petal/UX_REVIEW_2026-07-27.md

Petal UX review — 2026-07-27 (implementation doc)

Origin: a hands-on browser session against the live VPS deploy (petal.parodia.dev) on a 1517×810 desktop viewport, deliberately writing ESL-style English, accepting/undoing suggestions, using Ask Petal, the right-click dictionary, the Garden, History, and the doc-type menu. Goal: close the gap to Grammarly's feel (latency, stability, proximity of feedback) without its cost or surveillance.

How to use this doc: each item has symptom/repro, likely code location, proposed fix, and acceptance criteria. Items are ordered by value-for-effort. Where the session couldn't confirm root cause, that is said explicitly — verify before building. The product why behind Petal lives in SUGGESTIONS.md; execution phases in BUILD_PLAN.md. Nothing here contradicts them; this is polish on the existing loop.

What was verified working well (don't regress): error coverage and explanation quality across two check rounds; bilingual (en+zh) card explanations; Ask Petal follow-up answers; instant right-click dictionary with TTS + slow-replay; Garden sprouting; autosave + History snapshots; kitten cheers on accept; clean console throughout.

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0. DONE this session — kitten yields to cards

The corner mascot's halo sat on top of the bottom rail cards, History-panel footer controls, and the Garden counter, blocking reading and clicks.

Implemented (this commit): when any .petal-rail-card overlaps the mascot badge, the kitten fades to 15% opacity, shrinks 10% toward its corner (standalone scale property, so it composes with the bob animation's transform), and goes pointer-events: none so clicks pass through. It wakes (full size/opacity) while its speech bubble or the companion picker is open, or when cards no longer overlap.

• web/src/components/Companion/useCardOverlap.ts — rect-intersection hook, rAF-throttled on scroll/resize + 500 ms poll.
• web/src/components/Companion/PetalCompanion.tsx — faded wiring.
• web/src/index.css — .petal-companion-faded, transition.

Follow-up — DONE. The overlap check now watches .petal-rail-card, [role="dialog"][aria-modal="true"]. Matching the modal role rather than each panel's class covers History and Garden today (both already render role="dialog" aria-modal="true" drawers) and any future drawer for free, with no selector list to keep in sync.

Two refinements the original note didn't anticipate:

• The hook now reports { cards, modal } separately. A card overlap still lets the kitten wake for a bubble; a modal overlap yields unconditionally — a cheer isn't worth covering the panel she just opened on purpose.
• The speech bubble is its own layer, so fading the badge didn't hide it. It's now held back explicitly while a panel is open, and reappears when she closes it (useCompanion keeps it in state).

Verified against the live build: with History open, the drawer overlaps the badge rect and the "📜 写作证明 · Writing passport" control sits under the mascot — the exact defect. The new selector trips on it.

• useCardOverlap.ts — CardOverlap return type, modal selector, identity guard so the 500 ms poll doesn't re-render on every tick.
• PetalCompanion.tsx — crowded.modal || (crowded.cards && …), bubble gate.

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1. Bug: redo does not re-apply an accepted suggestion — NOT REPRODUCIBLE

Status (2026-07-27, follow-up session): investigated against the live VPS build with the ProseMirror history plugin state read directly (done.eventCount / undone.eventCount) and view.dispatch hooked to log every transaction. Redo works in every path tried — including the exact repro below, on the same Idiom card. Closing this unless it resurfaces with a tighter repro.

Paths tried, all correct (accept → done +1; undo → done −1, undone 1, text reverts; redo → replacement restored):

• accept → undo → redo pressed immediately
• accept → undo → 18 s pause so the full re-check lands → redo
• accept with the editor never focused → undo → redo

The doc's hypothesis — that the re-check wipes the redo stack — was tested directly and is false: across the pause, the only doc-changing transaction was the undo itself (metaHistory: true); the re-check's transactions are all decoration-only (docChanged: false), which prosemirror-history ignores. canRedo stayed true throughout.

One real trap that likely explains the original report: keyboard undo only works when focus is in the editor. Clicking Accept in the rail moves focus to the Accept button; handleAccept's chain().focus() normally returns it, but that only runs when findRange locates the original span — if the span isn't found, focus stays on the button and Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Shift+Z silently do nothing. Worth hardening regardless of this item.

Still real, found while investigating: after undo, the suggestion is already marked accepted server-side, so the card doesn't reliably come back for the text that's now showing again. In one run the "for buy some apple" card was gone while the erroneous text was visible; in another the card did return (re-merged into a wider span). This is the second half of this item's own acceptance criterion and belongs with item 2's stable identity work.

Original repro (could not reproduce): accept a suggestion (text updates), press Ctrl+Z (text reverts — correct), press Ctrl+Shift+Z → nothing happens. Observed on the Idiom card "by foots → on foot".

Where to look: EditorCore.handleAccept (web/src/components/Editor/EditorCore.tsx ~line 556) applies via editor.chain().focus().insertContentAt(range, s.replacement).run(), which is a normal history transaction — so the break is probably downstream: after the undo, the parent onAccept/re-check flow may dispatch a transaction that clears the redo stack (any doc-touching tr wipes redo), or the accepted suggestion's server-side state makes the recheck rewrite content. Root cause was not confirmed in the session — instrument first.

Acceptance: accept → undo → redo restores the replacement; the suggestion card state stays consistent with whichever text is showing.

2. Suggestion stability: stop regenerating the world on every accept

The biggest feel gap vs Grammarly. Today every accept (and every edit) triggers a full-document POST /api/docs/:id/check; all remaining cards vanish and re-arrive seconds later, spans re-merge into different shapes, and the LLM re-words every explanation each round (the "weather were" card carried three different explanations in one session). It reads as instability, doubles the pause after each accept, and burns qwen3.5 tokens.

Proposed fix (server + client):

• Split the doc into sentences (or paragraphs) and hash each. On re-check, send only chunks whose hash changed since the last check; suggestions on unchanged chunks are returned from cache byte-identical, including the explanation text. internal/suggestions/handlers.go is the entry point.
• Give suggestions stable identity across checks: key on (chunk hash, original span, replacement) so an untouched suggestion keeps its id, and the client keeps the existing card DOM instead of remounting (no vanish/reappear).
• Client: on accept, remove that one card optimistically and leave the rest untouched while the changed-chunk recheck runs.

Acceptance: accepting one suggestion never changes the text, wording, or position of any other card; re-check traffic after a one-sentence edit contains only that sentence's chunk; explanations are stable across rounds.

2 — DONE (fourth session). Server-side; the client needed nothing.

Both halves shipped, and they turned out to be one idea. The root cause of the vanish/reappear was structural: every pass deleted its whole family and re-inserted it, so each round minted new row ids. The rail keys its cards on suggestion.id, so a full remount was guaranteed — new id, new created_at (hence the re-fired arrival chime), and a freshly-worded explanation from a model that re-reasons every time it's asked.

Implemented:

• chunk.go — splits the document into sentences and hashes each. Newlines always break; ASCII terminators need trailing whitespace (so 3.50 and Ms. stay whole); 。！？ break outright, since Chinese runs sentences together with no space and she writes both languages in one document. The hash normalizes quotes and whitespace runs through the existing normalizeForDedup, so the editor's constant quote rewriting and a reflowed paragraph cost nothing. Identity is the hash, not the position — insert a paragraph at the top and every sentence below keeps its cards.
• reconcile.go — passes now reconcile rather than replace. A row on a sentence this pass didn't ask about is kept untouched; a row whose sentence is gone is dropped; a row on a sentence that was re-read survives only if the model proposed the same edit again, keeping its id, created_at and its original explanation. Re-proposals are matched on (original, replacement) normalized — not on type, so a re-labelled edit keeps the label she's already reading.
• checked_chunks (migration 0014) records which sentences a family has read. The grammar checkpoint asks only about the difference. When nothing changed it doesn't call the model at all — and doesn't consume its rate-limit slot, so an idle check can't throttle the next real edit.
• The tone is folded into a sentence's hash, so switching doc type still re-reads every line: the same sentence gets different advice as an academic essay than as a journal entry, and cached advice was written for the old register.
• replaceMechanics reconciles too. This mattered more than expected: the rule pack fires 250 ms after a keystroke (item 3b), so it was re-minting every local card's id several times a sentence.

Deliberately not done:

• Only the grammar checkpoint is chunked. Voice is a property of the document as a whole — a sentence isn't inconsistent with itself — and the collocation coach is a button she presses asking for a fresh read. Both still read everything, but both now reconcile, so they keep their ids.
• No client change. With stable ids the existing code already does what the item asked for: the rail keeps its card DOM, an expanded card survives a re-check, and the chime (which keys on id) stops re-firing for advice she is already reading. The one-card optimistic removal on accept was already there.

Sentences the model can't be trusted to have read. Two guards the plan didn't anticipate, both found while writing the tests: a finding is attributed to a sentence the model was actually shown before falling back to the whole document (a short span like "the the" can occur twice, and crediting the cached copy would drop it); and a cached row whose quoted span no longer matches byte-for-byte is dropped and its sentence re-opened, rather than caching advice the frontend can't anchor.

Verified on the running binary, not just in tests — per the handoff's own advice. Against a stand-in model server: three checks over a two- sentence document, editing only the second. The model received exactly She goes to market yesterday. and never saw the first sentence; the untouched card kept its id and its first explanation across all three rounds; the fixed sentence's card was dropped; the idle re-check made zero model calls. Mechanics identity confirmed the same way (a finding kept its row id while its span moved).

Coverage: chunk_test.go (splitting, CJK, decimals, cosmetic churn) and stability_test.go (untouched cards keep id + explanation, unchanged document skips the model, deleted sentence drops its card, tone change re-opens everything, mechanics rows keep identity). Two existing tests changed contract deliberately — TestFickleEditsSuppressed and TestCollocationPassCoexists both re-checked a document nobody had edited, which is now a no-op; they edit the text between passes, as she always does.

3. Perceived latency: mask the LLM round-trip

Measured ~8–15 s from typing-stop to cards, with only a small "Checking…" in the status bar. Two independent levers, both worth doing:

• Incremental surfacing. Stream/deliver per-chunk results as each sentence finishes checking instead of one batch at the end (pairs naturally with item 2's chunking). Status bar shows a live count: "Found 3 so far…".
• Instant local rules layer. A tiny deterministic pass that underlines the classics with zero network: a/an before vowel sound, plural after some/many/three…, he/she/it + verb-s, common mass nouns ("an information"). Petal's ethos (see SUGGESTIONS.md: LLM is garnish, plain code essential) fits this exactly. Note grammarLite.test.ts already exists under web/src/components/Companion/ — check whether a rules engine is already half-built before writing a new one. Local hits render immediately with a modest style, then get confirmed/enriched (or withdrawn) when the LLM pass lands.

Acceptance: an obvious error like "a apple" underlines in <100 ms offline; during a full check, at least one card appears before the last chunk finishes; the status bar shows a running count.

3b — DONE (third session). The rules existed; the latency didn't.

Scoped against the code as the handoff advised, and the handoff was right: prose.ts already carries every rule this item asks for — articles (a/an), pluralAfterNumber, subjectVerbAgreement, uncountables — and they already surface as real cards via the mechanics family. Nothing to write there. The gap was purely when they render: mechanicsFindings ran only inside runCheck, behind the same 4000 ms checkpoint debounce as the LLM, and only reached the screen via the server's reply. So a free, instant, offline-capable detection was being delivered at network speed on an LLM-shaped delay.

Implemented:

• useCheckpoint.ts — the rule pack gets its own FAST_MS = 250 fuse, separate from the 4 s checkpoint. It renders its findings as provisional suggestions with no network at all, then persists them; the server's reply is authoritative and clears the provisional set. If the reply never comes (offline, server down) the cards simply stay — which is the point of a rule pack.
• Provisional cards carry a local:<original> <replacement> id. The merge matches on wording, not position, so a card can't flicker into a duplicate of its own persisted twin while she types around it.
• resolveServerId maps a card to the row the API can act on, awaiting the in-flight submit if she accepts inside that window — so an early accept still records the keep and plants its word in the garden instead of being silently dropped. Null means no row exists (offline); the edit has landed regardless.
• Findings she actions while provisional are remembered client-side (actionedRef), because the detector has no memory between runs. The server already keeps the equivalent record for persisted rows.
• runCheck no longer re-submits mechanics for text the fast pass already filed; it's now a catch-up path for when that submit failed.
• App.tsx — accept/dismiss go through resolveServerId; the arrival chime keys rule-pack cards by wording so one finding doesn't chime twice (once provisional, once persisted).

Deliberately not done: no distinct "modest style" for unconfirmed local hits. The rail renders LLM and rule-pack cards identically on purpose (see the note on Suggestion.source in client.ts), and a provisional card now lives for one LAN round-trip. Styling it differently would be a visible regression against an existing decision, not polish.

Still open from item 3: the incremental-surfacing half (per-chunk LLM results) and the running count in the status bar — both belong with item 2's chunking and item 8's status-bar summary.

4. Rail scrolls away from the text

With ~7 cards the rail is taller than the viewport; scrolling to reach lower cards scrolls the document text fully off-screen, severing the card↔sentence connection.

Proposed fix: keep the editor column sticky/pinned while the rail (web/src/components/Editor/SuggestionRail.tsx, .petal-rail in index.css) scrolls in its own overflow-y: auto container. Preserve the existing anchor-to-highlight layout for cards that fit; the container only takes over when the stack exceeds the viewport.

Acceptance: with 10+ suggestions, the flagged text stays visible while scrolling the card list; hover-linking still highlights the right span.

4 — DONE (fifth session). The cards weren't distant; they were unreachable.

Measured on the live build before touching anything, and the item understates its own bug. Her open document: four cards, 173 px each, all anchored inside 126 px of text — the stack resolved to tops 4 / 189 / 374 / 559, so ~714 px of cards beside four lines of prose. And because .petal-rail is position: absolute, none of that counts as layout height: the page reported scrollHeight === clientHeight, no scroll container at all. On the review's 810 px viewport the lower cards weren't merely severed from their sentence, they were off-screen with no way to scroll to them. That is the real defect, and it is why the item read as a scrolling problem.

Implemented:

• SuggestionRail.tsx — the stack reports how far it reaches (onExtent), computed in the same pass that resolves the collision-avoided tops.
• EditorCore.tsx — the wrapper takes minHeight: railExtent + 24, so the space the cards occupy becomes real, scrollable page. minHeight never shrinks the column, so a rail that fits beside its text changes nothing.
• The prose moved into its own box, pinned with position: sticky while the stack overhangs it, so scrolling down to reach the lower cards no longer carries every sentence off the top. The offset is min(0, port − content): prose shorter than the viewport pins at the top; taller prose pins by its bottom edge, so the last lines — the ones the overhanging cards flag — stay visible rather than the first.
• The extent is cleared when the last card goes, or the window narrows past the rail's threshold; otherwise the column keeps the height of a stack that no longer exists.

A trap worth recording. That prose box must be left at its natural height. The first version kept the existing h-full, so it measured the wrapper — which this change had just grown to the stack's height — and reported the cards' height back as the text's own. railExtent > contentH was then never true and the pin could never trip. It typechecked, looked right, and did nothing; only measuring the running page caught it (proseHeight: 1424 for a two-line document).

Verified in a real browser at the review's own 1517×810, driving the local build with the rule pack from item 3b — which needs no model, so eight cards appear offline in one paragraph. All three branches exercised:

• Overhang, short prose — 8 cards, stack 1400 px, prose 95 px. Page gained 675 px of scroll where it previously had none; scrolled to the end, the last card sits fully in view (770–926) and the prose is still on screen (80–175).
• Overhang, tall prose — port 225 px, prose 347 px → top: −146px. Ordinary scrolling is untouched (at scrollTop 200 the text moves normally with the page); only at the overhang does it pin, bottom-anchored, last lines visible.
• No overhang — the port stays unscrollable and nothing moves.

Hover-linking re-checked on the last card, the one this fix made reachable at all: it glows the right span ("It make"), the span is on screen, the card lifts.

Known limit, not fixed. The overlays anchored in wrapper coordinates (gloss tip, selection bubble, word/misspell cards, confetti) rely on the invariant noted at recomputeRail — "stable under scroll since text and wrapper scroll together" — which the pin breaks. They are still placed correctly when opened, because their coordinates come from live rects; they drift only if she scrolls while one is open and the column is pinned, i.e. inside the overhang. Left alone rather than papered over; if it ever bites, the fix is to close or re-anchor them on scroll.

Deliberately not done: no compaction of the cards. Making crowded cards drop to a one-line form is the obvious way to shorten the stack, and it is wrong here — the explanation is the teaching, and hiding it from an ESL writer to save vertical space trades the product's purpose for tidiness. Ten cards cannot sit beside four lines of text; the answer is to make the overhang navigable, not to shrink what each card says.

5. Mixed-language spans: offer translation, don't ignore

Status (follow-up session): premise partly wrong — re-scope before building. On the live build the same sentence does now produce a card: a Clarity card reading 我想说这句话但是不知道用英语怎么说。 → "I want to say this sentence but do…". So the span is detected and an English rendering is already generated; what's missing is only the framing — it's labeled Clarity rather than a first-class 翻译 · Translate type, so the flagship moment reads as a tidy-up. Re-scope this item from "detect and translate" to "give it its own type, label, and card treatment", which is much cheaper than the plan below. The original observation follows.

Typed mid-document: 我想说这句话但是不知道用英语怎么说。 ("I want to say this but don't know how in English") — Petal produced no card at all. The pair model (SUGGESTIONS.md §1: user may type in either language, Petal infers direction) says this should be the flagship moment.

Proposed fix: during chunking (item 2), detect spans in the pair's X language inside an English context (CJK detection already exists for spellcheck exclusion — see web/src/components/Editor/SpellCheck.ts). Emit a new suggestion type translate whose replacement is the English rendering, card labeled 翻译 · Translate, with the usual Accept / Ask Petal. Accept replaces the span (keep the original as the card's strikethrough line so she can still see what she wrote).

Acceptance: a Chinese sentence inside an English doc yields a Translate card within one check cycle; accepting swaps in the English; an English-only doc and a Chinese-only doc are unaffected.

5 — DONE (sixth session). The label was the whole gap, and it isn't the model's to give.

The re-scoped premise held: Petal already found the span and already rendered it into English. Only the type was wrong. So the work was to decide that type structurally rather than ask for it — a model that re-reasons every pass would drift between labels for a sentence that hadn't changed, which is exactly the instability item 2 just spent a session removing.

Implemented:

• language.go — isTranslation(original, replacement, pairLang). Both halves must hold: the span reads as her language and what Petal offers back reads as English. The second half is not decoration — a Chinese span rewritten into different Chinese is something else, and Petal has no business calling it a translation.
• reconcile.go — the promotion sits at the single point where a type is stamped, and only on the open-typed grammar checkpoint. A pass with a forceType owns its family outright: voice reads paragraphs for tone and its rows carry no replacement, so a "translation" there would be a card offering nothing to accept. There is a test for exactly that.
• normalizeType still refuses translate from the model, deliberately. A model that volunteers the label lands on grammar and is then promoted — or not — on the evidence.
• Migration 0015 rebuilds the suggestions table for the extended type CHECK (SQLite can't ALTER one), as 0005 and 0008 did before it.
• Client: --color-jade, the translate entry in TYPE_META, and .petal-suggestion-translate for the inline underline.
• The pill is the one bilingual type name in the rail — 翻译 · Translate, Tradução · Translate, Traduction · Translate, from the pack. Every other type stays English on purpose: those are the terms she is learning, and she is learning them in English. This card's whole subject is her own language.
• The rail card stops truncating its two lines for a translation. Elsewhere the original and replacement differ by a word and the explanation below is what she reads; here the two lines are a whole sentence in each language and are the card.

The pair families need different tests, and pretending otherwise was the trap. The item's plan says to reuse the CJK detection from spellcheck — which works, for zh, because it is a different script. It gives nothing for pt-PT, fr or es, where no such signal exists. Those fall back to function words, and need two distinct markers before Petal will claim anything; the lists deliberately omit every word that is also English (do, con, ya, todo, and the pan-Romance shorts), even where that costs a very common one. A single marker is never enough, so a one-word Portuguese span won't trip it — a single word is a vocabulary question, not a translation. The whole heuristic is justified by how cheap its failure is: a wrong answer changes a coloured pill and nothing else, because the replacement, the explanation and the Accept button are identical either way.

Two things only the browser could have told me.

• The inline underline was invisible. The decoration plugin emits a per-type class, and .petal-suggestion sets border-bottom: 2px solid transparent — so a type with no colour rule renders with no underline at all. Every test passed; the flagship span simply had no mark under it on screen. Found by looking at the page, and it is the reason this doc keeps insisting on that.
• At her viewport there is no rail. railEnabled needs 348 px beside the editor, and at 1517×810 with the document list open the margin is 258 — so the card she actually gets is the inline hover panel, not a rail card. Worth knowing before item 7 is scoped: that item assumes the rail is what she sees and treats the anchored popover as the missing half. On this screen it is the other way round. (The fifth session measured rail cards at the same width, so some state does reach it; not chased here.)

Verified against the running binary, with a stand-in model server so no VPN or GPU was involved. The stub types the Chinese finding "clarity" — exactly what the live build did — so the label on screen can only have come from Petal's own detection. Through the real /check: grammar for the English sentence, translate for the Chinese one. In the browser: the jade underline distinct from grammar's mint, and the card showing the 翻译 · Translate pill, the Chinese struck through and wrapped over two lines rather than clipped, the English rendering, the bilingual explanation, and Accept.

Not verified in a browser: the rail card's version of the same thing. The rail is unreachable on this 1517 px display (above), and forcing it by hand kept being overridden by React's own layout. Its label goes through the same typeLabel call the hover card just proved, and its diff differs only by a class toggle — but that is a reading, not a measurement, and it is written down as one.

Coverage: language_test.go (the flagship sentence; a lone Han rune; one Chinese word inside English prose; Chinese→Chinese; a Chinese span on the wrong pair; all three Latin pairs; an English sentence stuffed with pan-Romance lookalikes; French elision; unknown and absent pairs), translate_type_test.go (the type through the real /check, an English correction keeping its own type, and voice unable to mint one), suggestionMeta.test.ts (every type has a colour and a name, translate's colour is its own, the pill is bilingual per pair and every other pill isn't), and db_test.go's TestTranslateTypeMigrationPreservesRows — 0015 rebuilds the table, so it is the first migration here that could silently drop her rows; every column, both timestamps and both indexes are asserted across it.

One test changed contract: the pt-PT pack's Brazilian-forms grep searched JSON.stringify(pack), which includes field names — and duly failed on translateLabel, since it lowercases to "transla·tela·bel" and so "contains" the pt-BR tela. It now searches the pack's copy only, with two canaries, since every assertion in it is a negative and a haystack that quietly went empty would make the whole test pass by having nothing to search.

6. Ask Petal answers: bilingual, and room to read

The card's explanation is bilingual, but the Ask Petal answer came back English-only, rendered in a small scrollable box inside the card.

Proposed fix: prompt the answer path (internal/suggestions/chat*.go / AskPetal.tsx) to reply in both pair languages (native first, mirroring the bubble pattern in PetalCompanion.tsx); let the answer area grow to the card's width with a sane max-height (~50vh) before scrolling.

Acceptance: an Ask Petal answer shows 中文 + English; a 3-paragraph answer is readable without scrolling a ~100 px box.

6 — DONE (eighth session). The answer was English-only on purpose, and the box was the smaller half of the item.

The first half was one sentence in a prompt. askPetalSystemTemplate said "Detect the language of the user's message and respond in that same language… Never mix languages in a single response." Self-consistent, and it made the English-only answer inevitable: ask in English — which she does, because she is practising — and the explanation that goes deepest into the "why" is the one surface that gives her nothing in her own language. It now asks for both halves every time, pair language first, and the old sentence is gone (a model handed both instructions picks one at random).

Which half is the lesson is not Petal's to assume. The first draft of this justified the change as "her language is the safety net, English is what she's learning" — wrong, and wrong in a way the code would have carried for good. The pair is (English + X) and Petal is used from both ends: an English speaker learning French needs the French half for exactly the reason a Mandarin speaker learning English needs the English one. So the prompt asks for both and says it does not know which way round, and nothing in the wording, the rendering or the comments assigns the halves a role. The ordering still holds either way — the pair language leads, English follows, which is the pack's order everywhere else.

The blank line between the halves is a contract, and a soft one. bilingualReply.ts splits on the first blank line to render the two halves the way the companion renders its two lines. It is deliberately forgiving because the reply streams in token by token from a small local model: a half-arrived reply is all "native" and the English simply appears beneath it when the break lands; a model that ignores the instruction renders as one ordinary block. The one thing it will never do is drop text. A separator with nothing on one side of it is a stray newline, not a split, and is kept whole.

• Petal's bubbles now take the card's full width. Two languages in the 85% a chat reserves to show who is talking wrapped a sentence into a paragraph, and the tint and alignment already say who is talking.
• chatFailed moved into the packs. It is the only message the panel writes without the model, and it was English-only — telling the half of the pair that can't read English nothing at all, in the one situation where nothing else is on screen. It is written blank-line separated, so it renders through the same two-half bubble as a real reply.

The height half was the larger one, and the first fix was wrong. The item asks for ~50vh. Because the anchored card opens under the flagged word and never flips above it, the first version took the smaller of 50vh and the room left below the card, so it could never overhang the screen. Measured on the running build, that gave 176 px against a 442 px answer — worse than the 220 px it replaced. The card's own pill, diff, explanation and action row already spend ~290 px of an 810 px window: "fits below the word" and "room to read" are not both available, and the clamp silently chose the wrong one.

So the ceiling is flat 50vh and the overhang is made navigable instead — item 4's answer to the same conflict, in its own words: make the overhang navigable, not shrink what each card says. Both surfaces that host the panel now report their reach, so the column grows and the page can scroll to what hangs below:

• SuggestionCard.tsx — onExtent, a ResizeObserver rather than a one-shot measure, because the card grows twice after it mounts: the panel opens, and then the reply streams into it. It reports 0 as it unmounts.
• EditorCore.tsx — cardExtent beside railExtent, resolved to one overhang (whichever reaches lower) that feeds the wrapper's minHeight. The rail's contribution stays conditional on the rail being mounted; the card's does not, because it withdraws its own.
• The rail needed nothing: it already re-measures on expandedId and a per-card ResizeObserver, so a rail card whose conversation grows reports it.

Verified in a real browser at the review's own 1517×810, against a stand-in model server (no VPN, no GPU) returning a deliberately long three-paragraph bilingual reply:

• Anchored card. Box 176 → 362 px (50vh), card overhangs by 165 px, the column gained 209 px of scroll where the same card previously had 20, and Accept is fully on screen after scrolling to it. No horizontal overflow.
• Rail card. Box 334 px, overhang 104 px, 204 px of scroll room, Accept reachable. The rail's own extent pipeline covered it, as read.
• On a taller window the whole 494 px answer fits with no scrollbar at all.

Honest limit: at 810 px a genuinely long answer still scrolls — 362 px of 442. The item's "readable without scrolling a ~100 px box" is met in the sense that mattered (the box is no longer a peephole and the rest is a short scroll, not a hunt), but a three-paragraph bilingual answer is roughly twice the text the item imagined, and half a small screen does not hold it.

A trap worth recording, because it cost two false measurements. The restart script used pkill -f 'scratchpad/petal$', which never matched: the process was started as ./petal after a cd, so its command line doesn't contain the path. Every "restart" after the first therefore failed to bind the port and died quietly, while the original binary kept serving the original bundle — and the page loaded fine, the app worked, and the numbers looked plausible. Two rounds of "the fix didn't take" were measurements of code that was never running. What caught it was the inline max-height reading 176.417px, a value the new code cannot produce. Check the served bundle hash, not that the page loads (curl -s localhost:PORT/ | grep -o 'index-[A-Za-z0-9_-]*\.js' against web/dist/index.html).

Deliberately not done:

• No auto-scroll to the card when the panel opens. The conversation starts short and grows; scrolling the page out from under her the moment she clicks Ask Petal would move the sentence she is reading about, to solve a problem she does not have yet.
• The seed bubble stays single-language. It is the pair-language rendering of the English explanation printed directly above it in the same card — the card is already bilingual across those two lines, and repeating the English inside the bubble would be the "same text twice" the seed exists to avoid.

Coverage: bilingualReply.test.ts (both scripts, mid-stream, one-language, extra blank lines, whitespace-only separator, empty, single newlines inside a half), lang_test.go's TestAskPetalAnswersInBothLanguages (all four pairs ask for both languages, name the pair language first, keep the separator, and no longer carry the sentence forbidding it), and an i18n.test.ts case that every pack's chatFailed has two non-empty halves and keeps its English one in English. The extent wiring has no unit test, for the reason item 7 recorded: jsdom has no layout, every rect is zero, and a test there would pass whatever the code did. It is browser-verified only, and is written down as such.

7. Inline popover at the underline (verify, then strengthen)

Grammarly's core gesture is click-the-word → popup at the word. EditorCore.tsx already has a hover card anchored to highlights (see handleAccept's fallback burst position), and the rail wires activeId/onHover both ways — so part of this exists. The session experience on a wide (1517 px) screen was still: click underline → the far-right rail card expands, ~400 px of eye travel.

Task: confirm the hover card appears on click as well as hover, that it offers Accept + a one-line reason + "more" (expanding the rail card), and that hover-linking (card ↔ span glow) works in both directions. Fix whichever half is missing.

Acceptance: clicking an underline shows an anchored mini-popover with Accept, without needing the rail; hovering a rail card glows its span and vice versa.

7 — DONE (seventh session). The rail isn't a screen-size fact; it's a mode.

The item says to confirm first and fix whichever half is missing. Confirming first is what mattered, because the interesting defect wasn't either half.

Settled first: the contradiction items 4 and 5 left behind. The fifth session measured rail cards at 1517px; the sixth found no rail at all at the same width and wrote down a margin of 258. Both were right. The editor is a fixed 720px column centred in the pane, and the doc-list sidebar is 280px, so at 1517px the right margin is 258 with the sidebar open and 406 without — either side of the rail's 348 threshold. What moves between them is distraction-free mode, which engages on its own the moment the editor takes focus. So the rail is not a property of her screen. It appears when she starts writing and disappears when she stops, and both sessions had simply caught it in different states.

The bug that fell out of that. recomputeRail was triggered by a ResizeObserver on the wrapper, a window resize, or a change to the suggestion set. Entering or leaving distraction-free mode is none of the three: the wrapper is a fixed 720px column, so re-centring it changes its position and never its size, and a ResizeObserver reports only size. railEnabled therefore kept whatever value it last had.

Leaving distraction-free with the rail up is the bad direction, and it is not subtle — measured in Chrome at 1517×810: the 300px column stayed mounted in the 266px margin the restored sidebar left behind, overhanging the viewport by 66px, cards clipped mid-sentence ("use "an": "a…"), and the page grew a horizontal scrollbar it never has otherwise. The other direction is only a loss: she starts typing, the margin opens to 406, and no rail arrives. Both persisted indefinitely — dispatching a lone resize event was enough to correct either, which is what proved the measurement was the only thing missing.

Implemented:

• EditorCore.tsx — the ResizeObserver now watches .petal-scrollport as well as the wrapper. The scrollport spans the pane, so it resizes whenever the chrome around the editor does; the wrapper, being fixed-width, never does. It is the element the sticky-pin code already reaches for, so it needed no new handle, and unlike threading focusMode down as a prop it also covers any future chrome that moves the editor.
• railFit.ts — RAIL_MIN_MARGIN and railFitsBeside lifted out of the measurement callback. A bare >= doesn't need a name; this one earns it, because the number picks between two entirely different suggestion surfaces and the margin it reads moves for reasons unrelated to window size.
• EditorCore.tsx — clicking a highlight now opens the anchored card even when the rail is up, which is the item's own acceptance criterion and was previously false by design. Hover still defers to the rail: an unbidden floating card next to a margin card saying the same thing is noise, and that earlier reasoning was about hover and still holds. A click isn't. The rail card glows instead of expanding, so the suggestion is never open in two places, and a click-opened card keeps its glow after the pointer leaves (it closes on a click away) so the margin and the open card don't disagree about what she's reading.

Measured, not estimated. The item guessed ~400px of eye travel from underline to rail card. At 1517px in distraction-free mode the real distance from the first flagged span's right edge to its card is 651px. After the change the card lands 6px under the word.

Verified in a real browser at the review's own 1517×810, driving the local build with the rule pack from item 3b so no model or VPN was involved:

• Rail follows the mode, with no resize event anywhere. Click into the prose → sidebar collapses, margin 406, rail mounts with its cards, no overflow. Escape → sidebar restores, margin 258, rail unmounts, no overflow, no horizontal scroll. Re-focus → it comes back. Re-run after the railFit extraction.
• Click with the rail up. Popover opens flush under "a apple" (6px gap, left edges aligned), carrying the type pill, the diff, the full explanation, Ask Petal, Accept and Dismiss; it fits the viewport; exactly one rail card glows and none is expanded.
• Accept from that popover. Text became "an apple", the popover closed, the rail went 6 cards → 5, and the other four kept their id, position and wording — item 2's stability holding under a path it hadn't been exercised on.
• The two halves the item asked about were already fine. Span hover lights its rail card, card hover lights its span (both directions, checked via the -active classes). And with the rail off, clicking an underline already gave an anchored popover — richer than the item's "one-line reason + more", since it carries the whole explanation and Ask Petal. Nothing to build there.

Deliberately not done: no "more" affordance linking the popover to a rail card. The item imagined the popover as a teaser for the rail's fuller version; there is no fuller version — both surfaces render the same explanation, and the popover has Ask Petal too. Adding a control that expands a second copy of what she is already reading would be the redundancy the hover rule exists to avoid.

Coverage: railFit.test.ts pins the threshold to the margins actually measured in Chrome — 406 fits, 258 and the mid-animation 266 don't, the bound is inclusive, 1920-with-sidebar fits, narrow windows never do. The observer wiring itself has no unit test and can't have a useful one: jsdom has no layout, so every getBoundingClientRect() is zero, railFitsBeside(0, 0) is false, and the rail branch is unreachable there. That half is browser-verified only, and is written down as such rather than covered by a test that would pass regardless.

8. Smaller items (each small, do opportunistically)

• Accept All per category. Five tense fixes = five clicks today. Add "Accept all Grammar (5)" per category header in the rail, one undo step for the batch. Acceptance: batch-accept applies all, single Ctrl+Z reverts the batch.
• Keyboard flow. Tab/Shift+Tab (or n/p) cycles underlines with the popover open; Enter accepts, Esc dismisses popover. Acceptance: a doc can be fully triaged without the mouse.
• Dismissal persistence. Untested in session: does a dismissed (✕) suggestion stay dismissed after the next full re-check? With item 2's stable identity, store dismissed keys per doc and filter server-side. Acceptance: dismiss → edit elsewhere → recheck → the dismissed card does not return.
• Status-bar summary. "3 petals to polish 🌸 · 三片花瓣待打磨" next to the word count — the gentle version of Grammarly's score. No numeric grade, per the north star. Acceptance: count updates live with the rail.

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Explicit non-goals (from this review)

• No document score/grade, no streaks-pressure — the Garden and kitten already carry motivation warmly.
• No browser-extension-style everywhere-checking; Petal is the writing place.
• The doc-type dropdown's translucent look during open was animation mid-fade, not a bug — leave it.

---

Handoff — state as of 2026-07-27, second session

Shipped and live. main is at the merge Merge fix/companion-yields-to-cards, pushed to gitea, and the VPS is rebuilt on it (git pull && docker compose up -d --build, all five containers healthy). Working tree clean.

Note that deploy carried two commits: the item 0 fade (written in the first session, never deployed) and this session's panel follow-up. So the kitten only started yielding to rail cards in production with this push — if you're comparing against memory of the live site, that's why.

Done: item 0 and its follow-up. Closed without code: item 1 (not reproducible) and item 5's original premise (re-scoped, much cheaper now). Untouched: items 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8.

(Third session: item 3b done — see the subsection under item 3. Item 3's incremental-surfacing half remains. Untouched: 2, 4, 6, 7, 8.)

(Fourth session: item 2 done — see the subsection under it. Neither 3b nor 2 is deployed yet: both sit on unmerged topic branches (feat/instant-local-rules, then feat/stable-suggestions stacked on it) and main is still at ba06d90. Untouched: 4, 6, 7, 8. Item 3's incremental-surfacing half is now cheap — the chunking it was waiting on exists — but it needs streaming, which the current /check shape doesn't do.)

(Fifth session: item 4 done — see the subsection under it. Still nothing deployed: main remains at ba06d90, and 3b → 2 → 4 are now three stacked topic branches. Merging and deploying that stack is the obvious next move — three sessions of work she hasn't seen. Untouched: 6, 7, 8, item 3's incremental half, and item 5's re-scoped Translate card type.)

(Sixth session: the stack is merged and live. Items 3b, 2 and 4 went to main as one --no-ff merge (963fc17), pushed to gitea, and the VPS is rebuilt on it — all five containers healthy, frontend build 014b43cdf44f, migration 0014 (checked_chunks) applied cleanly on the real database. Green before merging: go test ./..., tsc --noEmit, 195 vitest tests. So the three sessions of work she hasn't seen, she can now see. Untouched: 6, 7, 8, item 3's incremental half, item 5's re-scoped Translate card type.)

(Sixth session, second half: item 5 done — see the subsection under it — merged and live (b23c5a9). Two findings there are worth reading before picking the next item: the inline underline needs a per-type CSS rule or it renders invisibly, and at her actual viewport the rail is disabled — the inline hover card is what she sees, which inverts item 7's premise. Untouched: 6, 7, 8, item 3's incremental half.)

(Seventh session: item 7 done — see the subsection under it. Two things there are worth carrying forward. First, the rail is a mode, not a screen size: distraction-free engages by itself on editor focus and moves the margin across the rail's threshold, so "does she see the rail?" has no fixed answer at a given width — items 4 and 5 disagreed only because they caught it in different states. Second, the layout invariant that bit here is the same shape as the one item 4 recorded: a fixed-width column that gets re-centred changes position without changing size, and neither a ResizeObserver on it nor a window resize will say so. Untouched: 6, 8, item 3's incremental half.)

(Eighth session: item 6 done — see the subsection under it. Two things to carry forward. First, the pair is symmetric: Petal is used from both ends, so "her language" and "the language being learned" are not interchangeable terms, and any copy or prompt that assigns the two halves a role is wrong for half the users — the wording here was corrected mid-session for exactly that. Second, check the served bundle hash before believing a browser measurement: a restart that silently failed left an old binary serving an old bundle through two rounds of measurement, and nothing about the running app looked wrong. Untouched: 8, item 3's incremental half.)

Migration 0015 on the live database. It rebuilds the suggestions table, so unlike 0014 it could have dropped her rows. Backed up first — and the backup had to be the whole WAL set (petal.db, -wal, -shm in data/backups/pre-0015-translate-20260728T073254Z/), because stopping the container does not checkpoint: petal.db was still four hours stale while 2 MB of her writing sat in the -wal. A lone cp data/petal.db would have been a backup of the wrong day. Worth remembering for the next migration.

After the rebuild, on the live database: integrity_check ok, still 112 suggestions across 9 documents, both indexes recreated, 'translate' in the CHECK, and every existing row still carrying the label she has already read (the seven clarity rows include the mislabelled Chinese one — by design, only new findings get the new type; if you want that card relabelled, edit the sentence).

Suggested next (eighth session onward): only item 8's four small ones and item 3's incremental half remain. Dismissal persistence is still the one with real value now that item 2 gives suggestions stable identity across checks; the status-bar summary is the cheapest. Item 3's incremental surfacing needs streaming, which the current /check response shape doesn't do — it remains the largest of what's left.

(Superseded, kept for the reading list: the seventh session recommended item 6, which is now done.) item 6 was the obvious pick — it is the last small one, it is self-contained (prompt the answer path to reply in both pair languages, then let the answer area grow to ~50vh instead of a ~100px scrollbox), and item 7 just made the surface it lives on more prominent: Ask Petal now opens inside a card anchored at the word in both layouts, so a cramped English-only answer is more visible than when the review was written. Item 8's four are all still small and independent; dismissal persistence is the one with real value now that item 2 gives suggestions stable identity across checks. Item 3's incremental-surfacing half still needs streaming, which the current /check response shape doesn't do — it remains the largest of what's left.

(Superseded, kept for the reading list: the sixth session recommended item 5's Translate card type, which is now done and live.)

The advice below was written for the second session and is kept for its reading list, not its recommendation: item 3b is done and deployed. It was largely already built, in main, and the item as written didn't know that. Before touching the rules engine, read:

• web/src/components/Companion/prose.ts — the deterministic rules engine, client-side, already the single source of non-LLM detection. Sibling tests: prose.test.ts, grammarLite.test.ts.
• Commit 96f68a9 ("Add deterministic mechanics suggestion family, rule-based, no LLM"). Applyable rules already emit exact-span original -> replacement fixes that surface as suggestion cards, under a mechanics family persisted via POST /docs/{id}/mechanics; awareness-only rules (run-ons, splices) stay companion bubbles, and the companion hides fix-bearing hints so a span is never both.
• Commit 9d2501a ("Suppress fickle re-edits of sentences the user already settled") — a partial item 2 that also already shipped.

So item 3b's real remaining work is probably not "write the rules" but "make the existing local hits render immediately, before the LLM pass, with a modest style" — i.e. the latency/ordering half of the item, plus whatever rules prose.ts is missing. Scope it against the code, not against the item text.

Item 5 likewise: internal/suggestions/translate.go already exists — read it before designing a translate suggestion type.

(An earlier draft of this handoff claimed those two commits sat on unmerged branches. They don't; both are in main. That came from misreading git branch -vv tracking info as merge status.)

Verification technique, for whoever picks up items 2/3/7. Claims about editor behaviour in this doc should be checked against the running build, not reasoned about from source — item 1 looked airtight on paper and was wrong. Against a production bundle there's no exposed editor handle, so: walk up from .ProseMirror to the nearest __reactFiber$ key, breadth- first through the fiber tree for an object with .view/.state/ .commands/.schema — that's the Tiptap editor. From there editor.can().redo(), the prosemirror-history plugin state (done.eventCount / undone.eventCount), and a wrapper around view.dispatch logging tr.docChanged are enough to settle most "does the editor really do X" questions in a couple of minutes.

Housekeeping: every topic branch in the repo was fully merged into main and they have all been deleted, locally and on origin. Testing item 1 meant accepting suggestions on her live document; the one residual edit was reverted ("on foot" → "by foots") and the doc text is as it was found, but the History panel now shows several extra auto-snapshots from that session.