The counters said how MUCH and never which file, so a run that was working normally and one that had
wedged produced the same screen: `done` stops moving either way. A photograph is around thirty encodes
and a video is three plus a poster ladder, and none of that was visible from outside.
So the run keeps a transcript and the button opens it.
Every rung reports itself by CONSTRUCTION. Ten `variants.push` call sites became one `add`, which is
the point — a rung added later is described without anybody remembering to describe it. The slow
stages that produce nothing until they finish say so BEFORE they start instead: the HEIC decode, each
video rung, the poster frame. Those are the pauses that read as a hang.
`?since=<n>` is what keeps it cheap. The transcript is thousands of lines and polls once a second, so
sending all of it every tick would be the same megabyte over and over; the client keeps what it has
and asks for the rest. No `since` means everything, which is what a modal opened mid-run wants.
The transcript lives in the shared slot, not the modal, so closing it does not throw away the run —
somebody who looks, closes, and looks again is watching one run rather than two. `startedAt` is what
identifies a run, because `n` restarts at 1 and appending across a boundary would interleave two.
Polling, not a socket. Each line transfers once and the events are seconds apart, so a second
transport to open, authenticate and reconnect would buy nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>