The force simulation settles on arbitrary floats, and a neuron on a half pixel
has its ring, its gap and its disc rounded one edge at a time — which on the
smallest ones is a visibly off-centre ring. The size is already whole, so the
position was the last fractional term.
React Flow stamps `colorMode` on its wrapper as a class and defaults it to
`light`. The app's own token scopes are named `.light` / `.dark` — the classes
that let a dashboard be forced to one theme inside a shell on the other — so
every canvas was silently redeclaring the light palette on its own subtree:
white node cards and a white canvas in dark mode, with the inherited
`--foreground` text still near-white and therefore invisible. Home's neurons
had the same fault, drawn with white ring gaps and the light `--primary`.
A node's error cleared the moment it ran again, so a failure that genuinely
fired an alert could leave no trace on the canvas by the time anyone looked.
The engine records it now — on the node's status, so it survives a reload and
every client agrees — and reading the traceback is what clears it. The seam is
the event bus, which is where every failing path already meets: a queued live
run, an explicit run, a preview, and a single triggered node all publish
`node_error`, while the controller's own observer would have seen only one of
them.
That was half the confusion. The other half: clicking a failed neuron on Home
often landed on a flow where everything looked fine. Nodes merge into one
neuron by instance key — every InfluxDB node pointing at the same bucket is one
neuron — and the click went to whichever flow contributed a member first, not
the one that failed. It now goes to the failing member and selects it, and the
canvas marks a failing node rather than leaving it to the dot alone.
The inject node emitted one payload to every port it declared, whatever their
types, so an inject on a bool port carrying the text "true" raised at publish
time. Each port gets its own field now, typed and parsed by that port's dtype,
and remembers what it last sent. A port that is renamed carries its value with
it; one that is removed takes its value with it. An inject written before this
keeps emitting exactly what it did.
The derived-cron chip also appeared on the delay node, where `interval` is a
rate limit and a schedule derived from it means nothing.
The canvas lays itself out: a layered graph, left to right on a desktop and
top to bottom on a phone, with room reserved for the value each edge carries.
Nodes cannot be dragged and `NodeDef.position` is gone from the document —
a graph nobody can arrange is one worth keeping small, which is what keeps
flows atomic. Endpoints join the same layout, so their lanes and the
localStorage that remembered where they were dragged go too.
Mobile, per the new Responsive section of DESIGN-GUIDELINES.md: the dock caps
its width and wraps instead of running off the screen, the dashboard stacks
into one column rather than shrinking a wall panel to a fifth of its size, and
Home stops widening its grid track past the viewport. A Playwright project at
a phone's width fails the build when a screen no longer fits.
Along the way: publish is the checkmark that was already there rather than a
button that appears and disappears, with discard beside it on both the flow
and the dashboard; the brain reveals a neuron's name on the first tap; and the
port sparklines get room to breathe.
A name under every circle was most of what the graph drew, and none of it was
what someone looks at the brain for. Only the hovered or keyboard-focused
neuron names itself now — a failing one always does, since colour is never the
only carrier of a status. The label is absolute and the collide radius already
held that space, so revealing one moves nothing. Taking it out of flow also
fixed the off-centre edges: the node box was as wide as its widest label, so a
32px circle inside a 140px box sat 54px left of where the layout put it and
every edge aimed at the box rather than at the circle.
Neurons are filled discs rather than `bg-card` outlines, which were a hairline
against `--background` in light and close to nothing in dark. The fill is a
neutral `--muted-foreground` alpha and stays neutral: status still speaks only
through the border and the word beneath. Its lightness carries how recently the
open page saw that neuron publish — brightest just after it fires, decaying over
90s to a floor it never drops below, so a graph left open sorts itself into what
is busy and what is not. Edges do the same on their stroke. The signal is only
what this session has seen on the socket, so a fresh page starts everything at a
neutral middle rather than claiming a history it does not have. Both are CSS
transitions gated on `prefers-reduced-motion`, decayed out of and snapped into,
never the other way round.
`BrainEdge` now carries both circle radii and trims its path back to the rims,
with an arrowhead at the end it flows into. The barbs are two more segments of
the same stroked path rather than an SVG marker, so they dim with the line they
belong to. Neither trim reaches past the midpoint, so neurons closer together
than their radii still get a line pointing the right way.
`edge-pulse` reads its landing colour from `--edge-rest` instead of naming
`--muted-foreground`, so a selected edge — which rests in blue — decays into its
own colour instead of crossing to grey and snapping back at the end.
Obsidian's graph view is the reference for the first three: filled nodes sized
by degree, labels on a fade threshold with hover to recover them, and arrows as
an explicit affordance. The falloff-by-opacity encoding is the standard one in
the dynamic-graph literature.
The force layout settled roughly square, so in a wide band the graph sat as a
small island. Vertical centring now pulls nearly three times as hard as
horizontal and the seed sits on an ellipse, which settles at about 2.2:1
without stretching the circles or the edges.
The graph also slid in on load: the rebuild fit ran with a 300ms duration, so
React Flow animated the pan from its default viewport to the content. The fit
is instant now, and the canvas grows in from the centre with `scaleIn` once it
has a layout.
The pinned chart header said "Esc clears", which a phone cannot act on. It
carries the same "× Clear" button as the list header instead; Escape still
works.
Home is the one overview now: the brain graph flat across the top, the flow
switches, then the health sections. The /brain and /health routes and their
sidebar entries are gone.
- charts report their cursor and clicks, so hovering one filters the list
beside it to that minute and a click pins it until Escape or Clear
- chart values round to about three significant digits, the legend mounts
under the plot so it can wrap without leaving the card, and axis ticks
shorten past a thousand
- the embedded brain leaves the wheel to the page rather than zooming
- number fields no longer draw their up/down spinner (NOTEPAD)
A node type can now say which outside thing its parameters point at, and
nodes sharing one — a broker topic, a URL, a bucket — are drawn as a single
neuron on a new /brain canvas. That makes the wiring which runs between
flows through a broker visible for the first time; no single flow's canvas
can show it. The key is read off stored parameters, so a credential
reference never reaches an id.
Layout is a d3 force simulation settled once and then frozen, lit by the
socket the editor already listens to: a neuron pulses when any node behind
it publishes, and its connections light as values pass.
Fixes the message pulse while here: interpolating the stroke against the
edge's `color-mix()` resting colour went through oklab and left the gamut,
which turned every pulse on both canvases fluorescent yellow.
stroblme