‹ Dialogue

The toolbox

Everything about the room's instruments — dice, wheel, deck, ballot, sealed collect, note, clock, board, pad — in one place. Fifteen pages accumulated over the track; this is the map. Start with whichever row matches what you are about to do.

If you read only one. New to the track → the architecture. About to build → the build plan. Wondering whether any of it works → the battery. Designing a screen → the setting sheet.

1 · The rules it all obeys

Read these before changing anything. The rulings are numbered and referred to by number everywhere else.

The orthogonal toolboxThe architecture. Twelve rulings, the presence properties（§9）, and the completeness argument for why these instruments and no others — now eight, since the pad（§13）showed the basis had a private axis missing. Rulings ①–⑫ live here. The tool lifecycleopen · close · reveal — the three phases every instrument rides, the four-rung visibility ladder（明 · 暗 · 盲）, and the pill-is-a-tray-icon rule. Rulings ⑬–⑭; tasks L·A·B·C·D, all shipped. FurnitureThe原点: what it means to put a real object on a shared table, and why a described die is not one. Historical, but the argument still holds.

2 · The build

The build planT1–T11 step contracts, each written so a cold session can ship it alone. T1–T4 · T8–T11 shipped; T5 · T6 · T7 queued. The findings log lives here too. Host-moves planThe earlier plan this one superseded. Kept for its findings-backlog convention. Host movesThe original product story — six tools, every scenario. The architecture replaced it internally; this keeps the why.

3 · The interface a person touches

The setting sheetOne skeleton, five tools — 老虎机 · 掷骰 · 投票 · 密存 · 发牌 — where the three sections ARE the lifecycle and only 设计 differs. Live, generated from one config. The top barWho gets the width when pinned cards, a clock, a board, obligations and notices all want the same strip. 待办 > 状态 > 通知. The pollThe reference tool, rebuilt from an owner brief. The reveal gate — nobody sees the standings until they have voted — starts here. The icon setA tool is an SVG; a state is a house glyph. The standing rule from the icon sweep. The UI field studyHow chat-based TTRPG apps solve tool UI in a message stream. Twenty-five verified claims, gathered before we designed ours. First mockupsWhere the visual language started. Superseded by the setting sheet.

4 · The interface the AI touches

The half that kept breaking. A tool a persona cannot reach is a tool nobody uses.

The turn splitact, then speak. The persona had to be a careful form-filler and a natural conversationalist in one breath, and conversation won every time — so the turn became two calls. Behind a flag. The floor producerThe staging layer that decides who speaks and how. It was also, for a long time, why tools silently failed to fire. Megaprompt anatomyWhat the model actually reads on a turn, dissected from one real payload — including where the tool manual sits and what it costs.

5 · What was measured

The scenario batteryEighteen scenarios played end to end against a live room. The mechanism took zero defects; every failure sat upstream of it, in the persona's reach for the tool. Six failure classes, all named.

6 · Where the track stands

Piece	State	Note
T1–T4 · T8–T11	shipped	clock · tally · deal · touch drawer · presence properties · dice remake · bid box · reveal trigger
The lifecycle arc（L·A·B·C·D）	shipped	one lifecycle, one ladder, one timer across every instrument
The turn split	behind a flag	`MAD_TURN_SPLIT=1`. Knob-blindness and wrong-tool closed; 18 of 19 scenarios arm
The setting sheets · the top bar	designed, not built	the shape to build against
T5 · cards	queued — the hinge	size L; gates T6 and T7. Its contract predates the turn split and wants a re-read first.
T6 · the floor · T7 · the door	queued	T7's acceptance is the werewolf game, which composes all seven steps
The pad（T12）	shipped	v636 — the eighth tool: a private per-owner scratchpad that rides a persona's every turn. Storage-shaped so a leak is structurally impossible（never an event, no broadcast, every read keyed by owner）; the leak test was written first. §13
Personas as participants	deferred	`need` holds user ids only; a human cannot yet require a persona to answer

The toolbox · contents page, 2026-07-27, pad added 2026-07-28 · fifteen pages accumulated across the track and this is the map. Ordered by what you are about to do rather than by when it was written; pages marked historical are kept for their arguments, not their status. Everything here is reachable from the landing map.