work-pane

The node popup — a reference view of intent; the live work surface moved to the session interface.

raw source

The spec and the terminal are one act split in two — the spec is the intent, the terminal is where you change it in place. Originally they shared one pop-out work pane, two columns (spec left for reading, terminal right for the work), so intent and the surface that changes it sat side by side in a fixed-size panel that never grows to xterm's measured width.

expanded spec

The node popup is the i surface: a fixed pop-out (min(900px,90vw) × min(600px,84vh)) with tabs, opened over the board and dismissed with Esc. It is reference-only (NodeView.jsx) — no work pane, no embedded terminal — and it is a lens on the focus, not a pinned document: the popup renders whichever node currently holds board focus (keyed to it, remounting on change), so a focus move while it is open — keyboard-nav's Shift+nav walk — swaps the reference in place instead of forcing close-move-reopen; that is how a run of sibling docs is read. Across such a move the pane selection survives: the new node opens on the pane being read, and only when it lacks that pane does the popup fall back to the node's own default — the first of its real tabs — which is exactly what keeps the edit-leads rule below intact (a mid-change node greets with its edit tab even if the previous node was showing spec). The intent half is the spec doc — an information board. A stat bar carries the node's at-a-glance signals, the same the tile speaks: derived status, version, the aggregate eval score (eval-score-badge), and the drift count when a governed file outran the spec (source-of-truth) — so score and drift live in the popup now, not only on the tile. Below it the governed files, then the body as a living current-state document (the two labelled parts — raw source / expanded spec — when authored that way, else the flat body). Neither part is an agent-authored current state — what's-done is read from the derived status, never narrated, because agents hallucinate completion. The proof and evolution of that intent live in the history tab. An issues tab lists the unified issue work bound to this node — local and forge, open and closed alike, with both counts on the tab face (the board's badge/card show only the open ones; see dashboard-issues); the data already rides the board fold (node.issues), so the tab is a no-fetch group, silent when empty. Each entry is the shared compact IssueCard, clamped inside the popup and routed to the internal Issues page selection (#/issues/<issue-id>), not directly to the forge. A long pane earns a small sticky text filter (substring, over id + concern) — short lists skip it, the affordance would be chrome; the eval timeline mounts the same control (eval-tab). An edit tab makes a node's in-flight change reviewable from the board: it exists only while the node has a pending overlay, and when it does it leads (first tab, editing-session count on its face), so a node mid-change — a freshly-added ghost most of all, otherwise near-empty on spec/history — opens with its change front-and- centre. It lazily fetches the unified diff of the node's spec.md in the editing worktree vs the fork point (/api/edit), rendered with the history tab's diff view and memoised the same way — re-opening shows the last diff at once, not a reload — but revalidated each open, since a pending change is live.

panesFor(node) is the single source of which tabs exist and their order — both the tab bar and App's keyboard pane-nav read it, so number/Tab keys never cycle to a tab that isn't there. panesFor also registers an eval pane (a fourth reference face), but that pane's component and data contract — it rides node.evals, the board fold — belong to eval-tab, just as the issues tab's content is dashboard-issues'; this node owns the popup shell and the spec/history/issues/edit panes, so the eval pane's reframe into a verdict-over-evidence timeline is that node's evolution, never work-pane drift. The history tab is the one merged version log: the latest version sits expanded with its proof, older ones start collapsed and reveal one at a time on the down gesture once you've finished the open one — scrolling past its end, or a j/↓ keypress when there is nothing left to scroll (a short history with no scrollbar, or the bottom of a long one). Tying reveal to the gesture, not to scroll movement alone, is what keeps a sub-page history from dead-ending with older versions forever hidden (a header click also toggles by hand). An expand-all control complements that reveal, never replaces it: collapsed rows aren't mounted, so find-in-page and jump-to-an-old-version can't reach them without the one door that opens everything. The version log itself fetches when the history tab first shows (lazy, like eval/edit — most popup opens never visit it) and persists after, so returning to the tab stays instant. A version's proof is the spec.md line diff it introduced, fetched lazily on expand — every version, memoised by hash (the latest no longer shipped precomputed); a version with no recorded change says so plainly. That scaffold — scroll container, latest-expanded reveal, click-toggle, and the per-row header-over-evidence shape — is data-agnostic and shared: the eval pane (eval-tab) rides the same component (version rows + diff here, reading rows + screenshot there).

The "change it in place" surface — the live terminal — relocated to the session that does the changing (Enter; see session-console and term-input), keyed to a session rather than pinned to a node. The panel sizes to itself, never to xterm's measured width (each pane scrolls its own content, no stray horizontal scrollbar) — but that sizing lives in styles.css, the dashboard's shared stylesheet governed by node-graph; this node owns only the popup component, so a style change elsewhere is never drift here. So the original "one act split in two" intent stands, but the union is dissolved: intent in the popup, the changing surface with the session.