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.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XC2jX6Hdj7pxGGKzBTrbqB
stroblmeandClaude Opus 5
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