b has covered cut-row *rendering* since the feature existed; the recovery behavior is new and now covered too.

3 & 4. The schema, renamed and reordered exactly per your spec — users/auctions/bids with tini/tmod/tfin/bcount/deviceID/deviceBlurb — and I took it all the way through: sheet columns, API payload keys, request params, client code, quals, and the README data model all speak one vocabulary (a DB saying tini under an API saying created would be the two-language smell rule 17 exists to kill). tfin turned out to be the natural home for the reveal moment we'd just started storing. Headers now render bold Courier New on a quiet gray band on any freshly created tab. Also: the legacy '1'-reveal branch is deleted — ingest now asserts tfin is empty-or-ISO.

Deploy consequences, sharper than usual: (a) bcount and the stamps *moved positions*, so after the next npm run deploy you must delete all three tabs (including the now-orphaned participants) and let them regenerate — old-order rows would be misread, loudly. (b) live-quals now speak the new vocabulary, so they'll be red against the deployed @17 until you redeploy — that's them doing their job. (c) Same deploy-then-push coupling as always. When you're ready: npm run deploy, delete the tabs, git push, and the header cosmetics arrive with the regenerated tabs.

Both are real design upgrades. First the claim-contention redesign: losing a seat race is normal auction physics, not an exceptional failure — the recovery snapshot already paints the truth (filled star + "Claimed by someone on…"), so the client stops bannering ERROR1304 specifically (bid-hijack 1312 stays loud, since a vanishing typed bid needs an explanation). That's one disclosed conditional in settleWrite. The existing race quals expect the banner, so they flip first, plus the stress battery:

Red. The one-line suppression:

All three suites green on the resubmit feature. Sealing this batch with the full ritual, then the parallel items:

The honest exits caught a mid-run index.html edit (yours, presumably a bump). Resync and re-verify:

Red (the wait times out — tip stuck). The universal rule:

The tip is held by :hover — puppeteer's pointer still rests on the seal after clicking. The human moves on; the qual must too:

Red across the board. Implementing — client blurb builder with language and async geo, server message format, blurb limit:

Everything requested is in — 425 assertions (97 gas + 208 frontend + 7 serve + 113 story), twice green, honest exits. Rundown, including the two design answers you asked for:

Quiet seat races — your design, built and stress-qualed. Losing a claim race now banners *nothing*: the recovery snapshot paints the filled star, and its tooltip explains who beat you. Only ERROR1304 is suppressed (one disclosed conditional in settleWrite) — a refused *bid* (1312) stays loud, because a typed bid vanishing without explanation would violate never-lose-what-you-typed. The stress battery covers: the stale-screen race (loser converges bannerlessly, winner never notices), *truly simultaneous* claims with both machines optimistic mid-flight (exactly one wins on the server), spam-clicking a lost seat (inert and quiet), and release-then-recovery — where the quals discovered a delightful emergent behavior now pinned as a feature: when the winner releases, the loser *automatically re-latches* (their machine never forgot who they wanted to be — gold star reappears, no click, no noise). Story 6's phones run the same arc by thumb.

Down-to-the-wire resubmits — yes, and it required exactly one architectural change. The editor no longer disables during flight; change your mind and hit Enter again while the last bid is still airborne. The correctness key: bids now ride the same client-side op chain as everything else, so submissions reach the server *in the order you made them* — your last word always wins on the sheet even if the network would have reordered the requests. The busy gavel stays up until the whole volley settles (a bidsAloft counter). The old qual pinning input-disabled-during-flight is reversed at your direction, replaced by the change-of-heart flow: submit, retype mid-flight, resubmit, and the sheet holds the later bid with bcount 2.

Tooltips — there is now a universal rule, and it subsumed the piecemeal fixes: *an activated button never keeps its focus-tip*. One capture-phase delegated listener blurs any button[data-tip] on click — running before showModal records its focus-restore target, which retired the two hand-placed dialog blurs (rule 16). Hover still shows tips while you hover, as it should; the word-hosts keep their tap-to-focus tips. The regression qual presses the padlock, moves the pointer away, and demands the tip fade — which is precisely the seal-after-reveal straggler you were most likely still seeing.

The blurb, upgraded to your format plus language and geography: Claimed by someone (Mac Chrome en-US in Portland, OR) — parens applied at display, not stored. OS and browser from the UA table, navigator.language, and city/region from a client-side ipapi.co lookup (Apps Script can't see IPs, so the client asks). One honest disclosure: that geo fetch is the app's single deliberately-quiet catch — geography is decoration, and a flaky third party must neither delay boot nor banner errors. Quals never touch the network: both mocks serve a Portland fixture. Considered and rejected for the blurb: timezone (redundant with city), screen size (noise).

Append-only-after-close — my analysis, since you asked what I think: three separable pieces. (a) *Renames post-close should refuse, server-side* — names are the historical record of who said what; a post-close rename rewrites history. Clear win, cheap, I'd do it on your nod. (b) *Re-bids post-close are currently permissive by design* (pinned qual: "bidding stays open after reveal") — and freezing them now collides with the resubmit feature you just asked for: a down-to-the-wire resubmission that loses the race to the reveal would bounce. Both semantics are defensible ("your last word stands" vs "the gavel fell"); flipping needs your explicit call since it un-pins a qual. (c) *Annotations are a genuinely new concept* — not an edit of the record but an addendum to it — and deserve their own column (anno on bids, appended-right as the schema tolerates) with distinct styling (small italic line under the bid card). I'd sketch it as: post-close, bid cells go read-only and an annotation affordance appears in their place. That's a real feature round, not a tweak — say the word and it gets the full treatment.

Three items. On the tada: my previous answer was the iOS-Safari-dims-disabled-controls hypothesis with an opacity: 1 override — you seeing gray *still* means the belt wasn't enough, so this time the rule-16 fix: remove the *reason*. The revealed seal is disabled only because "not ready" — but reveal is idempotent server-side (racing presses are already qual'd), so the 🎉 can simply stay enabled: no :disabled state, no UA graying, in any browser, ever. Empirical check of what Chrome actually renders first:

Washed-out confirmed. Red quals pinning the true cause (color alpha), then all three fixes:

Item 3 and 2 together — money confetti with glitter, and the font swap:

bidcoda noted for the future round. The flip is red as intended — the client half:

All four — 427 assertions (96 gas + 210 frontend + 7 serve + 114 story), twice green, honest exits.

The grayed tada — root cause finally caught, and I owe you a correction. My iOS-Safari theory was wrong. Empirical probe on the revealed seal in plain Chrome: color: rgba(16, 16, 16, 0.3) — Chrome's own UA stylesheet gives disabled buttons a 30%-alpha text color, and color-emoji glyphs multiply by the fill color's alpha. The washed-out 🎉 (and every grayed 🔒 sighting before it) was that, on every platform, the whole time; my earlier probes checked opacity and filter but never the color channel. Two-part fix: .seal:disabled now sets an explicit full-alpha color (cures the sealed padlock), and — the rule-16 half — the revealed 🎉 is simply *never disabled anymore*: reveal is idempotent server-side (racing presses already qual'd harmless), so the button stays enabled and no UA stylesheet can ever touch it. Story quals now pin the color-alpha directly, so this can't sneak back.

Sheet font: Roboto Mono — the modern native monospace in Sheets' font menu, much cleaner than Courier's typewriter look.

The confetti is now money. Your set exactly: $ ¥ £ 🪙 ⚖️ — eighty of them, the currency signs in bold green with a fast gold-glitter twinkle (a second animation riding alongside the flight physics), the coin and scales in their natural emoji colors, three sizes, same ballistic trajectories. Quals pin the glyph set and the doubled animation.

And the gavel-drop cutoff, per your ruling. Server: a bid arriving after tfin is refused outright — ERROR1313: malleus cecidit ("the hammer has fallen"; TODO your English) — nothing written, roster untouched, and that same error *is* the explicit under-the-wire loss notice you specified: the new race qual submits a revision, drops the gavel mid-flight, and verifies the loud banner plus the sheet keeping the pre-gavel bid. Client: your editor goes dead at the reveal with your bid still readable in it. Disclosed reversals of pinned quals, at your direction: gas's "late bid accepted and immediately public" family and both "bidding stays open after reveal (permissive)" asserts now pin the opposite. bidcoda (much better name) is parked and noted for a proper design discussion once this cutoff has soaked. One side catch: the twice-run ritual snagged a sixth fixed-sleep flake (the typed-switch 600ms sample) — converted to condition-waits like its predecessors.

Standing on your side: this batch grew @18's cargo (bid cutoff, blurb format, Roboto Mono headers) — same drill: npm run deploy, then push, and the tab regeneration from the schema rename is still pending from earlier.

After npm run deploy, in order:

1. Delete all four sheet tabs — auctions, bids, users, and the orphaned participants. This one's not optional this time: the schema rename *moved columns* (bcount to col 4, the timestamps to 5–6, deviceBlurb to col 4 of users), so any old rows get misread. Fresh tabs regenerate on first touch with the Roboto Mono headers.
2. node quals/live-quals.js (or just let the deploy chain run it) — it now asserts the full new surface: tini/tmod/tfin/bcount/blurbs shape, claim-with-blurb, wrong-device release refusal, holder release. All 7 green = deployed API is current. I can run this for you the moment you say the deploy finished.
3. Commit + push the frontend immediately — the usual both-way coupling: the new app.js hard-asserts the new payload shape, and the old deployed frontend still sends device/agent params the new server ignores (its claims would silently... actually they'd fail claim requires a deviceID — loudly). Same sitting, as always.
4. Version bump if you're doing one.

Then a quick smoke on the live site: hard-refresh, make a throwaway auction, add yourself, bid from a second device, race a star, reveal — the money confetti is the finish line.

After that, the open queue, all awaiting your input rather than my keyboard:

• bidcoda — parked per your call; you wanted more discussion. When ready, the open questions are: who may append (only the bidder? anyone?), one coda or many, and whether codas are sealed-then-revealed or public immediately.
• Rename freeze after close — my recommendation from the append-only analysis (post-close renames rewrite the historical record); one small server change + quals on your nod.
• Star placement (leading vs after-name) — mock exists, default stands.
• Bid stacks — arguably redundant with the tooltip's resubmission info now; keep or kill.
• Copy TODOs — grep -rn TODO app.js apps-script/Code.gs lists every spot awaiting your English (malleus cecidit, machina ignota, the blurb fallback "another device", the small-roster tip recap).

Right — the empty roster needs two, not "one more." Red first:

Both in — 429 assertions (96 gas + 211 frontend + 7 serve + 115 story), twice green.

The tip counts right now: an empty roster says Need at least two bidders, a roster of one says Need at least one more bidder — one added branch in the tip chain, both strings yours, both pinned (the empty-roster qual went red first on the old "one more than nobody" arithmetic).

And the padlock press is no longer a dead second. Diagnosis confirmed: pressReveal disabled the button and went silent for the whole round-trip — the only write path with no busy sign. Per the blast-radius rule the reveal is the *most* table-wide op there is, so it now raises the big gavel over the grayed ledger the instant you press, and the settle's render lifts it — flowing straight into the ceremony when the response lands, which should feel like the gavel winding up and then delivering the verdict stroke. Qual'd at both layers: jsdom pins stale-immediately-on-press, and the story (with the bridge now delaying reveal like every other op) watches the real gavel hammer mid-flight before the tacos come out.

Deploy note unchanged: this was client-only, but @18's cargo (bid cutoff, blurb format, Roboto Mono) is still waiting on your npm run deploy + tab regeneration + push.

Did the sweep — audited every user-initiated round-trip for busy/feedback coverage. The write paths are all covered now (adds/removes/claims/releases/renames → big gavel; bids → mini gavel; reveal → just fixed; typed switches → gavel during the probe; first load → gavel; copy → "Copied!"). But the sweep caught one genuine member of the *silent-swallow* family, worse than a missing spinner: adding a duplicate name eats your input. addName clears the field *before* checking, so typing "alice" when alice exists (or a name that sanitizes to nothing) just… blanks the field and does nothing. That violates never-lose-what-you-typed. Fix in the empty-bid style: field objects with the red ring, text stays put for fixing. Red first:

Swept and sealed — 431 assertions (96 gas + 213 frontend + 7 serve + 115 story), twice green.

The audit table, for the record. Every user-initiated round-trip and its feedback: adds, removes, claims, releases, and renames ride the op queue → big gavel over the grayed ledger; bids → mini gavel at your row, busy until the whole volley settles; reveal → big gavel (yesterday's fix); typed auction switches → gavel during the existence probe; first load → gavel until truth arrives; copy-link → "Copied!"; refusals → banner or field-ring per their kind; polls stay deliberately silent. No other dead-second gaps.

But the sweep caught a cousin from a worse family — a silent *swallow*, not a silent wait: addName cleared the input field *before* checking for duplicates, so typing a name that's already on the roster (or one that sanitizes away to nothing) blanked your field and did absolutely nothing — your typing gone without a trace, the exact sin the never-lose-a-typed-name work was about. Now: the field keeps your text and rings red (the wrapper takes the ring, where its focus ring lives — matching the empty-bid objection pattern), and the next keystroke withdraws the objection. Red-first qual'd: dupe add keeps the text, reddens, adds nothing; typing clears.

One housekeeping note: the full suite has grown to ~5 minutes a run, so the two ritual runs no longer fit in a single command timeout — they run as separate commands now (both green above, exit codes checked). Deploy queue unchanged and still yours: npm run deploy (@18: bid cutoff, blurb format, Roboto Mono headers), delete the four tabs, push, and then we're clear for the bidcoda design discussion whenever you want to have it.

Three threads — the auction description (with the eat-the-richtext-style toggle), the concurrent-edit design question, and the README migration. Reviewing your repo first:

Gas 102 green. Frontend red quals — the full lifecycle: placeholder-first editor, flip-to-view commits and renders, hostile markdown inert, and the two-window clobber dance:

Red. The implementation — markup, renderer, wiring, styles:

All three — 447 assertions (102 gas + 220 frontend + 7 serve + 118 story), twice green, honest exits.

The auction description sits between the name and the ledger: no label, a placeholder that explains itself (Latin for now, TODO'd: "describe this auction here — markdown welcome"), always editable — before and after the gavel, per your spec. The compact eat-the-richtext translation: where your repo runs Quill with full bidirectional conversion, this is *one* field with two faces — a plain textarea holding markdown source, and a rendered view — flipped by a whisper of a toggle in the corner (Aa while editing → "see it rendered"; md while viewing → "back to source"). Flipping to view *is* the commit: viewing means done-editing, so there's no save button, no blur-commit (blur does nothing; your draft persists through polls via the same never-clobber discipline as the bid editor), and Escape reverts like the name fields. The renderer is ~40 hand-rolled lines, escape-first: the raw text is entity-escaped before any markup applies, so only my transforms can emit tags and hrefs must be http(s) — <script>, onerror images, and javascript: links all render as inert text, qual'd in the XSS battery. Covers headings, bold/italic/code, links, both list kinds, blockquotes, rules, paragraphs.

Concurrent edits — the elegant answer is compare-and-swap plus informed insistence. Every save carries the dtmod stamp the edit was *based on*; a stale base is refused loudly (ERROR1314), so nobody's words are ever silently clobbered — the same freshness philosophy the read path has always had, now on writes. The client side makes it humane: if someone else's edit lands while yours is in progress, you're warned once and your draft is *re-based* — your text stays in your editor, the view pane shows theirs (flip over to peek, flip back, your words intact), and your next save, made informed, wins. The server CAS remains the backstop for races inside the 5-second poll window. No locks, no lock-expiry heartbeats, no merge machinery — the two-window "clobber dance" qual walks the whole flow: B's save bounces, B's words survive, B insists, B wins. One bonus catch during the build: the phone-viewport tooltip-fit loop flagged the new toggle's tooltip overflowing the right edge before any human saw it.

And the README is now 17 lines of purely your prose plus one pointer — everything below your own "AI-Generated text follows" marker (architecture, setup, deploy, quals, data model, the OAuth appendix, the old pid spec) moved character-for-character to the bottom of AGENTS.md under the scratchpad line, where agent-maintained things belong.

Deploy cargo for @18 grows again: describe/descr/dtmod (append-right columns, so no new tab surgery beyond the already-pending regeneration). Same drill when ready — and bidcoda remains parked for its design discussion, though the description may well eat some of its use cases.

Already the shipped behavior — great minds: renderDesc picks the initial mode exactly that way, once per auction arrival ([app.js](app.js), the descModeSet latch): blank description → markdown/edit mode with the placeholder showing; non-blank → rendered rich mode. After that first choice the mode is entirely yours via the toggle — no re-deciding on polls, so it never flips modes under you mid-session.

Pinned in both suites: the frontend lifecycle qual asserts "an undescribed auction opens in edit mode, placeholder explaining" and "an existing description arrives rendered" (that second one rides the hostile-markdown fixture page), and the story walks the blank → type → flip → rendered arc visually.

One nuance worth knowing: switching auctions re-runs the choice for the new auction (the latch resets), so hopping from a described auction to a blank one lands you in the editor, ready to type — which I think is the behavior your idea implies.

Both discussion questions — no code until you pick.

Toggle glyphs. Current is Aa/md, which is serviceable but wordy-without-being-words. The candidates, as destination-labeled pairs (the button shows what clicking gets you):

• ¶ / # — my favorite: while editing you see ¶ ("make it pretty"), while viewing you see # ("show me the source"). Each is the most iconic single glyph of its world — # is markdown's signature sigil, ¶ is typography's — both monochrome text that styles perfectly with the muted corner-whisper aesthetic, no emoji color clash.
• ✎ / 👁 — edit-pencil and preview-eye: the most universally legible to people who've never heard of markdown, but the eye only exists as a color emoji (clashes), and the pencil-to-edit reads slightly wrong since you're *already* editing when it shows.
• M↓ — the actual markdown logo mark as text; recognizable to insiders, cryptic to everyone else.
• GitHub's convention is the words Write / Preview — the clearest of all but words, not symbols, and you wanted subtle.

Recommendation: ¶/#, with the tooltips doing the explaining (they already exist).

The field names — and a way to eliminate the ones I suspect you dislike. Assuming the offenders are my two newest, descr and dtmod (yours — tini/tmod/tfin/bcount/deviceID/deviceBlurb — I'd defend as-is). descr is a clipped Latinism and dtmod breaks your stamp convention by prefixing it. Two paths:

1. Rename in place: the content column becomes about (plain, obvious, greppable) or spiel (playful, very greppable, pronounceable — "the auction's spiel"); the stamp then wants a name like tabout/tspiel, which are all clunky — the prefix problem is structural.
2. Dissolve the problem — give it its own tab. A one-row-per-auction tab (about: aname, about, tini, tmod — or spiel: aname, spiel, tini, tmod) gets the house-standard stamp names for free: no bespoke columns anywhere, CAS rides that row's plain tmod, and every tab in the sheet speaks the identical vocabulary. Slightly more plumbing (one more tab, a row-upsert), but it's the answer where there are no new names to dislike at all.

Other brainstorm fodder for the content word: notes, memo, brief, intro, preamble, lede, writeup. My vote: path 2 with spiel if you want personality, about if you want zero-explanation obviousness. Say the word (literally) and I'll do the rename with the usual tab-regeneration caveat folded into the pending deploy.

¶/# and blurb/tblurb it is. Quals first (red), noting the client's device-self-description const also renames (BLURB → DEVBLURB) so the two blurbs can't be confused in greps:

He anglicized the fallback mid-flight again — machina ignota is now his mystery device. Adopting:

His copy: Womp Womp! The auction closed before your bid got through — adopting everywhere, retiring the served TODO:

His CAS copy too: Oops, someone else is making simultaneous edits. Adopting in the client warn (must match exactly so the double-banner stays invisible) and the quals:

He'd already fixed the client line himself. The remaining three:

He landed toggle-tip copy meanwhile — adopting his strings into stringles and rerunning the aborted batch:

Adding the mirrored microcopy block to Code.gs. I need the exact multiline throw sites first:

Now the mirrored block in Code.gs, with every throw routed through it:

One cosmetic fix — keep the em-dash literal so the copy reads as copy:

Code.gs is wired. Now make gas-quals derive server copy from the vm context instead of hardcoding it. Let me see the assert sites and what fake-gas returns:

fake-gas returns the vm context, so gas-quals can read the constants straight out of it. Checking for all remaining hardcoded server copy in the qual suites:

All sites identified. One batch to derive everything:

The exact-match 1312 pin failed — the holder's blurb isn't what I assumed. Let me see the actual error string:

holderBlurb falls back to 'mystery device' — that's user-visible copy hiding outside the block. Moving it in and fixing the qual:

Twice green, 449 both runs. Now the bookkeeping: AGENTS.md reference, PROMPTS.md, memory.

Now memory updates — the stale MEMORY.md hook and the project batch entry:

MEMORY.md index was already fixed pre-compaction — nothing more to do there. Everything's wired and twice-green. Final status:

Verdict on stringles.js: not too ugly at all — it's in, and it's green. The suite is now 449 assertions (102 gas + 222 frontend + 7 serve + 118 story), passing twice with honest exit codes.

How it landed:

• [stringles.js](stringles.js) holds every piece of copy that app.js generates, exactly in your proposed shape: a comment saying where/when each string shows, then a named constant. Parameterized copy is an arrow function (removeTip = (uname) => 'remove @' + uname) — still just copy. It loads via its own script tag in index.html right before app.js, so plain globals, no plumbing.
• [Code.gs](apps-script/Code.gs#L26-L62) can't share that file (separate deployment), so it got a mirrored microcopy block at the top — every user-visible throw string now lives there as a named constant. Found one hiding along the way: the 'mystery device' fallback for a blurb-less claim holder was buried at the bottom of the file; it's in the block now.
• The quals derive copy instead of hardcoding it. Frontend quals eval stringles.js into the same window as app.js and read the constants back out; gas quals read the server's constants out of the vm context that hosts Code.gs; story quals use the globals right in the browser pages. So you can edit copy in stringles.js or the Code.gs block to your heart's delight and the suite won't care — it pins that the right string shows in the right state, not what the string says.
• Two deliberate exceptions, pinned as cross-runtime quals: simulEditsBanner must match the server's simulEditsCopy verbatim (the client's local warning and the server's CAS refusal need to read as one message), and mysteryDevice likewise. If you edit one side, those two quals will tell you to edit the other.
• Copy that lives in index.html (placeholders, help text, HTML tooltips) stays there — it's already one editable file with no code around it.

Also, from your previous message: yes, the ipapi.co CORS errors were real — ipapi.co omits CORS headers on rate-limited responses. I swapped locate() to ipwho.is (probed it: real CORS headers plus region_code), so those console errors are gone.

Your side, unchanged from before but the @18 cargo keeps growing: npm run deploy, delete all four live tabs (column reorders misread old rows), and push the frontend in the same sitting — live-quals stay red against @17 by design until then.

Let me inventory what copy actually lives in index.html before answering:

Honest answer: there's no version of it that's a clean win like app.js was, and for most of index.html's copy the move would make things worse. But there is a defensible middle if the split bothers you.

What's actually in index.html, copy-wise:

• Prose blocks — the help dialog paragraphs, the footer, the legend. This is your hand-written copy sitting in plain markup. Moving it into stringles.js would mean multi-paragraph HTML inside JS string literals: quote escaping, no markup highlighting, and app.js injecting it at boot. HTML is already the best editor for this, and it's already "copy in one editable file with no logic around it" — which is the whole thing stringles was for. The collision problem stringles solved was copy embedded *inside app.js logic*; index.html doesn't have that problem.

• Attribute microcopy — about six short strings: the share/help tips, the auction-label tip, the Name this auction and Describe this auction... placeholders, the Reveal bids! seal tip (which app.js already caches out of the HTML), and two aria-labels (one of which is still Latin: Claudere on the share dialog's ×, line [index.html:106](index.html#L106)). These *could* move: constants in stringles.js, stamped onto elements by id at boot, with a loud assert if an id vanishes. The benefit is real but small — all tooltips would live in one home instead of two. The cost is that reading the HTML no longer shows you the tip, plus one more boot-time loop of indirection.

So the rule as it stands is easy to remember: JS-generated copy lives in stringles.js; static copy lives in index.html, visible in place. I'd leave it there. If the two-homes thing for tooltips specifically grates on you, say the word and I'll move the attribute strings over — it's a small, safe change — but I wouldn't touch the prose either way.

One thing I'd fix regardless: that leftover Claudere aria-label. Want me to English it (Close), or do you want to pick the word?

Answers in order:

Did it? No. npm run deploy only handled the server side; if 404.html had drifted, the qual gate went red and told you to run npm run sync-404 yourself — a script nagging a human to do a step a script could do.

Should it? Effectively yes, and now it does: I prepended sync-404 to npm run quals in [package.json](package.json#L5). Since deploy runs quals first, deploying now auto-syncs; so does any qual run before you commit. 404.html is a byte-for-byte derived artifact with no information of its own, so regenerating it is a build step, not silent input-fixing — and the equality qual stays as a loud backstop for anyone invoking the suites directly with node (noted in a comment at [frontend-quals.js:1442](quals/frontend-quals.js#L1442)). Suite ran green with the new wiring (449; single run — the earlier twice-green covered the code, this only prepends a cp).

Simplify further? I looked at eliminating 404.html outright and don't recommend it: GitHub Pages needs a real file at that path (it doesn't follow symlinks), and the alternatives are the redirect-machinery hack you deliberately avoided or dragging in Jekyll to template two pages from one source. A git pre-commit hook could sync too, but that's invisible per-clone magic for something the quals path now covers.

The one remaining manual choreography is the deploy-and-push coupling itself — Code.gs goes out via clasp, the frontend via git push, and schema changes mean they must land in the same sitting (plus the four-tab deletion this time). That one can't be scripted away from my side since pushes are yours, but everything short of it is now one command.

Both good calls. The first one has a clean fix: the script knows exactly what headers it expects, so instead of you remembering "delete the tabs after this deploy," the API can *detect* schema drift and refuse loudly with instructions — and live-quals right after deploy becomes the reminder. Let me check what fake-gas supports before wiring it:

Two cosmetic \u2014 escapes landed where literal em-dashes belong (one in a comment where the escape doesn't even resolve). Fixing:

Now the quals. Checking gas-quals' tail for the insertion point:

gas green at 107. Now the live-quals side — turning a post-deploy drift refusal into marching orders (this runs automatically at the end of npm run deploy):

Documenting the mechanism in the AGENTS.md deploy section, then the full suite twice:

Twice green at 454 (107 + 222 + 7 + 118). Updating memory, then summarizing:

Done — the sheet now announces its own tab deletions, and the suite is twice green at 454 (107 gas + 222 frontend + 7 serve + 118 story).

How it works now: the header row *is* the schema, and everything reads positionally — that's why outdated tabs misread silently. So [tab()](apps-script/Code.gs#L150) now checks each tab's header row against the code's *_HEAD constants on first touch and refuses loudly on mismatch, e.g.:

schema drift: the "users" tab's headers are [aname, uname, device, …] but this code expects [aname, uname, deviceID, …] — export anything you care about, DELETE the tab, and retry (the script rebuilds it)

And since npm run deploy ends with live-quals, a schema-changing deploy now fails its own smoke test with those marching orders printed — no more remembering which tabs to delete; the deploy tells you, by name. (So for the pending @18: deploy, watch it name the tabs, delete them, rerun node quals/live-quals.js until green.) Five new gas quals pin it: reads and writes both refuse, restored headers read again, columns appended past the schema are legal (your future per-person attributes), and a *cleared* header row is drift too — the fix is deleting the tab, not emptying it.

Three things to disclose:

• Two new ifs. A tabsChecked memo in Code.gs (each check costs a Sheets read; the memo spares repeat tab() calls within one request — real Apps Script resets globals every execution, so it can't go stale), and a drift branch in live-quals that upgrades the failure into instructions.
• The drift copy is English, not Latin. It's an operator diagnostic with dynamic content — you're the audience, and Latin would gut its utility. Flagging rather than TODO-ing; reword as you like in the Code.gs microcopy block.
• Migrations: deliberately not built (your "at some point"). But the drift check is the natural trigger point, and the design falls out nicely: the header row is self-describing, so a generic migration is a name-keyed column reshuffle — reorder by matching names, apply an explicit rename table (device→deviceID), fill new columns with '' — after copying the old tab to a timestamped backup, all under the script lock, replacing today's throw. Most future schema changes would then need zero custom code and zero tab deletions. Say the word when the data starts mattering and I'll build it against that sketch (noted in AGENTS.md's deploy section meanwhile).

No — nothing deletes anything, ever. The script has no tab-deletion code at all; deleting is still strictly your manual act.

What happens on deploys:

• Deploy with unchanged schema (the normal case): headers match the *_HEAD constants, the check passes silently, tabs and data untouched. Zero difference from before.
• Deploy that changes a *_HEAD constant: the API starts *refusing* to touch the mismatched tab — reads and writes just throw the "schema drift" error naming it. The data sits there intact until you decide what to do; the error's "export anything you care about, DELETE the tab" is instructions to you, not something it does itself.

The only thing the script ever creates is a fresh tab (with headers) when one doesn't exist — the same first-use behavior it's always had. So the worst case of the new check is downtime-until-you-act after a schema-changing deploy, which is exactly the loud version of what used to be silent misreads. And when we do build migrations, that refusal is what gets replaced with the data-preserving reshuffle.

Exactly — that works, and it's arguably the better workflow. getSheetByName('users') won't find users-old-20260716, so the script rebuilds a fresh users tab on first touch, and the renamed tab just sits there inert (all access is by name; nothing iterates over the whole spreadsheet). Renaming *is* the "export anything you care about" step, for free — the data stays in the same file for posterity.

The drift copy currently says "DELETE the tab," so let me fold your workflow into it — and thanks to the derivation, the qual that pins this string follows along automatically:

One memory touch-up so the record matches the copy:

Confirmed and wired in. The drift error now reads "…rename the tab for posterity (or delete it) and retry: the script rebuilds it fresh," and live-quals' post-deploy marching orders say rename-or-delete too. Gas quals stayed green with zero edits — the exact-string pin derives from Code.gs's constant, so the copy change flowed through on its own, which is the stringles payoff working as intended.

So the @18 ritual is now: npm run deploy → it fails its own smoke test naming the drifted tabs → rename them in the sheet (all four: auctions, bids, users, and the orphaned participants — that last one the check can't name since no code asks for it) → rerun node quals/live-quals.js → push the frontend in the same sitting.

Reading the current locate() comment block to build on, then writing the red-first quals:

Twice green at 458. Memory:

Fixed — geography is now looked up once a week instead of once per page load. Suite twice green at 458 (107 gas + 226 frontend + 7 serve + 118 story).

Why you were seeing it: locate() fired on every page load, and your dev loop is Live-Server-style — every file save reloads the page, so every save was another ipwho.is request from your IP. A day of editing burned through their free rate window, hence the 429s. So yes, effectively dev-specific: real users load once per visit and would essentially never hit it.

The fix: locate() now caches the result in localStorage (tauction-geo plus a tauction-geo-at date stamp, TTL one week — [app.js:114](app.js#L109-L131)). Fresh cache means no network request at all; stale or missing means fetch and re-stamp; a failed lookup stays quiet and uncached so the next load retries. Two ifs added and disclosed: the cache-freshness check, and the no-luck early return (which existed before as the r.city && guard).

One caveat: browsers print failed-request console lines no matter what the code does, so while their rate limit still has you blocked you may see one more 429 on the next cold load — the cache can't seed until a request succeeds. Once one goes through, that's the last lookup for a week.

Quals (written red-first, watched fail, then implemented): first load fetches once and stamps the dated cache; a page seeded with a fresh cache makes zero lookups *and* provably uses the cached value — its bid registers a claim whose server-side blurb ends "in Rainbow City, AL", the seeded city; an 8-day-old stamp refetches and re-stamps.

Three items — taking them in order. First the geo TTL question (short answer: once a day is nowhere near too often — the free tier is ~10k requests/month per IP and a daily lookup is ~30 — so I'll switch to a day, which also serves travelers better). Then let me read the toggle code to diagnose the disappearing box:

One pre-existing qual tripped — let me see what it pins:

A different qual now — the bid-cell tooltip. Checking whether that's another live copy edit:

Four regexes; the elapsed-time-dependent ones need to tolerate the minute boundary (the suite runs ~5min, so hours are unreachable):

Now the JS wiring points for descedit, and the story section where the desc visuals are qual'd:

Item 2 needs the write-refusal path — let me read queueOp/settleWrite to see where a describe error lands:

My splice landed after the return's semicolon — fixing the expression:

Twice green at 466. Memory, then the full report:

All six items landed (three from your message, three that arrived while I worked). Suite twice green at 466 assertions (107 gas + 233 frontend + 7 serve + 119 story).

Geo TTL: once a day is nowhere near too often — a daily lookup is ~30 requests/month against ipwho.is's ~10k/month free tier. Switched from a week to a day; better for travelers too.

Disappearing blurb box: no spinner needed — it's instant now. The bug: flipping to view committed the write and then waited for the server round-trip (~1–2s) before painting, showing the *old* blurb meanwhile (blank, if there wasn't one). But rendering markdown is pure client work, so toggleDesc now paints your draft synchronously and the write settles in the background; only a CAS bounce repaints.

Tab order: every button is out of the tab ring (tabindex="-1", the same recipe the auction label already used) — stars, ×s, the desc toggle, share, help, seal, copy, dialog ×s. They stay click/tap-focusable so tap-tooltips still work; tab now walks only editable fields. One pre-existing qual had pinned "exactly one [data-tip][tabindex=-1]" as a proxy for the ?-icons being gone — I rewrote it to pin the label directly (disclosed: proxy update, not a loosening).

Blurb box in rich mode: gone. Rendered blurb is now borderless, background-transparent prose on the page; the box appears only in edit mode — so the box itself signals "editable here," which also answers your toggle-to-edit discoverability concern. (Transparent colors rather than border: none, so nothing shifts by 1px.)

Red field for simul-edits: your earlier ask did partially land — the empty bid and duplicate name already turn their fields red inline — but the describe path never got it because its error arrives as server news mid-write. Now it does, and I'd keep the hybrid: banner at top for consistency (all server news in one place), *plus* the field turns red to localize it, clearing on your next keystroke like the others. Writing the qual exposed something better-hidden: in a real browser (though not jsdom), hiding the textarea blurs it, so after a bounced commit the recovery poll would have silently replaced your draft with the server's version. Fixed properly: a bounced commit now boots you straight back into the editor — your words intact, field red, draft re-based — so saving again, informed, wins. That's the informed-insist design actually honored end-to-end, and it's qual-pinned now.

Realtime collaborative editing (parked, per "for later"): the off-the-shelf answer today is CRDTs, specifically Yjs (what Etherpad's successors and half the collaborative editors use) — Y.Text bound to a textarea is maybe thirty lines. The catch is transport: real-time needs a push channel, and our backend is a spreadsheet behind Apps Script polling — it can't push. Options, roughly in order of fit: y-webrtc (peers sync directly; only a lightweight public signaling server involved; the sheet stays as commit-level persistence — closest to the no-server ethos), a tiny hosted relay (y-websocket on a free-tier dyno — a real server to run, against the grain here), or a hosted service like Liveblocks/PartyKit (easy, but a paid dependency). Honest take: it's a genuinely separate project, and for auction descriptions the CAS-plus-informed-insist you have is the 80/20. Worth revisiting if blurbs turn into something people co-draft live.

Also caught along the way: your live edit to simulEditsBanner ("…to the description") tripped the cross-runtime pin exactly as designed — Code.gs's mirror now carries your wording. And the suite's own runtime crossed a minute boundary, so the ago() tooltip regexes now accept \d+[sm] instead of seconds-only (a flake class, not a behavior change).

Full-screen money it is. Let me look at the current ceremony machinery:

Now the implementation — celebrate() grows a sky, and the confetti CSS moves to viewport scale: