Sonderr v1.6.2 — the companion update

The otter pet

• Add a ChatGPT-style screen companion, specialized: an otter. It floats on its own little pool anywhere on the workspace — drag it anywhere (pointer events, clamped to the viewport), click to pet it for a burst of hearts, and watch its moods: it paddles energetically while Sonderr works, celebrates when a task list completes, and naps (with z's) after four quiet minutes. Toggle it from the new "Otter pet" sidebar item; the on/off choice, position, and lifetime pet count persist in local storage. The pet is a hand-built vector (crisp at every size), ships on by default for new sessions, and honors prefers-reduced-motion.
• The app now emits sonderr:pet events (working, idle, celebrate, meet) from the send flow and task-list rendering; the v1.6.2 announcement's "Meet the otter" button turns the pet on and throws a celebration.

Working animation, rebuilt

• Replace the raster otter chip (a static PNG bobbing in a circle) with a hand-built vector swim scene: an otter gliding between two moving wave layers, tail flicking, bubbles rising — every part animates on smooth transform/opacity curves with proper easing. The status text gets a Claude-grade shimmer sweep. Both honor reduced-motion preferences.

Bulletproofed workflow

• Empty final responses no longer render as a silent blank bubble: the turn ends with an honest inline notice explaining what happened and how to fix it.
• The chat handler refuses classifier/guard models in the chat slot server-side (mirroring the v1.6.1 picker filter): the turn ends immediately with an actionable explanation instead of streaming a verdict like "User Safety: safe" that reads like silence.
• The model picker flags any model whose id looks like a classifier with a "classifier" badge, and choosing one shows a heads-up toast.
• A stuck-stream watchdog: if a running turn produces no events for 75 seconds, the status line says so honestly ("Still working — the model is taking longer than usual…") instead of leaving an indefinite spinner. The watchdog timer is cleared on every exit path and can never leak.

Announcements and docs

• New v1.6.2 launch announcement with generated pet key art; the v1.6.0 announcement moves to the announcements archive alongside the Sonderr-v1 film, and the Release Center at /update gains an "Otter pet" section with new generated art (pet scene and glide scene) plus the bulletproofing story.

Internal

• Bump the application version to 1.6.2. New test/companion.test.js suite pins the pet/animation/bulletproofing wiring (22 test suites total); npm test runs it as part of the standard suite.