v3.8.0

Since v3.7.0. Every claimed symbol was verified to exist in the shipped scripts.

One behaviour change to know: at boldness: bold/experimental, a surviving timid/sanded distinctiveness verdict is now blocking-until-the-user-waives-it — the waiver moves from the agent to the person who set the dial. conservative/balanced+ unchanged.

Added — native 2.5D isometric components (no generated image)

• deckkit.iso_bars — a faithful 2.5D bar chart: extrusion height is linear in the value and
  zero-based, so the depth never distorts the data (this is why the projection is parallel, not
  perspective — a perspective chart would foreshorten the far bars and lie). Rejects negatives and

  9 bars with an actionable message; highlight= pops one bar in hi_color= (default the deck's
  emphasis hue).

• deckkit.iso_stack — a layered architecture / disclosure ladder / decision hierarchy: floating
  isometric slabs with a label aligned beside each. Caps at ~6 layers (raises, like org_tree).
• deckkit.iso_prism — one extruded isometric block as a hero; returns a cleared apex anchor
  above the whole top face so a caller can seat a label without landing it on the rhombus.
• Fixed projection (true 30° isometric) and one-light-source face shading (top = base, right ×0.80,
  left ×0.55) so every 2.5D element in a deck reads as one system. Text sits beside the geometry —
  python-pptx cannot shear text onto a tilted face. Scenario gates live in form-selection.md:
  2.5D trades precision for presence (the constant top-face pedestal compresses ratios, an 8×
  reads ~4.8×), so it is a pitch/launch/keynote move, never a research/defense results comparison, and
  the more the room rewards rigor the worse the trade. Dose like generated imagery — one 2.5D moment
  per deck. Complementary to the generated-image branch: native = crisp, editable, data-bearing;
  generated = soft, organic, atmospheric.

Added — component_audit.py: did this deck hand-roll a form the library implements?

• Reads the build script (which components were called, via dk.x(), an alias, or
  from deckkit import x) + the finished pptx (geometry signatures: bar row · abutting 100% band ·
  tile row · marker row) and names the component whose geometry a hand-roll matches. Advisory,
  never a blocker — a bespoke composition is the signature move; what the tool states as fact is
  the usage ratio and the specific match. Motivation, measured: across three delivered decks the
  build scripts called 3 of 59 form components; everything else was raw box+text, re-inheriting the
  geometry bugs the components fix. Run at PRE-FLIGHT 12.
• Suppression is derived from deckkit's source (which functions draw rects) intersected with the
  form catalogue — a hand-kept list was wrong twice in two edits (columns() returns rects and draws
  nothing; table() emits a GraphicFrame), each time silencing real detections deck-wide. A
  deck that was never opened now prints NOT CHECKED and exits 1 rather than reporting clean.

Added — deck-level gates: RULE_THROUGH_TEXT · composition axis · signature proof

• RULE_THROUGH_TEXT (build-time lint CRITICAL) — a decorative rule/divider drawn through a
  text block's ink, always caused by a hand-picked y the text later grew into. Neither existing
  lint caught it (a thin box over text is not text-on-text, not overflow, not invisible text); it
  shipped twice in one delivered deck and was caught by the user. Derive the rule from the block's
  measured end, never a coordinate.
• The direction gate diverges on COMPOSITION, not just palette — the token set gained cover
  and skeleton (rendered faithfully to the canonical skeleton vocabulary), divergence is now a
  pairwise ≥2 of {palette · type · density · composition} rule with lock-and-redirect, and a new
  directions_diversity.py measures it (never auto-kills — rediverge or justify on the gate line).
  The picked composition is carried into the built deck (the cover token becomes the cover's
  layout, skeleton becomes the rhythm map's plurality), not discarded at style.py.
• The SIGNATURE PROOF opens Step 4 — author the signature slide first and render just that page
  (render_deck.py --slides N) before authoring the rest, so the pixels that honour or sand the
  boldness:/signature move: contract arrive when the decision is cheap to change, not after the
  whole deck is built. signature move: now carries a carried_by: clause (2–3 slides where the
  idea does structural work), verified through to the critic.

Changed — blandness can block, at the user's own dial

• The critic's distinctiveness axis was MAJOR-at-most (a deck asked to be bold could ship
  forgettable with a footnote while a 4pt overflow blocked). At boldness: bold/experimental a
  surviving timid/sanded verdict is now blocking-until-the user waives it — the waiver moves
  from the agent to the person who set the dial. conservative/balanced+ unchanged.

Fixed

• render_deck.py --slides N[,M] renders only the named pages (the signature-proof path);
  byte-identical to those pages from a full render, leaves no cache, mutually exclusive with --fast
  and --deliverables.
• lint_deck.py is iso-aware — two textless freeform polygons that overlap are the faces of one
  vector drawing (an iso solid, any freeform illustration), not a card collision; a pure-2.5D slide
  no longer drowns the linter in self-overlap noise. A text card on a prism still flags.
• A long chain of self-inflicted defects found by adversarial review across these features — an
  over-suppressing audit list, a green pre-flight for an unopened deck, a composition axis that
  stopped at the preview, an iso_prism return that produced invisible labels, iso_stack labels
  drifting into the trough beside the next slab — each fixed and locked with a regression.
• Whole-skill maturity audit (six lenses, adversarially verified) closed the last integration
  gaps from the recent gate additions: a composition skeleton token that could crash the
  direction gate (a 5-value hard-error set feeding an 8-value rhythm-map vocabulary — now accepts
  all eight); a dead rule where the composition tokens were produced and routed to the design
  lens but the critic brief never consumed them (now wired producer→consumer→arbiter with a verdict
  slot); and reference drift behind the code (small_multiples told the agent to hand-compose what its
  own index forbids; the design-gallery catalogue omitted four real components; modbox had no
  when-to-use trigger). Plus disambiguation tie-breakers (hub_spoke/hub_spokes, scorecard/
  kpi_card) and every emitted lint code now documented.

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5 sections · Added · Added · Added · Changed · Fixed