The page is now three things: what bench is, what installing costs, and
why to bother. The header nav is the way into the docs.
Removing them takes their CSS with them (.doors/.door* in the base sheet
and in all three breakpoints) and two tests that existed only for them —
the six-are-distinct check here and TheDoorsOpenOntoArticles in
test_site_pages. The hero-buttons test survives its class, renamed to say
what it now guards: the landing page's only links into the docs.
One test needed retargeting rather than deleting.
test_it_fails_before_anything_is_written removed /concepts/team-mode/
from the manifest to prove a dead internal link stops the build before
anything is written — but the link it relied on was a door. It now aims
at /guides/install/, which the hero button still hard-links.
Side effect worth having: the two reasons in "Why bench?" that nearly
repeated doors 03 and 04 no longer sit above them.
Two changes to the landing page and the reference layout.
The three problem one-liners become "Why bench?" — four reasons now,
led by the one no hosted tool can answer: bench lives in your codebase
and is built to be extended, so the workflow it runs is exactly yours.
It stays unboxed on purpose; the doors below are the page's one grid of
cards and repeating that shape would make the eye read it twice.
The reference pages split the room right of the nav three fifths prose,
two fifths console. At the old fixed 208px every BOARD_AGENT_MODEL_* key
was cut mid-word, which makes a console of settings useless for the one
thing it is there for. Articles keep the narrow gutter — a list of
headings needs no more.
The narrow-width overrides are repeated at .page-reference .shell
specificity in both media blocks. Without that the base override (0-2-0)
outranks the bare .shell inside the query (0-1-0), the third track
survives, and with the gutter hidden it becomes two fifths of empty grid
squeezing the prose on every phone.
The landing page was carrying two large visuals stacked — a full
terminal in the hero and the board beneath it — which is what made it
read as busy. Now the hero is one third words and two thirds board: the
claim this page makes is a board, so the board is what it shows first
and shows large.
The terminal moves into a 50/50 section below, beside the copy that
explains what installing costs: one script, port 26071, two questions,
and the settings file it writes. The six doors are unchanged.
Smaller changes that follow from it: the headline takes a narrower step
(--t-hero-narrow, 40px) because it no longer has half a row; it loses
its hard <br> and wraps on its own; the CTA drops the time claim now
that a whole section makes it; and the caption under the shot becomes
one plain line rather than a tagged row.
The third setup question wanted an answer about a repo the person may
have just cloned, thirty seconds in, before anything had explained why
the board needed one. The file that names a project's ecosystem usually
names its runner too, so it is read off the project: package.json → npm
test, Cargo.toml → cargo test, go.mod → go test ./..., a
pyproject/setup.py/tests/ → python3 -m unittest.
Nothing recognisable writes BOARD_AGENT_COMMANDS empty rather than the
example's Python default, which would be quietly wrong in most repos —
and a wrong prefix denies an agent exactly the way an empty one does, so
absent beats wrong here.
Two details the first attempt got wrong, both now covered:
- Detection runs *before* the questions. Placed after them, a Ctrl-D
part-way through skipped it and left the example's default.
- "Keep what the project already said" reads the existing .env, not the
example-seeded defaults dict — which already carries the example's
answer, so every first run looked like it had one and detection never
ran.
The landing page's terminal, README.md and AGENTS.md follow: two
questions now, and AGENTS.md documents the detection table.
"You" was the else-branch of session_label: anything the board could not
attribute to an agent it attributed to the person. Every session read back
from disk was one of those, because the agent id lived only in the session
registry and never reached the persisted events — so past agent runs came
back wearing the human's label, carrying their own closing reports
underneath it.
Identity is now a small whole file beside each event log
(state/sessions/<id>.who.json): agent id, the agent's name, the model it
rode, and the task. A file rather than a key on the events, because the
logs are append-only JSONL whose first line every reader takes for an
event — and because the name and the model are nowhere in the stream, so
this is the only thing a restart can read them back from. It is rewritten
only when what the board knows changes, which also covers an agent id that
arrives on a later event.
load_disk_sessions() reads it back, and the label now has three registers
instead of two: the agent's name (persisted, so a restart no longer costs
it), "You" only for a session positively recorded as carrying no agent,
and a neutral "Session · <id>" for a log written before any of this was
recorded. Old logs are not retro-attributed in either direction.
agentFor() in board.html falls back to the persisted identity when this
board no longer holds the live record, so a replayed agent session wears
its model chip from what was written rather than from what happens to be
in memory. What depends on liveness (Hold, the worktree branch) finds
nothing there and stays silent, as before.
tests/test_session_identity.py drives the real ingest → persist → reload
path and the page's own chip functions in node.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One conflict, in the 480px block of site.css: main added the landing
page's .shot rules there while this branch widened the prose padding
selector to cover .page-reference. Both belong — the shot is home-only,
the padding is every long-form layout — so the resolution keeps main's
two rules and the branch's wider selector.
Everything else merged clean: the reference layout, its four routes and
the settings parser do not touch what the landing page changed.
The third design layout (1c Logbook) had no page. This lands it, and
with it the four routes a reader reaches for when the guides have
stopped answering: /reference/settings and the three contracts a
project implements against.
The settings page is parsed, not transcribed. site/build.py grows a
second way to make a body — a page may say "generate": "settings"
instead of a "from" heading — and manager/core/.env.example is read on
every build: its blank-line blocks become the page's entries, a comment
block documents the keys directly under it, and the file's own
NAME=value lines are the defaults shown. A key with no comment above it,
or one set twice, stops the build naming the route; a settings page that
disagrees with the settings file is worse than no settings page.
Generated bodies render with raw HTML off. The file writes
<git user.name> meaning a placeholder, and a parser honouring HTML
swallows it — it was never written to be markdown.
The reference layout is the article's three columns with the contents
gutter given over to a console: every entry on the page once more in the
machine register, keys with their defaults on the settings page and
headings on a sliced one. It links the same anchors "On this page"
carries, so the 1080px step folds the whole column away and the contents
strip hands them back — no third copy of anything, and the responsive
rules already in the sheet cover it.
The contract pages are slices like every other page: the adapter
contract and its event schema out of manager/core/adapters/README.md,
the driver and local-command contracts out of AGENTS.md. Renaming any of
those headings stops the build naming its route.
tests/test_site_reference.py holds the promise: add a key to
.env.example with its comment, rebuild, and it is on the page with its
default, with nothing in site/ edited.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
33 tests over reports.report: the head survives, the tail survives, the
elision says in words what it cut and names the log, cuts land on line
boundaries, a short report is passed through unchanged, the four marker
lines still parse, and the two windows never duplicate a line — checked
across a sweep of caps, which is where an off-by-one would put a
paragraph into the permanent record twice.
The fixture is card 32's report at the size it was (3,619 bytes). Its
log is gitignored state that did not survive into this worktree, so the
file is that report reassembled: the 3,000 characters the old clip kept
are verbatim from its card in tasks/done/, and the 619 it discarded are
rebuilt from the quotation in card 42, which is where they survived.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The closing report was capped by keeping its last 3000 characters, so a
report longer than that lost exactly the sentence the prompt contract
puts first — the state of the work — and the task file began mid-word.
Card 32's record still shows it.
reports.py is now the one place a report is clipped: it keeps both ends
(the headline and the review-first pointer), cuts the middle on line
boundaries, and leaves one line of prose saying how many characters went
and naming the log under local/state/agent/logs/ that still holds all of
it. One documented cap, CAP = 12000, replaces 3000 in agents.py and 1500
in github.py, so the PR body and the task file carry the same text for
the same run. It sits left of both consumers in the module map and
depends on config alone.
The failure excerpt keeps its tail deliberately — for a crash the end is
the story — and now says so through reports.tail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The page claimed 'mission control' and showed a terminal. It now shows
the board itself, directly under the hero, on bench's own repo with
three agents working — the claim demonstrated rather than described.
The terminal gives up the height for it: the .env preamble and the
Ctrl-C line go, the install command and the three setup questions stay.
tests/test_site_landing.py's TRANSCRIPT follows, and still holds every
remaining line against the source that prints it.
The shot goes through stamp() like the stylesheet, so its url carries a
?v=<hash>. Without that, /static/*'s year-long immutable cache would
make the screenshot unreplaceable. 1600px wide and palettised to 256
colours — 164K rather than 452K, and a flat dark UI loses nothing to it.
img{max-width:100%} is now a base rule rather than only .prose img: the
shot lives outside the article body, where that rule never reached.
The Sessions list shows agent names only for runs this board process
launched; anything replayed from disk loses its agent id and falls
through to the You branch of session_label(). Diagnosis and evidence in
the card.
Fathom sends its pageview as an image request. script-src named the
origin and img-src did not, so the script loaded and the one thing it
loads to do was blocked — visible only in the browser console, with a
200 on every response and no pageview at the other end.
The console said it plainly:
Loading the image 'https://cdn.usefathom.com/?h=...&sid=ZPKDEHCV...'
violates the following Content-Security-Policy directive: img-src
'self'
A test now asserts the origin appears under all three directives it
actually uses, because nothing on this side of the wire can tell that it
does not.
A running agent was visible on the board and nowhere else, so switching
tabs — the normal thing to do while one works for minutes — left bench
saying the same string whether three agents ran or none.
The count now leads the title (`2◌ · bench · bench`), ahead of even the
project: the reasoning that put the project first (truncation eats the
tail) applies harder to the one state you want from a tab you are not
looking at. The mark is the in-flight glyph the CI and copilot chips
already wear, not an emoji, and a quiet board keeps the plain title byte
for byte.
Both the tab and the header chip now count through one runningAgents(),
so they cannot disagree, and the title is written only when the string
actually changed — render() runs on every SSE frame.
Behaviour is covered in node (skipped where node is absent); the wiring
that keeps one filter and one writer is a source-level invariant, as
elsewhere for board.html.
11 and 15 were archived through the board, which renames the file and
stops there — the deletion from done/ and the new file in archive/ never
reached git, and the uncommitted deletion is what sync refuses to run
over. 36 carries an appended agent report, uncommitted for the same
reason. Card 44 writes both up.
The hero explained the architecture before saying why anyone would care:
'task files in stage directories', 'stdlib-only', 'narrates' are words
that mean something once you already use bench. Every line now maps to
something the audience has actually hit — agents outrunning the person
supposed to be tracking them.
- Hero: 'Run a team of coding agents. Stay in control.' The old headline
keeps its job as the brand line, in the footer of every layout.
- A new section between hero and doors: three sentences a reader has
said out loud, each answered by a mechanism rather than a promise.
Deliberately unboxed — the doors below are the page's one grid of
cards, and repeating that shape would make the eye work twice.
- The six doors lead with the outcome and keep one mechanism as the
evidence for it, which is the inversion of what they did before.
- Title and description follow, since a pasted url is the same pitch in
another form.
Two lines that were quietly false are fixed too: the strip's comment
still said this site counts nothing (Fathom counts pageviews now), and
'no per-seat pricing' would have tripped the fiction guard in
tests/test_site_landing.py, which forbids the word outright.
The host uploads the assets directory whole, so a .md left in static/
becomes a public url — static/fonts/README.md was live, telling readers
how to refresh fonts they cannot write to. copy_static skips it, and
internal_targets skips it too: the link checker and the copier have to
agree, or a link to a skipped file would pass the build and 404 on the
site. The licences are .txt and still ship, which is the point of
committing them.
Card 43 records the other thing today's run turned up: the suite reads
the developer's own local/.env, so two sync tests fail here and pass in
CI.
Two changes to what the live site sends.
Analytics: Fathom's tag goes in every template's <head>, deferred. It is
cookieless and collects nothing about a person, so no consent banner —
but it is a third party, so the CSP names cdn.usefathom.com for script
and connect rather than opening the door generally, and the tests that
said 'no script at all' now say 'no script this site depends on, and no
origin nobody chose'.
Caching: the host concatenates a header two matching rules both set
rather than overriding, so /* and /static/* each setting Cache-Control
sent 'max-age=0, must-revalidate, max-age=31536000, immutable' on the
stylesheet — first max-age wins, and the year-long cache never happened.
Measured on the live site, which is where the from-memory assumption in
task 32 said to check it. Now /static/* is the only rule that sets it
and HTML takes the host's revalidating default; the post-deploy checks
in site/README.md verify both ends.
article.html: 34 added the lede under the h1, 35 added the folded
contents strip in the same place. Both belong, and site.css settles the
order — its lede adjacency names .menu-contents + p, so the strip sits
between the title and the lede.
Two things the merge exposed rather than caused:
- $toc and $sidebar were spelled inside article.html's own comments,
and string.Template substitutes there too, so every page carried a
second copy of both rails inside a comment (28 toc links for 7
headings). Doubled to $$toc / $$sidebar, as the template contract
already said to.
- test_site_pages assumed one rendering of each rail. Both are now
written twice by design, so the tests assert every rendering agrees
with the page instead of assuming there is one.
The card file keeps main's location: the board owns a card's stage, and
main had already moved 35 to review/.
istos