--- id: CB-WP-0017 kind: product title: "Legible interaction: what can be picked up, what is being dragged, where it can go" status: done state_hub_workstream_id: "e5080127-8cde-40de-bf03-2898a98491ca" --- # Purpose ``` structural tier S (presentation work inside an existing capability — no new port, no canonical interface, no new dependency, no change to the loop's own constraints) chaos d4 = 4 → OVERRIDE, tier drawn: M declared tier M (structural S, chaos 4 → M) ``` **Declaration 12 of 12 — the chaos calibration window closes here**, and owes its evaluation (T04). This is the **second override in twelve declarations**, and it rolls the opposite way from the first: CB-WP-0011 was structural L rolled *down* to S, this is structural S rolled *up* to M. The window therefore has one of each to evaluate, which is the minimum that makes an evaluation possible at all. Tier M means survey and decision merge into one document and the adversarial review is optional. ## The report this pass exists for The maintainer ran stage 1's human check again after CB-WP-0016 and could drag — but: > *"it is not possible to get what moves are possible and how they affect > the state of the game"* … *"Can i have better visualization of which > Elements in the ui can be manipulated"* … *"If the element isnt shown as > picked up, there is no way to understand that i am actually dragging it > or where i am dragging it"* … *"visual clues about where something can be > dropped when it is picked up"* Four requests, and one prior finding that makes them one pass: **the page already hides which moves are legal.** Measured, seat P1 at round 1 step Select — **9 legal commands**, rendered as 5 cards each claiming all three target kinds: | the card says | actually legal | |---|---| | Investigate → *"a seat, a problem, or the table"* | **problem-2, problem-3** | | Solve → *"a seat, a problem, or the table"* | **problem-1** | | Attack → *"a seat, a problem, or the table"* | **seat-1, seat-2** | | Support → *"a seat, a problem, or the table"* | **seat-1, seat-2** | | Ground → *"a seat, a problem, or the table"* | **table** | Investigate is legal on problems 2 and 3 but not 1; Solve on 1 but not 2 or 3. The card text is a **constant** — `"drag {a:?} onto a seat, a problem, or the table"` — emitted whenever *any* legal command uses that action, then naming all three kinds regardless. `legal` carries the exact targets and the renderer discards them. So highlighting drop targets is not decoration on top of a working table. It is the first time the page will tell the truth about what is legal. ## Task: decide how far the JavaScript may grow ```task id: CB-WP-0017-T01 status: done priority: high state_hub_task_id: "be0f8249-51b2-4fef-89c0-9fad660563b4" ``` Write `decisions/ADR-0010-*.md` (tier M: survey and decision in one). **This is a real decision, not a formality.** ADR-0007 Decision 5 says the page *"reports raw pointer facts and nothing else, and Rust decides what command they mean"*, and `doc.rs` says of `SCRIPT`: *"it does one thing"*. Everything asked for here needs the script to do **more** than one thing — track a drag in flight, move a ghost with the pointer, add and remove classes on other elements. Decide, explicitly: - **Does class-toggling violate control 5?** The honest argument is that legality still comes from Rust as data and the script only renders it — but that argument must be *made*, because "the page renders what Rust said" is exactly what a page constructing commands would also claim. - **What is the invariant that replaces "it does one thing"?** If the script may grow, say what it may never do, in a form a test can check. The existing no-game-vocabulary test is the candidate and it is weak. - **The cost.** Marginal AM-4a is zero either way, so the budget does not decide this. Say what does. **Done 2026-08-02.** [ADR-0010](../decisions/ADR-0010-what-the-script-may-do.md) — *the script may render state it was given; it may not derive any.* The survey's real output: the permitted design (Rust emits legality, the script matches it) and the forbidden one (the script derives legality from the DOM) are **indistinguishable from the outside** — both are "the page highlights some elements". So the vocabulary grep is demoted to a cheap first line and the load-bearing controls are stated over behaviour: the highlighted set must **equal** the set Rust emitted, and anything the page marks legal must **resolve**. Both are mutation-proven below. ## Task: tell the truth about which moves are legal ```task id: CB-WP-0017-T02 status: done priority: high state_hub_task_id: "749e03f3-70b6-458d-be9c-4a178808af9e" ``` Emit the legal targets **derived from `legal`**, per action, and render them so the table is legible without dragging anything. The generic sentence goes. A card that says *"onto a seat, a problem, or the table"* when only `problem-1` is legal is not a simplification, it is wrong. **Controls:** - The emitted target set must equal the affordance targets of the legal list exactly — pure Rust, no browser, and it must go red when the sets diverge. - A drop that the page marked legal must **resolve**. If the page can advertise a target `resolve` then refuses, the two have drifted and the highlighting is worse than none. **Done 2026-08-02.** From the live server: *"Solve onto problem 1"*, *"Investigate onto problem 2, problem 3"*, *"Attack onto P2, P3"*, *"Ground onto the table"*. The constant sentence is gone. `everything_the_page_advertises_actually_resolves` drives four real bot games and checks every emitted target against `resolve` itself. Mutation — adding `table` to Investigate's targets — goes red with *"the page advertises action-investigate -> table but resolve refuses it"*. ## Task: make picking up, dragging, and dropping visible ```task id: CB-WP-0017-T03 status: done priority: high state_hub_task_id: "e607e4e1-3270-458d-9c49-be77d48cff0a" ``` The four requests, in order of how badly they are needed: 1. **What can be manipulated at all** — a resting affordance on every pickable element. The maintainer asked for a slight shadow; the point is that interactive and inert must not look identical. 2. **What is picked up** — the grabbed element must visibly change while the pointer is down. 3. **Where it can go** — every legal drop target for *the thing currently held* highlights, and nothing else does. 4. **Where it is going** — the drag must be followable, not invisible. **Be honest about what is testable.** Whether a shadow reads as "you can pick this up" is not something any test here can settle, and claiming otherwise would be this project's characteristic error in its newest costume. What *is* testable, and must be: - pointerdown marks the grabbed element and **exactly** the legal targets for it, and nothing else; - pointerup and cancellation clear every mark — a drag that ends leaves no residue, or the next drag highlights a stale set; - the highlighted set is the same set T02 emitted. The JS DOM stub cannot express any of this today. It will have to model `classList` and element lookup, which is a real deepening of the harness — and CB-WP-0016 showed that a stub too thin to express a failure is how the failure survives. **Done 2026-08-02.** `.pick` (resting shadow, lift on hover), `.held` (dimmed and scaled), `.dropok` (dashed outline on every legal target), and a ghost following the pointer. The stub now models `classList`, `querySelectorAll`, `createElement` and a body, **and its node set is built from the real emitted page** via `droppables(html)` rather than from a list the harness invented. Three mutations, each red: | mutation | result | |---|---| | the script *derives* targets from the DOM instead of reading `data-targets` | red — marks `seat-0, seat-1, seat-2` where only `seat-1` is legal. **A plausible-looking highlight, caught.** This is ADR-0010 D1 enforced | | the page advertises a target `resolve` refuses | red | | `pointercancel` and the `clear()` on pointerup are dropped | red — *"marks survived `__up('seat-1')`"* | **A seat highlights on both of its drawings** — card and graph node — and that is asserted rather than tolerated. The first draft of the assertion was wrong about it: it expected `seat-1` and read `seat-1,seat-1`. **A real trap, recorded:** QuickJS fixes its stack limit at `Context` creation relative to the frame it was created in, so a helper that creates a context and *returns* it makes every later `eval` report `SyntaxError: stack overflow` — for `__all.length`. The caller must own the `Context`. **Nothing perceptual is verified.** Whether a shadow reads as "pick me up" is not reachable from here (ADR-0010 D5). ## Task: evidence, and close the chaos calibration window ```task id: CB-WP-0017-T04 status: done priority: high state_hub_task_id: "b67442a5-ad27-495c-857a-b4ebe28b07bf" ``` `evidence/CB-EV-0015-*.md`, and then **the evaluation the window has owed since 2026-07-31**. `gates.toml` states the retirement condition in its own words: > *retire_if = "the window closes with no overridden tier producing a > different outcome than the argued one — the evaluation this window > exists to make possible"* So answer it, on the two overrides actually observed: - **CB-WP-0011**, structural L → S. What did the deleted survey cost or save? CB-EV-0009 §1 and CB-EV-0010 §5 already priced part of this (0.123 $/response at L against 0.099 at S on the same subject). - **CB-WP-0017**, structural S → M. What did the *extra* ADR buy that a tier-S provenance paragraph would not have? If the answer is nothing, say so — that is the finding the window was opened to produce, and a mechanism that survives its own evaluation by being graded generously is worse than one that is retired. Then: keep, retire, or change the rate, with the argument. Also due: - **Whether stage 1 closes.** It needs a human to drag again. Say so. - **Quote CB-WP-0016's cost**, and apply CB-EV-0013 §5's correction — quote a boundary that has actually settled, or say it has not. **Done 2026-08-02.** [CB-EV-0015](../evidence/CB-EV-0015-legible-interaction.md). `make all` exits 0. - **The chaos window's verdict: keep, at a lower rate.** Both overrides changed the outcome, so the retirement condition is not met. CB-WP-0011 (L→S) bought a defect in the existing renderer that a toolkit survey would have walked past, at 0.099 $/response against 0.123. CB-WP-0017 (S→M) bought the restatement of control 5 — at tier S the script would have outgrown ADR-0007 D5 under a one-paragraph commit note. **Recommendation: d4 → d8, second window of 12, retire if an override changes nothing twice running.** That is a change to how the loop constrains its own operation, so it is tier-M work this pass does not do — it is owed to the next declaration. - **CB-EV-0014 is corrected.** It quoted CB-WP-0015 at $15.14/136 and claimed that was the first settled figure this project had quoted. Both wrong: it now reads **$22.70/166**. The number had been read during CB-WP-0015 itself and carried forward, so there are two defects — the boundary, and quoting a figure from memory rather than re-running the instrument. Five for five, always low. - **Stage 1 stays open**, and now on a purely perceptual question.