PROJECT KNOWLEDGE

RISE — what one model learned building it

Written 2026-08-21. A handover for whoever works here next, human or model. It is not a spec; the specs are authoritative, and docs/README.md says which of them still are. This is the knowledge that sits between the specs — the defect patterns, the reasons behind decisions that look arbitrary, and the things measured rather than assumed.

Everything here was verified against the tree at the time of writing. Where I could not confirm something, it says so.

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1. What RISE is, in one paragraph

A browser-based audiovisual reader. Text is broken into atoms — a word, a phrase, a line — each with a duration, and presented in a Chamber against procedural or sourced imagery and a bed of sound. A score (an Experience Program) can author what appears when. The Library holds prepared editions; the Workshop authors; the Scriptorium lets a model compose; the Chapel is a Catholic devotional instrument with its own liturgy engine. The unit of value is not the catalogue. It is what happens to the act of reading after a work enters.

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2. The recurring defects — read this section twice

These are not hypotheticals. Each cost real time, and each recurred after being fixed once.

2.1 A vocabulary living in two places where only one learns a new word

The single most frequent defect. Examples: gmask with GT=4096 beside a hardcoded 4095; the phrase floor's constant against a comment citing texts no script ever measured; getDivisions reading a declared scheme while sequencesFor, four hundred lines away, re-derived it; mostlyVerse about to exist in two rooms.

The rule: prefer deleting one copy to synchronising two. Where duplication is unavoidable, add a test asserting the two agree — that converts silent drift into loud failure.

2.2 A runtime filter cannot remove a build-time dependency

The catalogue filtered withheld works at runtime; every entry still carried load: () => import(...), so Rollup emitted a chunk for all of them. Eighty-two megabytes of unreachable books were built and deployed. The same defect, found independently by a collaborator, shipped a withheld visual engine — because the import was the dependency.

Whenever something is "withheld", "hidden" or "disabled", ask whether it is still built. Grep the built output, not the source.

2.3 A test that exercises the plumbing you just wrote

Verse handling was wired to scriptorium-resolve, tested against scriptorium-resolve, and reported as shipped. But a reader opens a poem through the Library's contents sheet, and that path passes an explicit allowlist at four separate hops. The flag was dropped at the first one.

A reading has more than one entrance. A fix applied at one is not a fix, and a test written against the entrance you just built proves only that you can wire two things together. Test the door a reader uses.

2.4 A guard that cannot fail

expect(Math.max(...beads)).toBe(ROSARY_BEAD_COUNT - 1) — both sides derived from the same expression. It passed for six weeks against a rosary with the wrong number of beads. Related: a study whose control and experimental group were the same condition, and an e2e suite that set VITE_RISE_ARCHIVE_REVIEW=1 in global setup and so could not see that public builds served an empty Library.

Ask of every guard: what input makes this fail? If you cannot construct one, it is decoration.

2.5 Structure destroyed at import, then guessed at forever

Flattening Blake's quatrains into one line caused four downstream failures and four detectors written to catch them. The source was never at fault.

An ingest may not destroy a distinction the source made. Corollary, learned later and painfully: having read the distinction, do not then throw it away. sectionsFromParts read the edition's verse and dropped it, after which a read-time heuristic guessed it back.

2.6 Zero known defects is not known clean text

A detector registry finds only what a signature already describes. "Every detector reports zero" gets weaker as you learn more. This ended the cleansing campaign and produced the acquisition contract instead.

2.7 Metrics agree with each other and are all wrong together

Coefficient of variation, fragment rate, stutter runs, dangling tails — every one scored Tintern Abbey as healthy while an atom carried the head of Wordsworth's next line. A person reading one poem found it. Three separate defects of this class surfaced that way.

When a metric and the page disagree, the metric is the suspect.

2.8 A label is not evidence

Front matter was applied to any preamble over 200 words, which skipped Hawthorne's Custom-House and 91% of the Shahnama. An .mp4 extension is what a file is called; the mime type is what it claims to be.

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3. Standing laws

Violating one of these is how section 2 happens.

• Structure is read, never inferred.
• Words in must equal words out. The ingest refuses a payload whose count differs from its source. This is the only reason several disasters are stories about bugs rather than about books.
• A subdivision is not a division. A division is what a reader enters.
• An ordinal is a position, not a field.
• A heading is structured, not a string. se:label, z3998:ordinal and epub:type="title" are three facts; textContent presses them into one.
• Reverent degradation. A work that will not resolve is absent — never a broken frame, never a substitute.
• Models flag; humans dispose. A silently corrected edition ceases to be the edition its provenance claims it is.
• Withheld, never deleted. Payload stays on disk, git keeps it reversible, and every withholding states a reason — enforced by test.
• The build ships what a reader can reach; a test reads what is on disk.
• Provenance is the promise. A reader should always know whether they are meeting a received text or one written here.

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4. The Archive, and why it is small

Eighty-eight inherited Gutenberg works became fifteen from Standard Ebooks. Not a retreat — a change of loop:

    OLD                             NEW
    acquire → ingest →              select → compare editions →
    find garbage → write            choose and say why → ingest
    detector → clean →              PRESERVING structure →
    find different garbage          certify end to end

The fifteen are chosen as acceptance fixtures for textual forms, not as favourites: epic, drama, lyric, wisdom, essay, novel. A canon of favourites proves nothing; a canon of forms proves the instrument.

Shelves are provenance (Received / Composed) because provenance is what RISE promises to keep. Divisions are form, because form decides the reading — a verse line is met differently from a paragraph. Where a work was written is a fact about it, not a shelf to put it on.

Certification — the release long pole

CERTIFIED_IDS is empty. A record (certification.js, completeCertification) requires: the edition chosen and why; a structural and token comparison against an outside reference; a named human who dispositioned every difference; the detector registry at zero at a stated revision; and the exact sourceRevision. Certification is tied to bytes — a re-ingest withdraws it automatically.

As of 2026-08-21 the public build serves uncertified candidates by explicit decision (RELEASE_SERVES_UNCERTIFIED), and the shelf says so to the reader.

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5. The chunker

• Ceiling MAX_CHUNK_WORDS = 16. Floor PHRASE_FLOOR_WORDS = 5, default-on.
• The floor never crosses a sentence end, never exceeds the ceiling, and never touches a paragraph containing an authored |.
• Verse is read from the edition, carried as verse: true per section, and weighed in words — an eight-line epigraph over two thousand words of Middlemarch prose is not a verse chapter.
• verseLines reaches phrase mode only; sentence mode still windows by word count.
• A prose paragraph inside a verse reading is still prose, and gets the floor.

Reproduce any claim with npm run study:chunking. Read the whole shelf, atom by atom, with npm run sheet:chunks — that instrument exists because the numbers alone could not see the defect.

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6. Things that look wrong and are correct

Leave these alone without new evidence.

• atr- prefixes name real museum accessions. The Atrium room is deleted; the namespace is data.
• atriumCollections is a live field the Chapel writes. Renaming a persisted config key is a migration, not a cleanup.
• rise_sol_plan_v1 stays in USER_DATA_KEYS though the Solarium is gone: a key dropped from that registry is data that export cannot carry out and erase cannot clear.
• Oedipus Rex is one reading of 12,617 words. Storr's edition marks the whole play as one scene; its fifty-one choral odes are inline.
• Karamazov's numerals restart because each is chapter I of a different Book. That is the book, not a defect.
• git cherry, not ahead/behind. Squash merges make the counts lie about whether work is upstream.

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7. Practical notes

• Verify deploys against the live bundle, never the deploy log. More than one reported bug was a stale deployment — including Scriptorium uploads.
• Netlify SPA rewrites return 200 for missing assets. A 200 proves nothing; fetch the content and look at it.
• The suite is large; maxWorkers scales to the machine. What CI runs on a pull request, and what only after a merge, is in AGENTS.md (Testing / build gotchas) and .github/workflows/.
• Other agents commit to this working directory and switch its branch. Save a patch before large operations, stage only your own files, and verify in a detached worktree of the actual commit — local green means nothing when somebody else's fix is sitting in your tree.
• Heredocs mangle \n, \b and \s. Use chr(92) in Python, or an editor.
• Regex on CSS is unsafe wherever a comment can sit between a selector and its brace. It silently produced a descendant selector and killed .portal-continue. Parse, or edit by inspection.
• A module worker never loads in an opaque origin. A host's card sandboxed with allow-scripts alone has origin null; Chromium fetches a module worker's script in CORS mode, which blob:null/… cannot pass, so new Worker(blobUrl, { type: 'module' }) fires onerror with no message. A classic blob worker loads there, and import() works inside it. The scene worker is classic for this reason (src/scenes/create-scene-worker.js); the browser test of a generated scene in the self-contained card is the guard.

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8. What is open

• Certification — nothing certified; the release gate is held open by an explicit decision that should not become permanent by neglect.
• Slugs in the extent grammar — the composer reads division names and must emit ordinals. Depends on edition identity, which does not exist yet.
• Sentence mode on verse — the declaration reaches phrase mode only.
• Per-boundary provenance — splitPhrases still treats |, , and a newline as one anonymous split.
• Materials descriptions — the composer is told a filename and nothing else. describes / describedBy is the next step, and the one that makes anchored placement work rather than only gallery.
• Workshop on mobile — the room is a desktop timeline (Workshop.js, five thousand lines) with no phone architecture behind it.
• Journeys are on ice — their scores quote editions the canon no longer serves. Re-anchoring is an editorial act, not a repair.

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9. The sentence the whole project turns on

RISE does not need every text. It needs the right texts, represented correctly.

Everything in section 4 follows from it, and most of section 2 is what happened before it was believed.

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Published from docs/PROJECT-KNOWLEDGE.md. Edits made here are overwritten on the next push to main.