shipped spoolcast dev log 2

dev log 2 is up. 3:19, four acts, built with spoolcast. the story: i asked claude to redo some images using the exact same inputs, 8 of 9 came back right, one didn't. when i pushed on why, the answer was slippery. turned out the ai had checked its memory of what the code does, not what the code actually sent. it said "same inputs" based on reading the code, not by diffing the two inputs side by side. that's the whole video.

the shipping pass caught four rule gaps in the pipeline. memes were getting held way too long because the rule said to use silent standalone chunks, but the roadmap said silent chunks read as dead air until sfx support ships — a live contradiction. rewrote the rule to say memes must have audio (narration or sfx) during their visible time, and introduced overlay-as-third-option. beat descriptions had character language everywhere that didn't match the locked style library — anchor pulls one way, prompt pulls the other, output is a compromise that matches neither. wrote a style-agnostic rule: beat vocab must match the style library's registered characters. also found a real prompt-builder bug: when a chunk had both a scene description and on-screen text, the scene description got silently dropped and the output rendered as typography-only. cost a whole regen round to catch.

six render iterations to ship. v4 had pacing violations, v5 caught them but inherited v4 holds on converted text-cards (dead air again), v6 recalibrated the holds. the hold-recalibration thing is now a rule too — when a text card becomes a visible-action scene, the hold has to shrink from reading-time to registration-time or it reads as a freeze. worth it. the fixes live in rules.md so next video doesn't repeat.