fix: say less, and say the true thing

[dspv]

A read of every string a user sees, on the brief that the product should read as if a person wrote it for a person.

Three were wrong, not merely long

The answers screen showed raw Markdown. Claude writes bold text, lists and tables; the screen preserved line breaks and rendered nothing, so a reader got asterisks around every bold phrase and a table collapsed into | | |.

This is the same defect caught in the release-notes dialog an hour earlier — the fix existed and had not been applied here. The renderer is now shared (and learned tables and block quotes on the way). Renamed ReleaseNotes → Prose, since that is what it renders.

A Gemini error sent people somewhere they no longer need to go. "Set GEMINI_API_KEY in the daemon's environment and restart it" — but the key has had a field on the Cost screen since this morning and takes effect at once. A wrong instruction costs more than a long one.

A Go package prefix reached the dialog box. agents: "/x" is not an absolute path is a message written for whoever was debugging it.

The rest is length

Several tooltips explained the attribution algorithm where the reader had asked what a number meant. The per-directory rule was four sentences of specification on hover:

A turn counts toward the directory of the most recent file it touched, and keeps counting there until it touches a file somewhere else — so the commands, tests and searches between two edits count toward the directory being worked on. Reading, editing or writing a file counts as touching it; running a command does not. Each turn goes whole to one row, never split between two, so the rows add up to the repository total exactly.

Now: "Cost is charged to the folder Claude was last working in. Rows add up to the repository total."

Several paragraphs defended decisions nobody had questioned — why the Telegram bot is yours, why Caprock will not type into a session it did not start, why a connection timer counts up when idle. Each of those teaches a reader to be suspicious of something they had accepted.

"Everything here is measured — no invented numbers" is gone. That is project rule 6 leaking onto the display: readers assume figures are real until told otherwise, so the sentence created the doubt it answered.

The tests that broke are worth noting

Four failed. Three asserted exact words rather than the claim underneath — toContain('approximately') where the text now says "roughly" — and now assert the claim.

The fourth asserted that answer text survives with its line breaks intact. That is the behaviour this change deliberately removes: it passed for months while readers saw markup. It now asserts the structure is rendered.

https://claude.ai/code/session_01DR8fggA2LRHcjNWUsqtDcF

Then: say what each number is

The copy pass ended at the words. Three screens later the same brief caught the numbers.

Five tables had no column headings — a value, a bar and a percentage, with nothing naming what the percentage was of. Each now names its columns on the same line as its title, so the header row costs no extra line.

Most-used tools gained a returned column, and it inverts the story the call count tells. Bash is 46,343 calls that hand back 13.4MB; Read is 11,767 calls that hand back 58.7MB. Four times fewer calls, four times more context. The loud tool is the cheap one — which is not visible anywhere else in the product.

Bytes and not tokens, on purpose. Tool results arrive in the transcript with no token attribution of their own. The only way to print a token figure here is to invent one from a bytes-per-token ratio, which would understate Bash against Read by an order of magnitude — in the one table whose whole job is comparing them. Rule 6, in its most harmful form. Bytes are measured.

Measured at write time, not per request. A new tool_bytes column, filled from the response as the event is stored and backfilled once, plus a covering index. GET /v1/history?range=all went 2.1s → 0.05s on a 641MB database, so the panel that took a visible beat to appear no longer does. No cache, no new moving part.

Migration 0019 drops idx_events_kind_ts_tool, which 0018's index now supersedes — as its own migration, because 0018 had already run where it mattered, and an edit to an applied migration is an edit nobody receives.

And the plan picker. Once a plan was set the button went grey and borderless — exactly what an unset control looks like — so every session read as though the plan had never been chosen. It now carries a check and keeps its border.